In the age of discovery, navigators changed the world. Their unique skills won them fame, riches, and glory, as well as the ears and support of kings and emperors. The rulers of old who knew the importance of investing in these skilled frontier men rewarded their nations with the longest and wealthiest golden ages they’d ever seen. Nowadays, in the age of data, developers are the new navigators.

The metaphor of software viruses to biological ones is deeply ingrained, easily seen in the fact that biological viruses are at least the namesake, if not the inspiration for computer viruses. Can we take this analogy and reapply it in reverse? Is it possible to learn more about how we can combat biological viruses, such as the raging COVID-19 epidemic, by leveraging concepts, mindsets, and ideas that evolved in the software engineering and cybersecurity worlds?

Software developers and software architects have, for a very long time, stood on opposite sides of the “whose is better” competition. They have completely different beliefs, with each vowing that theirs is the correct one. Some swear by Java as the holy grail of backend; some worship Go as the right solution to all your backend problems. But, really, is there one right answer? Apart from the tools that you use, the architecture you will be using differs from company to company.

Being a UI developer, I’ve learned one thing: It doesn’t matter how carefully you write your code. Suppose you’ve double-checked that you defined and called all functions the right way or followed all the best practices. Even then you’ll see that a tiny variable can sneak behind and create an error. Now, suppose you find out that for some unknown reason a form validation or submit button isn’t working.

If you take a long hard look at the DevOps movement, you will find it actually divides neatly into two sub-movements. The bigger and often noisier of the two is about technology, advocating for the latest and the greatest tools and techniques, be they Cloud, CI/CD, Serverless, or Containers. The smaller sister, however, is much different, stemming from Management Theorem and focusing more on processes.

Last week the Rookout team, myself among them, participated in and sponsored the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference in New York. New York is a city I personally love - the energy, the food, and the views are always top notch- there’s really just no comparison to the city that never sleeps. On top of that, I had the opportunity to mingle with some of the brightest minds in software architecture from many of the most successful companies in the world.

Ever feel like the world is moving by so rapidly, that it feels like something got left behind in the rush? That’s how we feel about being able to debug your applications easily. Technology has advanced rapidly, but the ease of debugging has not. With the introduction of serverless computing, the way enterprises are designed and how they build their production applications was changed.