I'm so glad I'm not a programmer.

I mean, the money would be great, the constant job offers would be nice, and I suppose the freedom to show up to work wearing anything you want would be a bonus, but the actual programming? Ick. It seems awfully tedious.

I can't imagine the patience it would take to write line after line after line of code, only to test it, find out there's a bug, then have to locate the bug, fix it, and repeat. And really, that's the least of it. You're constantly having to learn how to use new languages and new tools and figure out how to stitch them together so they all cooperate and deliver the new and improved developing experience you've been promised. And then if you're successful with that endeavor, finding out that yes, the new tool did solve one enormous longstanding problem, but it created ten new, small, perpetually annoying problems.

Again, I just can't imagine having to possess that kind of patience (and employ it five days a week).

The good news if you're a developer though is that this really does seem to be the golden age of innovation when it comes to tools that make the job less tedious. The whole array of PaaS offerings hitting the market right now are all meant (in one way or another) to help automate as much of the development process as possible and allow you to avoid more and more of the repetitive processes that even the most patient among you probably deplore.

Case in point: Project Shipped from Cisco. It's a hybrid devops platform that makes it easy for developers to build, deploy, and run containerized microservices.

Not sure what that means?

Well, in short, it means developers can build applications the way they always have with the tools they've always used, BUT they can deploy those applications across a variety of internal, private and public clouds without lock-in, AND they can run their applications across multiple deployment locations in a CI/CS and application-intent framework. It's crazy cool. The kind of things developer dreams are made of.

Need further explanation? That's what webinars are for. And it turns out we're having one about Project Shipped tomorrow morning at 9:30 AM Pacific! Lucky you! To get in on the fun, register here.