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I wanted to specify the title as “Software engineering state of play 2025” but that would be a bit too lengthy. Also, why 2025, since it’s still 2024? Well, 2025 just sounds better—halfway between 2020 and 2030, and it’s almost 2025, anyway.

Compared to a decade ago, when all a software engineer needed on their CV to snag a decent job was either Java or C#, plus a bit of JavaScript, the two most necessary keywords nowadays are “microservices” and “cloud”, and not necessarily in that order. Add “React” or “Angular” for extra points.

To expand on the “cloud” aspect, it’s impossible to work on a new software project without involving either AWS or Azure. Interestingly, the AWS/Azure (admittedly false) dichotomy is pretty much like the Java/C# dichotomy: the path one takes depends on which one you happen to start in. So, if by pure happenstance your first cloud experience involves AWS, then you’re stuck looking for jobs involving AWS forever.

Another interesting thing is that there are now two spinoffs from the vocation of software engineer, namely data engineer and cloud engineer. To be a bit more precise, a cloud engineer is what a DevOps engineer used to be.

There’s also TypeScript, which personally I like a lot, but only because I’m older now, and I forget what “type” the parameter of a function is supposed to be as soon as I finish writing it.

In summary: unlike 2015, Java or C# ain’t enough for 2025. You also need either AWS or Azure, plus either React or Angular.

Around twelve years ago, the .NET web-based tech stack was most definitely ASP.NET Web Forms, and maybe ASMX web services. A few years after that came WCF and its associated SOAP, XML, and endpoint configuration madness. Silverlight made a brief hyped-up appearance then disappeared. Then came ASP.NET MVC, with Stack Overflow being its very successful poster boy.

Nowadays, interestingly, AngularJS (with Bootstrap, of course), has become part of the .NET web dev landscape. It doesn’t hurt that it interoperates very well with both ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web API. More and more, the cool stuff is being done in JS, with C# being relegated to mere data retrieval.

I think that once it becomes easy and straightforward for Node.js to connect to SQL Server, with internet tutorials everywhere, things could start looking very different at the back end as well.

You know you’re old when kids open Windows Explorer and ask, “why do the drive letters start from C?” and you explain that, in the old days, DOS assigned drive letters A and B to the floppy disk drives; then they ask, “what’s DOS? What’s a floppy disk?” You know your are old when all you want to do is to stay at home sleeping with the backrest pillow for bed.

If they’re lucky they won’t ask about the capacity of a diskette; they might just die ROFL when you tell them that it’s around 1MB.

But if you don’t know what ROFL means then you’re really really old.