Matan ShidlovI've spent the last decade leading technology development, creating real-time low latency AI-based systems, processing billions of requests each day, and helping companies with their software architectures. Through the years, I've been working alongside highly talented software engineers and cloud architects. I've learned to appreciate the value of sound engineering that can make the difference in creating reliable, maintainable, flexible, and scalable software.
Now I'm excited to try and make software architecture and good engineering practices more accessible to all by joining Amplication as VP of engineering.
The Unicorns
In today's economy, what once was an unreachable title "unicorn", became another milestone in companies' way to success. Companies are experiencing hyper-growth, which leads to a severe shortage of talented developers. Any crisis in history (including COVID-19) accelerates evolution and creates new opportunities. The severe lack of gifted developers was a unique opportunity for new people to join the engineering community, and they've been integrated within both big and small organizations.
Good Engineering Is a Scarce Commodity
Unfortunately, tapping new sources of talent doesn't fill the shortage of experienced engineers who have extensive knowledge and understanding. Senior developers who can mentor inexperienced programmers and create intelligent, robust, scalable, maintainable, and flexible solutions are especially tough to find.
The Cost of Lack of Good Engineering
I've had the privilege of helping many companies with consulting on how to architect for scale. I noticed that, in many companies, low engineering standards and poor decisions were impacting business. So many developers today are writing code that "works" but doesn't stand the test of time. The main reason for this phenomenon is lack of knowledge and insufficient training. Writing code that only "works" will not withstand any of the following dynamics:
Logic Changes - adding, removing, and updating business logic
Data Changes - adding, removing, and updating fields and entities
Data Accumulates - what was once thousands of entries grows to hundreds of thousands, millions, and billions
Usage Changes - Getting more and more traffic as a result of growth and usage spikes that leads to uneven loads
Infrastructure Changes - Changes in API's of 3rd party services or products (for example, databases)
Staff changes - Original committers leave and which results in knowledge loss.
Democratization of Engineering Is the Need of the Hour
I have a vision that with Amplication, an open-source low-code platform, we can empower developers. Amplication can take care of those necessities of repetitive code and function as a developer private architect helping implement great software with a solid foundation. In my vision, senior developers will appreciate Amplication as an uncompromising shortcut, and developers at the beginning of their career will find it extremely useful as an enabler tool for quality engineering.
Amplication
Amplication is an open-source low-code platform for backend and full-stack developers. Amplication's goal is to help developers and empower their code generation. The application code owner is the developer, and Amplication supports the project by providing a robust base. When developing projects with Amplication, developers can create great applications without the nuisance of being "bogged down" with building and maintaining the application's infrastructure and architecture.
Open as a Policy
What a better way to democratize software engineering than open-sourcing it and building a community around the principles of open engineering.
I'm excited to start this journey with Amplication. I will use this platform to share our architecture decisions, best practices, and coding standards along the way and publicly build Amplication with this great community.
Please share your experience using Amplication and your vision of how Amplication can help you in your next project.
I'm always available along with the rest of the team at our Discord channel. So please join, to talk to me about anything.
