Quality software is built on foundations, not trends

Solid foundations 

When I started creating my first websites, I didn't have internet access at home, so I drew everything from printed magazines and explored the source codes of fanzines in the supplements of the gaming magazine Score. Thanks to this, I became familiar with HTML and CSS, which later helped me significantly not only in coding templates for new pages, but also in solving problems when something did not work as it should.

Nowadays, such knowledge is seemingly unnecessary. All you need to do is use a front-end framework and simply put the page together from what is available. But what if a problem arises? Can we identify it and solve it correctly?

Have you ever heard the phrase "640K should be enough for everyone"? In 1985, it was really necessary for every developer to know how to work with memory correctly. Nowadays, we don't have such strict limits, and memory management is somehow automatically solved by using various tools and frameworks. Or we simply buy more powerful hardware. I often shake my head when looking at the charts in the monitoring application and ask myself, "Can't it really be done better?"

How Prince of Persia Defeated Apple II's Memory Limitations

The fast-paced world and AI

Thanks to AI, situations where we don't pay full attention to the basics are becoming more common. AI can write code much faster, and if it works, we win at first glance. But do we really know what the code does? Can we verify that it really works correctly? If we use AI to write code, we must be able to verify its results. This means we need to understand the basics. We can't just generate source code and trust that everything is fine.

We also need to take into account the fact that AI is constantly learning from new data and new source codes, which may also be largely generated by AI. If we learn something the wrong way, we will build it the wrong way. And through a chain reaction, we can reach a point where the results from AI are completely unusable.

The ability to solve basic problems may slowly disappear from the minds of both human developers and artificial assistants. Who will ultimately benefit from this? People who are able to solve such problems. People with knowledge of the basics and how everything works.

Quality is the key

So let's not rely on the fact that "there is already a solution for this," but let’s dig into how such a solution works. Understanding the deeper principles and basic building blocks of software is and always will be the key to creating robust, sustainable, and high-quality applications.

I see no problem with using tools that increase efficiency, but I have noticed that fundamental knowledge is gradually disappearing, and new knowledge is often subject to current trends that often last just days or weeks. Development is advancing at a tremendous pace, but when developing software, we must also consider stability, quality, and maintainability.

It is not uncommon for our software to run for years in operations where it is not possible to install a new update or patch every week, for example due to operational or security reasons. Every problem can lead to significant financial losses.