They say – “History repeats itself”
I think most of the things we came across are recurring in themselves. “No matter what I design, the costume industry is going to recur, fashion repeats itself after a time span”. Names we decide for our offsprings, position of platonic plates, planetory positions.. everything recurs in one way or other, in same, better or in a degraded way. Recursion plays with everything but we, Software Engineers play with recursion.

In this decade, we came across with new updated recursions of some fundamentally same things enchanted with new names and some updates. Some are :
MOOCs : From the very starting of internet, the focus was to share information and to make it readily available. Information stacked in a sequence so that a novice can master the subject matter, becomes courses. Initially these courses were distributed over the internet then we moved forward to put them in a sequence, made better interfaces/teaching engines and term which got coined was “MOOCs”.
SaaS , PaaS and other ‘X’aaS : Things evolved and softwares evolved most rapidly over internet. Creating a web interface for a simple thing like editing a file over web using browser got names like SaaS. Was it just because we moved from vi to nice beautiful in-place editors? No, We recurred, made things better and easier. Initially companies used to offer hosting space, we made it better, gave all controls to the end user and we updated the name to PaaS. Today there are a whole lot of services. Think of “x” and you will get “x” as a Service.
DevOps : Being agile is a good thing but not the best thing we can have or we can do. So, we added new ingredients to agile and the resultant is a new dish : DevOps, a sweet and refreshing dish 😉
Bitcoins : Currency denominations are a problem and we need a unified currency over the internet. Which is distributed, under no leadership, uncrackable, secure soft storage and easy accessible. Initially this kind of currency may have started with rewards system on browsing or buying something over web, in some other factors may be time or a collection of buyers which resulted in deals portal.
QR Codes : The amount/types of information we wanna carry these days has changed significantly. We just can’t go with the fairly simple bar codes.
Wearables : It’s not about any sci-fi movie. It’s here and it’s on. This time we have a better name for them and boom, many competitors are there already in the market.
NFC : Most of the time we upgrade by becoming more powerful or giving new dimensions to existing things. But NFC have a different story. It has been resulted from chopping off some powers from RF and others. In this field, we are going both ways. One side we are chopping off few features to create NFC and on other hand we are beaming ultra high frequency laser lights to moon for internet connectivity over there.
Big Data : We are preparing for the days when you are about to leave home for work and your smartphone beeps with a push message “Don’t go outside today, there are 93% chances of cloud burst”. Or may be a smart grocery shop learns your shopping habit and remind you through a message that “Hey, Pradeep Kumar you have not bought Tops tomato sauce, which you used to buy around every 40 days”. So, preparing well for better future, better earth, with recursions, new names.
Cloud : A really sexy name given to upgraded versions of hosting. More powers to you. I know a startup with a tagline “We may not take to you moon or stars but we are sure we will take all of your business into cloud”
Croud-“x” : We did lot of things in past with collective efforts of general public may be in lieu of their interest, some offerings or simply volunteeringly. In democratic setups, many things are done by public in a collective efforts resulting in different outcomes. Crowd-funding and crowd-sourcing are just upgraded versions which are being better protocolized, but this is the way we move forward.
So, let’s Keep Calm and Keep Recurring.