My Theory About The Rate At Which Software is Eating the World

Kumar Thangudu

October 01, 2015

Kumar’s Law: Over the history of software programming and app development, I’ve observed that the the number of developers and/or technologies/APIs and/or costs and/or education required to build an app will decrease by 2x every 2 years.

Graveyard Code. No-one can be sure just how many apps exist in the marketplace. One of the primary issues is that there’s graveyard code that exists not-in-the cloud that is not open source. There exists commercializable code that sits on dead or private repos.

The Notion: Websites that once took years to build can be cloned with fewer more robust technologies with less experienced developers who have been educated in less time.

Examples:

HIPAA Compliant App 5 years ago: Building a HIPAA compliant websites used to take several thousand dollars a year and take a few months to put together. Today: It takes less than 20 minutes to build a HIPAA compliant web app with TypeForm with zero coding skills.

Scraping: To scrape a website, one was required to have a full on technical team. Today, scraping can be done visually with a non-technical person at the helm with technologies like import.io and kimonolabs.

Software is Eating the World

All these things contribute to a world in which the coding bootcamp industry grew from 0 to 150M in 3 years flat. (2015 being the end year)

A world in which there are over 100 healthcare APIs.

A world in which there are entire SAAs companies that have close to zero humans but get hundreds of millions of impressions/user interactions.

A world in which you don’t even have to know how to do environment setup and can begin coding. Vida Nitrous.

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