Opinion: Anyone can become a developer with the evolution of code components

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Here’s an interesting fact: GitHub, the leading platform for open source collaboration, now holds over 70 million open source projects and is home to 25 million developers, according to its website. Not even a year ago, it had less than half the number of projects and millions of developers less.

GitHub’s growth is not surprising. As Marc Andreessen said, “Software is eating the world.” More and more people are becoming developers, and the barrier to becoming a developer keeps getting lower.

Looking into 2018, the importance of open source to the future of the world’s tech industry is beyond doubt—a fact that has not gone unnoticed by some of the leading companies in the world. Today, these companies race to gain an advantage in the future of software applications: the composition of code components.

It’s all about the components

In the past, all of an application’s code was kept together in a single repository, and every change affected the entire application. Projects such as jQuery were used to build UI in a way that ties all its different pieces together.

In the last few years, the world of software development has changed dramatically. Instead of keeping our source code together, most teams today work with multiple repositories and microservices, where each part of the application is handled separately.

Open source projects such as React, Angular, Polymer, Vue, and others encourage developers to build their applications’ UI using smaller, reusable components. Every button, slider, or navigation bar is an independent component which can be tweaked and reused in other projects.

Serverless functions also enable us to run single functions in a fully controlled, serverless environment. Amazon’s AWS, Google’s GCP, and others all rapidly deepen work with serverless functions.

In addition, frameworks such as GraphQL allow us to handle our APIs while treating every part of it as a component.

As open source becomes the standard in application development, the race is bound to involve the open source community:

• Projects like ReactIDE provide us with an editor designed to join React components together to create our UI.
• Styled components with over 10,000 stars on GitHub allow you to write actual CSS code to style your components.
• Libraries such as Material UI offer a selection of top-notch, premade React components that enable developers to compose their apps’ entire UI.
• Projects like Bit enable you to share and sync components between projects as a team.

Disclosure: The author is an employee at Bit.

So where is it all going, and how will software application development look like in a year, two years, and five years?

For entrepreneurs or developers working against the clock to deliver their product to market, the modularity and reusability of composing components could shorten delivery times and reduce the number of developers working to maintain the application. Choosing component-based frameworks like React or Angular in your technological layout could pay off in the evolution of the product and the ability to adjust to changes.

Build an application by drag and drop

Looking ahead