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30 Years of Development: How to keep up with the ever changing software industry

30 Years of Development: How to keep up with the ever changing software industry
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30 Years of Development: How to keep up with the ever changing software industry

We sat down with the creator of Project Configurator, Pepe Marañon, who has over 30 years of industry experience to chat about how development has changed, and more importantly, what’s coming next.

Pepe joined the Adaptavist family in 2012, having been working on Project Configurator at another company, where he was responsible for creating tools to help manage the life cycle of applications.

One important project for key clients, his managers wanted to be able to test changes in a staging environment and only be deployed once they had been approved. But this wasn’t possible in Jira.

“We had to tell them that we can only do the changes directly or on the production system. They didn’t like that. So we told them, if we do the changes in this instance, we have to repeat them manually in production afterwards. They felt it was an outrage when they heard that. That was the origin of the idea, to have something that would allow you to take a bunch of changes from one instance and move them to another one,’ says Pepe.

Pepe now has his own team in Seville, working on Project Configurator and a few other Adaptavist plugins. But after 30 years in the development industry, how has he stayed on top of changes and continued to create products that still fill gaps in the market?

The need to keep learning

“If you are a developer, you always have to learn.  You have to be permanently, all your professional life, learning new things,” he says, adding that although the tech industry has been constantly evolving over the last 25 years, the core principles have stayed the same.

“Coding is about problem solving. You want the machine to do something, you have to explain the steps it has to perform to do that particular task. You have to think about how you are going to organise your code, which part is going to do which task and how you are going to communicate and coordinate those parts.”

The Age of Agile

For Pepe, the biggest change he’s had to adjust to is the Agile revolution.

“Before Agile, it was either no project management at all or a very complex project management structure with a lot of steps, and a lot of augmentation,” he says.

While Agile has created a much more efficient and structured way to manage projects, Pepe doesn’t feel that it has hindered the anarchistic element of development that has always existed.

The robot revolution

As for the next big? Pepe believes automation is going to really shake up the industry, and is already making waves.

He believes that development will become a mixed-environment, where code is partially written by AI, but the more dynamic and creative problem solving is still left to us humans.  

As for Project Configurator, a new look and interface is on the short-term horizon with more plugins and integrations as a long-term goal.

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