Who’s the best developer you ever saw? Expert programmers produce highly effective results; programs that are robust and efficient, not just something that runs.

A panel consisting of GitHub Co-Founder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner, New Relic Founder and CEO Lew Cirne, Mixpanel Co-Founder and CEO Suhail Doshi, Stripe Co-Founder and President John Collison and moderated by Google Developer Advocate Don Dodge recently gathered in San Francisco on a panel called “The Developer is King: The Power Behind the Throne.”

According to the panelists, it is programming expertise that puts the “power” into a business success or failures. The panelists all agreed that both independent and corporate employed developers now have more power and thus more opportunity than ever.

Part of the credit goes to the Agile methodology and the availability of resources that have swept away many of the barriers to speedy development and deployment. For example, to accelerate sales and customer retention, software vendors are focusing more on developers now. For developers in general, this is great news.

“Today companies have a higher proportion of their headcount and focus on product,” Cirne said, “[because] you reach more customers, not by doubling the number of sales people, but by delivering stronger products. At the top of your company you have to have a passion for building something your customers care about.”

Cirne, himself, is the developer behind the creation of Application Performance Management (APM) market. His company New Relic provides developers with an all-in-one web app performance management tool for the cloud.

Preston-Werner said the rise of the Internet is leading to the rise of the developer. “The Internet is changing everything about what it means to be a developer,” he said. “You can create and distribute products with basically no costs. You have this infrastructure that allows you to transmit info and products to your customers with zero overhead. So now you have the opportunity to create a great product that can sell itself if you have a good market. You’re going to need salespeople at some point to help you reach a broader audience, but you can get started immediately.”

Stripe Co-Founder Collison is on the view that over the past few years the online developer community has been getting increasingly verbal, thanks to companies like GitHub, which amounts to a modern day version of a Home Brew Computer Club. One of the advantages for all the companies here is that they nurture an ever growing audience. The developer communities are very close knit. If the product is good enough, the word gets out.

The rise of internet, social networks and mobile technology is another vital factor developers have become so important.

“Every time there’s a platform shift there are ten times as many developers, and the developer community also grows,” Dodge said. “There are hundreds of times more developers [now] than there were mainframe developers.”

You had all these new kinds of things happening on the web, and people wanting to run businesses on the web, and companies that were not fundamentally not set up for that. It wasn’t that companies were deliberately trying to make anything complex. They were operating in a completely different frame of reference. We build from the ground up for the web.

Some new technologies and techniques have emerged in operations to help developers become more responsive. This brings up the assumption that manages the efficiency and effectiveness of the delivery process has business value associated with the direct and quantifiable system as a whole.

“Being a developer makes you feel like you’ve got a superpower,” Doshi said. “That’s because you can think about something in the world that you want to build, and then you can go and build it. The reason the developer has become so important and valuable is [because] it feels limitless in terms of what your potential can be. You find that you can make this huge impact by building software. Then you get together with five or six other people with super powers and you’re like the Avengers. And you go and do something great for the world. You go and build a Google or a GitHub.”

Don’t Get Left Behind

It’s actually the pressure from enterprise leaders for developers to perform at superhuman levels that’s become too intense. The speed with which a business can do new things, respond to competitor threats or attack competitors is tied intrinsically to the speed with which IT can enhance and deliver new functionality into its revenue applications.

However, there are some practical factors still stymieing the true potential of developers including poor coordination and lack of visibility, need to rely on others for key tasks, and manual processes that create bottlenecks.

Although agile methods have been readily adapted for many development teams, users usually do not have access to the software they produce due to implementation processes full of gaps, error-prone manual tasks or other work-related operational delays.

At the same time, the pressures of an increasingly competitive market are causing business leaders require lower operating cycle to get new software and resources in the hands of users and customers. These three factors – agile development, new technologies and operational requirement of market responsiveness in business – are causing people to rethink how organizations think about software delivery.

Developers are seen as having more advanced in their efforts to become more responsive to business needs. The manifesto itself is partly the result of previous approaches and experiments extreme programming and programming pairs. Unfortunately, sophisticated software depends largely on infrastructure and requires it to evolve at the same pace as the software itself. The notion of keeping separate software and infrastructure is not sustainable if the technology has to keep pace with business needs. This is forcing the development to engage more in infrastructure needs to support complex software into production.