It’s that time of year when I start looking toward the tech trends that I think are going to be interesting in the new year. Being a software developer, I’m focusing on development and development-related technologies rather than technology as a whole. The follow items are in now specific order and these are just my opinions based on what I am seeing in my little corner of the world – one special note, this is all from a very US and similar economies perspective, so any references to margins or growth should be seen from that point of view.
Rust
OK, so if you follow me on any social media or have listened to Coder Radio for even more than a few minutes, you’ll know that I have been pretty hot on the Rust programming language. What you might not know is that the Rust community is growing rapidly. In fact, over the last few months, several Rust podcasts have launched and a number of prominent technology blogs have started reporting on the language as something more than a nerdy curiosity. The truth is Rust is a language that at its core is designed to prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot by preventing entire classes of common programming errors. Yes, it’s true that getting Rust code to simply compile is a little more tedious than other languages, but the reality is that the extra work is really work you should be doing for all but the most trivial of programs. My bet is that more large-scale institutions are going to start looking at Rust as a safer alternative to languages like C++ in the coming year so much so that by the end of the year it will be a standard.
PWAs
This is a trend that’s been gaining steam for a few years now and this stone is only going to keep rolling! As JavaScript engines become faster and more desktop and mobile browsers begin to support Web Assembly, it’s just not going to make business-sense to develop the vast majority of apps / applications with separate mobile and web clients. The big caveat here is of Apple’s iOS and it’s somewhat conservative approach to PWAs, but even Cupertino has (albeit slowly) started to come around to market reality that most organizations need to support multiple platforms and don’t want to have two separate code-bases. In terms of the mobile side of this story, I think a good portion of the gains made by PWAs are going to be at the expense of other cross-platform mobile development tools, such as Xamarin or some of the Java-based tools, not necessarily all at the expense of native development.
Back to the 80s
Dudes and dudettes grab your ghetto blasters and crank those IOT beats! We’re going back to the days of innovative hardware and software coupling for small gadgets being commonplace and I’m Hungry Like the Wolf for it. IOT may have been a virtually meaningless hype term used by egomaniac startup founders to get in on some of that bodacious Sand Hill Road cha ching, but this Material Girl is ready to settle down for some cold-hard automation cash. Kidding aside, as true profit growth becomes increasingly hard to find in late-stage economies, firms are going to need to look to cost cutting and for most organizations that means pulling a Gordon Gekko on some headcount by automating their jobs. This trend is probably inevitable and has serious long-term implications for society as a whole, but there’s no viable way to avoid the realities of increasingly intelligent systems, the fact that it’s cheaper / easier than ever to manufacture increasingly more capable hardware components, and the reality that cellular coverage is going to become increasingly ubiquitous and reliable. The only real impediments I see this is the Tainted Love of big telecom (read AT&T, Verizon, etc) having been able to rollback net neutrality rules; it’s important to note that these companies can only hold back this technology so much and even then only for so long. To not embrace this trend as unprepared as we are for it, is to stand on a shoreline shouting for the waves to stop. In other words, the days of mobile apps being the hot new projects for startups are basically over – expect to see gadgets cobbled together in garages like it’s 1985.
Desktop Linux Growth
I know someone clever is going to tweet me the “year of the Linux” desktop meme, but I think there’s a good chance that Linux will continue to gain market share, particularly among technical professionals such as software developers. My reasoning is pretty straightforward – macOS is becoming somewhat more questionable as an ideal development environment for anything other than iOS and macOS development. Now, this is not to say that Linux desktop usage among developers is going to overtake macOS in terms of market share in the coming year but it’s likely to grow significantly, especially thanks to engineering focused and easy to get running distros such as Elementary and Pop!_OS. If the Linux-powered IOT device prediction ends up being true, then this makes even more sense, as it makes a lot of sense to have your development environment be as similar to your production one; also, keep in mind that most servers (even on Azure) are running some form of Linux. My real concern here is that most of Linux manufacturers have not yet caught up to the build quality or battery life of the average mac. This is more accurate than ever sense it seems that Apple has started moving back to their more reliable scissor switch mechanism for their keyboards. With companies like Dell and System76 on the case, I am hoping that there will be a spec for spec Macbook Pro competitor on the market this coming year.
What do you think about these trends for 2020? Am I right on? Or am I off the mark? Either way let me know on Twitter and make sure to take a look at Automator, my new automation podcast.
