Next, I started working with Docker and languages with better package management. Dependencies were fetched in CI and were either statically linked or packaged in a container with the application I was working on. Still, these were mostly monoliths or applications with simple API boundaries and a known set of clients.

In the past few years, almost everything I have written has involved cloud services, and when I deploy an application, I do not know what other services may soon depend on the one I just wrote. This type of workflow that depends on runtime systems that I do not own - and where my app may become a runtime dependency of someone else - is what I am referring to as a "modern development workflow".