The Tech Stack of Babel

This post attempts to convey whine and complain about a common paranoia which affects full stack developers and other technical folk like auto mechanics or circuit designers or really anyone alive today in so-called high tech society.

New layers of the tech stack are built with protocols, languages if you will. When we learn javascript, we can talk using this language to the browser to enable it to display components on our screens. We are quite high on the tower with this “high level language”. Behind the scenes in the browser, that javascript code might be interpreted by a javascript interpreter written in java, passing the commands on to the browser. That java code runs on a virtual machine written in C. The C compiler enables us to translate C code into assembly code which commands the CPU. Drivers and interfaces allow communication from the CPU to various peripherals each with their own tech stack language all the way down to the materials. And do you know how that silicon was prepared? How about those capacitors? More tech stacks await us as we approach the base of the tower. Is the base of the tower the raw materials? Or is it perhaps the ancient history of human knowledge, the natural language substrate?

At any rate, the paranoia arises from the fear that this stack is too high and could crash down startling the children. With too many languages, too many floors on our tower, there aren’t enough people to teach and learn them and layers begin to disintegrate. A software library disappears from some cloud platform and apps don’t function. Nobody knows how to speak to the guy who knows how to make galvanized rubber or what language he speaks, and now we have a tire shortage. As the amount of technical requirements required to built your product goes up, so does the amount of time you must spend dealing with updates and changes to each of these dependencies, until eventually you can’t keep up and that’s all she wrote.

It’s kind of a pernicious paranoia so I’ve come with some good news.

1. The tech stack is larger in China, and they are still holding it up. Really, it can get a lot higher.
2. Humans have always been hugely tempted by apocalyptic fantasy. Don’t fall for that trap.
3. Hackers. Hackers constantly provide tests and break various layers when they are weak so we don’t build more on top of them.
4. Experience. As tech stack failures become more common, engineers have become wary of building on new layers unless absolutely necessary. Nobody calls all those cloud APIs like getting fonts from google like people used to do back in the 2010s. Mechanics know they want machines that can be fixed and worked on.
5. Redundancy.
6. Redundancy.
7. Just because we can’t fit the stack in our heads doesn’t mean the stack won’t work.