Node.js community is 'completely feral' and a model for future development, says Weaveworks

One day "development will be a natural part of our lives" adds Rackspace

The open source Node.js community is "completely feral" and full of coders who "don't know what they're doing". But it is also an indicator of "what the next 15 years of development will be like".

This is according to Weaveworks founder and CEO Alexis Richardson, who foresees a chaotic - but ultimately progressive - near future for coding as community-based open source development becomes an increasingly meritocratic environment.

"If you look at the Node.js community, you can see what the next 15 years of development will be like," said Richardson, speaking at a Rackspace open source debate this week.

"It's completely feral, lots and lots of people hacking infrastructure code without knowing what they're doing - there are plenty of people using their stuff and building APIs within their companies, and guess what - it works, despite the fact it's pretty crazy."

Igor Ljubuncic, a principal engineer at Rackspace, added how "in the sixties and seventies, computers started becoming the thing".

"[It was said] everybody should be an electrical engineer, and eventually those engineers started writing code as a necessity of their reality. I think today's younger generation are now facing those challenges at work and at home - they will be people who will lead the direction of where the future will be."

Ljubuncic said society is currently "seeing humans lagging behind software" and this will continue for a while, but "eventually we'll get to that point where development is the natural part of our life - but not in our generation".

As this year's A-Level results are unveiled, it may be worth heeding Richardson's warning that "the rate of demand for developers is now outpacing supply very, very, very substantially", with only 10-20 million coders currently working in the world.

"My belief is that in 20 to 30 years, developers - or some future version of that digital human - will be many more like 50-100 million round the world. And so that completely changes how IT is consumed within the enterprise."

Currently, he continued, enterprises have "realised it's much more effective to rent data centres from the likes of Amazon and Rackspace, and to insource and build up a big IP pool around talent and skills that support you core bits".

"If they don't do that, they won't be able to compete with the Ubers and Airbnbs of this world. So, ordinary companies - real enterprises - are thinking 'Oh crap, I've got to have a lot more developers in-house now. What's a developer and how do I find one? Do I recognise them in the street? Will they be wearing sandals?'"

With skills gaps affecting big data just as much as coding, IT industry recruiters at Michael Page recently offered some valuable advice on bridging the data skills gap.