We are abstracting on the shoulders of giants

My new startup has data centers on three continents, utilizes global load-balancing, traverses networks with ease, has both an iPhone and Windows application, was written in a simple high level language, and enables an amazing scenario to help people get more done, faster.

But the real story - the real mindblower for me - was not the hours and hours of software that my partner and I wrote, it"s the years and years of software that we didn"t write.

We globally load balanced web sites and services across multiple servers in Europe, Asia, and the US. Windows Azure Traffic Manager handled that.

We sat our communication protocol on top of SignalR, an open source library using ASP.NET that hides the complexities of the real-time Web, handles NAT traversal for us, and basically removed the network for us as an issue. SignalR sits on stop of HTTP and Web Sockets, which sits on top of TCP/IP.

We used RayGun.io for our error management, and get complete stack dumps when a failure occurs in our application, this enables us to upgrade fast and often and give a good experience to our users

We used InnoSetup to install our application, it"s truly one of the most amazing applications I"ve ever used. Give him money.

We used the ZXing QRCode Open source library for creation of QR codes. We didn"t worry about the graphics details.

We used MahApps.Metro UI to make our Windows application look great. Added some controls, and it"s lovely.

And it all comes together using C# and the Xamarin set of tools. The iPhone app, the Windows app, and the cloud service, are all C#.

I"ve been in the software industry for over 20 years now and I remember when writing C was considered a rather high-level language. I generally understand the full stack from assembler all the way up to managed code and beyond to the cloud. It"s fantastic that today we think about managing VM clusters as much as we think about managing bytes.

Think about the giant shoulders that our application is standing on. Think about the shoulders that your application is standing on. Software abstraction has enabled us to do so much.

We can marvel at the abstraction layer that is Google. For many, that IS the internet. You type a question into a text box and push a button and the entire world opens up to you and a just a fraction of the planet truly appreciates the orchestration and history that makes it all happen.

Do I have a point here? Probably not. It just struck me today. Go listen to my chat with computer science legend Len Bass on this week"s podcast to get a feeling for the history and power that we exploit every day.

There is value in taking a moment to think about the deep and broad stack that your application sits on. Go thank and support the projects, both open source and not, that your application uses. Revel in the layers of abstraction that others have created and appreciate the ones that you have created. They make all the LEGO pieces you"re using just the correct size, and they make snapping them together a lot of fun.

It"s a great time to be a programmer. This blog post was dictated with the myEcho application.

SOURCE: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/WeAreAbstractingOnTheShouldersOfGiants.aspx