#future of software

Because my honors thesis is about software maintenance and rebuilding software infrastructure, I've been thinking a lot about "infrastructural debt" accrued by companies that build quick prototypes and then need to scale. Right now, there's a lot of attention shining on "hacky" and "scrappy" programmers, which makes sense: why waste resources on a product that won't catch on?

Hence, I understand the emergence of the hackathon - you get x number of hours to throw together an idea, then pitch it to venture capitalists and see if it's really worth it. Awesome. But then what?

I had a random pondering today about the future of these scrappy prototypes made during hackathons: where do they go? Maybe there's a good idea in there that never gets fully developed because it didn't make the top 3 in a competition.

I muse that in the future, software engineering as a craft will return, and maybe we'll hold competitions to add infrastructural support to flailing software systems: the fixathon (maybe a more brilliant little programmer will come along with a better name than that haha). Anyways, rather than muddling our industry with scrappy prototype after scrappy prototype, we can move into the art of creating sustainable systems and giving these product real life to them. Maybe that's the future of technology.