5 Technologies To Watch & Learn

Technology is always changing. As much of our world is dependent upon increasingly complex technology, it’s always prudent to catch up on some of the trends.

Here are 5 trends in technology with some notes about how to take advantage of them.

1. Languages on the Rise

If you’re looking to learn a new language to stay relevant, Python and Rust are two great choices. Both languages are mature and already have a solid and vocal user base. These languages aren’t going to surpass JavaScript any time soon, but expect these two growing languages to become even more popular in the coming year. 

Rust, a general-use language like C or C++, has a small user base, but that user base swears by its security, ease of use, efficiency, and speed. Rust is consistently the most-loved language in surveys, and over the past year has finally broken into the “most popular programming language” surveys. This could be the year that Rust breaks into the mainstream.

Python, on the other hand, is already very popular. It’s the darling of data science, AI, and scripting, and has continually risen in popularity over the past five years. Python recently passed Java in popularity in the latest stack overflow survey, and is the second most-loved language behind, you guessed it, Rust. You can’t go wrong adding Python to your language arsenal.

JAMstack, as we covered last week, is a combination of Javascript, APIs, and Markdown. What this enables is super-fast lightweight sites that also have enough functionality to replace many of the websites out there running some form of LAMP (Linux / Apache / MySQL / [PHP / Perl / Python]) aka WordPress and its many competitors.

Lastly, Typescript is a new way to write JavaScript, and one that is a bit more precise when it comes to declaring variables, functions, classes and more. If you’ve ever used another language like C# or Java, you know that those languages are a bit stricter about variable declaration. This strict declaration is sometimes known as static typing. JavaScript, by default, is a loosely typed language. What Typescipt provides is code that’s easier to read, faster to write, simpler to refactor, and has many other advantages like less bugs, better merges, less boilerplate tests, and tons more QOL improvements.

Plus, all the cool kids are using Typescript.

2. Artificial Intelligence Continues to Thrive (But Will it Hit a Wall?)

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been quickly evolving over the last several years. It represents some of our most optimistic (identifying hate speech, reducing fake news, autonomous cars) and feared (face recognition, deep fakes, privacy intrusion) advances in engineering. Companies like Facebook and Google are looking to leverage AI to help continue their growth and bring in revenue. 

According to this report from Stanford University, investment in AI startups, the demand for AI skills, and the percentage of global companies using AI are all growing. That means job growth. According to that same report, AI job postings have more than doubled in the past five years, and now represent nearly 1% of all jobs posted in the United States. However, some experts, such as the VP of AI at Facebook, think these technologies are becoming too expensive and too centralized, and are about to hit a wall. 

No one knows for sure. But wall or no wall, AI seems like a safe bet for skills that are in demand both now and in the future. One way to get started in AI is to learn Python, mentioned above as a trending language. You can also read here for a great overview on getting started in AI.

3. Hybrid Clouds, Multi-Clouds Everywhere

Companies are no longer using just one cloud provider; rather, they are moving to multi-cloud, using a combination of multiple providers (AWS, Heroku, Azure, and so on) to gain the benefits and geographical reach of all these platforms. 

In fact, in a recent survey by Gartner, 81% of companies said they are using two or more cloud providers. Respondents to the survey cited a wide variety of reasons for moving to multi-cloud, which include the following:

• minimizing vendor lock-in
• performance
• regulatory requirements
• labor costs
• governance
• disaster recovery
• easier data migration

With these reasons, you will likely need to become comfortable with more than one cloud provider in the near future, if you aren’t already. Additionally, if you have expertise in more than one cloud provider, then you have a head start on staying relevant for years to come.

4. SaaS and PaaS Continue Strong Growth

Companies still don’t want the hassle, expense, and risk of hosting their own data and applications. That’s not news. However, more than just outsourcing data centers (Infrastructure as a Service), expect the add-on services supplied by Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers to continue to grow in popularity over the next few years (15-20% projected growth per year for 2020-2022). 

If your company isn’t using SaaS or PaaS, there’s a good chance it will soon. Companies like Salesforce and Heroku will continue to provide increasingly popular quick-and-easy solutions for dev teams to quickly spin up products. It’s a good idea to become comfortable with the idea of outsourcing your infrastructure, dev-ops, and services, if you aren’t already.

5. Blockchain – High Demand for Developers

Blockchain boomed and busted over the last several years. But regardless of the drop in publicity, the technology is quietly advancing toward real-world use cases in the background. Solidity (the programming language of Ethereum) was ranked as the #1 overall desired tech skill in 2019 on LinkedIn. Twitter announced it wanted to move to a decentralized (blockchain) platform. Additionally, even larger, established companies, such as Microsoft and Salesforce, are releasing production-ready blockchain products. 

As complex and groundbreaking projects launch, and real use cases emerge in the marketplace, we can expect another blockchain boom. And along with that boom, expect high demand and high pay for blockchain developers. Freelance blockchain developers average between $165 and $255 per hour.

Keep your skills sharp and keep with the changing times, and you’ll be well-positioned for any changes.