Happy 2017! As we put 2016 in the rearview mirror, we’re all taking a look at the outlook for 2017 as I did here but I wanted to take a more personal angle here and explore what I desperately want to see from the tech community. This list is by no means exhaustive and for the sake of time (and online attention spans) I’m limiting it to my top three.
Google Account Management: Dealing with multiple Google accounts is an unfortunate and annoying fact of life for me both as a regular user and as a developer. In this year alone I’ve probably written thousands of lines of code for myself and for clients to deal with this problem by basically scraping calendar events between two or Google accounts. The business case for this problem is pretty simple. Company A gets a contract to do some work but they don’t have the resources in house, so they subcontract part (or all) of the job to Company B, but Company A doesn’t want the client to figure out that Company B exists and is actually doing the work, so they give all the Company B people Company A Google accounts. My event scraping solution is sloppy and fraught with all sorts of little issues. Google should find a way to implement some sort “vanity account” system that let’s the actual email addresses be masked between multiple domains, so that the customer sees what Company A wants them to, but Company B doesn’t have the overhead of dealing with yet another GMAIL account.
Reactive Programming Hype: A lot has been made of Reactive Programming in 2016. While there is definitely some fire to the smoke, things are getting way too hyped and frankly I’m seeing Jr developers pitching reactive programming on freelance gigs as some sort of silver bullet that will solve all the problems you have have and even ones you don’t know you have yet. This is scary! Sure there has always been hype around “new” (sneer quotes because Reactive Programming is only new from a ‘certain point of view’) technologies and methodologies but this hype train around all things with the word or root ‘react’ in them has the kinetic energy of ten hydrogen bombs. I’ve gotten too many projects in this year from prospective clients that were over-engineered in one of these reactive libraries by some Jr dev who just got a little too excited on the Kool-Aide sales pitch and the story is sadly all the same – the client was happy with what he was told but what he got was a steaming pile of hard to reason about spaghetti code and ultimately a rewrite. For 2017 let’s just pull the cord a little on the hype train, OK?
Docker Direction: Despite some fairly significant pain in upgrading between Docker versions and other more minor issues, I am still a serious believer in Docker as the premier containerization solution. Coder Radio listeners will remember that even as a callow youth I was on the Docker train right from the beginning but my faith has been somewhat shaken and I’d like some clearer communications regarding where the technology is going, who they feel their ideal target users are, and where Docker the company sees its role beginning and ending — in other words where will they and where won’t they compete with vendors who are selling / implementing Docker.
Those are my three (I hope fairly doable) wishes for 2017, but before I go…. I also want to note what I didn’t mention here that I have in my end of year / new year posts for the last years – App Store monetization and more specifically a sign from Apple on where they see that going. We got our answer in 2016 – subscriptions. While that will work for a number of apps and is working fine for my Backpoints (iOS & Android), it does not satisfy all the needs of independent developers and likely will not create the high-value ecosystem of professional paid (paid defined as taking money in any non-donation way) software that the iOS App Store originally enjoyed. When I think about Apple and their answer to the monetization issues on the App Store, I am remained of that great quote from Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons: “God answers all prayers, but sometimes his answer is ‘no’.”
