This blog post is an attempt in that direction - which are the trends that I think would make a difference for any software developer to keep up with the fast pace of change.
(Note: Not in any particular order, all are important)
- No SQL.
- Traditional DBs are good but definitely not "one size fits all" solution. We have to understand these too have some limitations.We have to stop thinking in rows and columns and start thinking in Documents. Get familiar with some of these concepts, find out what makes these (Mongo DB, Redis etc) successful, what kind of problems can be solved by these. This technology is going to thrive.
- Scripting language
- Enough of Java, C++, C#. Enough of OOPS. Its time to open a notepad and do some quick scripting to get things done. Too much dependency on IDEs have made many of us dumb. Its time to brush-up (or learn) scripting language. Simplicity matters. Be it Ruby, Groovy, Perl, PHP.
- Cloud computing
- Get familiar with Cloud computing architecture. This technology is already 5 years old. Amazon launched its services in 2006. Computing is cheap these days and just a click away. There would be a time in future when everything would be on cloud. This technology would grow by leaps and bounds
- Git / Mercurial (Modern Version Control Systems)
- Speed is the mantra of this age. Gone are the days of client-server versioning system. In this era of opensource and distributed teams, distributed version controls make life of the developers easy. Every developer should be aware of installing and using these distributed configuration management systems.
- Web 3.0 (HTML 5)
- A month back I attended one day conference on HTML 5 conference in NYC. The takeaway from the conference is - HTML 5 is inevitable. It has been already a decade since HTML standards got updated. The big guns (Google, Apple, Microsoft etc) are all supporting it. HTML 5, CSS3 will be the future of the web. Features like Offline storage, drag drop, geo location, canvas etc will make developing "desktop caliber" web apps a breeze. Developers, Architects ignoring this will be left behind.
- Functional language
- History repeats. Computing started with Functional language (Lisp, Scheme etc), moved to procedural (C, Pascal etc) to object oriented (C++, Java. C#) and again back to Functional languages(F#, Clojure, Erlang, Haskell etc). The job trends already indicate a huge demand for Clojure, F# etc. Hardware has become cheap, grid computing has been norm and some real world problems can be solved insanely easy with these functional languages. Its all about "Share Nothing Architecture". No concurrency issues. Its high time for the developers to start thinking differently and learn (or re-learn) the concepts of functional programming
- Data visualization
- At least two billion tweets are being posted per quarter (Source wikipedia). Wealth of information is available on twitter and all the data is public. Everybody would be interested in visualizing this data in some form (graphs, charts, trees etc ) to make sense of it. Its too much information out there. Barack Obama knew this and used this technique to do a wonderful campaign for his elections. This trend would keep growing as more data gets collected on the Internet.
- Mobile / Tablet platform
- iPad has been rated as one of the best devices to consume information. Consumers, executives, enterprise folks - all would have one or the other form of tablet devices in the near future. Its the new trend and a growing trend. Analysts call it "arm platform". Architects, Developers should first think of smart phones, then tablets and finally the notebook - when architecting or designing new enterprise or e commerce applications.
- Agile
- Everybody should be familiar with Agile Manifesto.
- TDD, BDD
- SCRUM/XP
- This should take care of your learning appetitie for at-least couple of years :).
- Please share your list ...
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