These 15 technologies are changing how developers work

Sep 15, 2014

Once upon a time, a developer wrote code on one machine.  The software loaded the data from memory, and spit out back a result.
Those were the days.

Today, the very nature of programming is changing.  Teams of developers work across the globe (and across languages and character sets) – with different versions of the compiler.
The very nature of programming is changing, according to InfoWorld.  They present 15 technologies that are changing the way developers do their job:

  1. Continuous integration: code repositories are linked to continuous build systems (so don’t expect any lag time to catch your breath!)
  2. Frameworks: very little is from scratch; make sure you get the right framework.
  3. Libraries: knowledge of the library is as important as knowing the ins and outs of the language itself.
  4. APIs: Do you want a street address and a ZIP code turned into latitude and longitude? There’s an API for that, and it costs a few slivers of a penny to find each answer.
  5. Platform as a service: All it takes is a few fields in a Web form, and voilà! Your new website does everything you wanted … almost.
  6. Browsers: Moving beyond individual desktops, now everything goes through a browser.
  7. Application containers: Building a server is hard work – application containers like Docker  have changed the game.
  8. Infrastructure as a service: Few programmers need to ask the infrastructure team to build them a new server for a new project. They simply log into a website, push a button, and get a machine running for them.
  9. Node.js and JavaScript: Instead of a programmer for SQL, a coder in PHP or Java and an HTML designer – now the browser (and other systems) speak JavaScript.
  10. Secondary marketplaces: Why hire when you can just shop? There are effective marketplaces for plug-ins, extensions, libraries, and other add-ons.
  11. Virtual machines: Much of the code written today runs on virtual machines that translate your instructions into something understood by the chip.
  12. Social media portals: Traffic seems to be eaten up by the behemoths like Facebook and Salesforce. Do you integrate with their platform, or try to stay independent?
  13. Devops tools: Instead of one server, we rent servers en masse – requiring new tools to make sure your servers are provisioned on demand.
  14. GitHub, SourceForge, and social code sharing: Sharing posts code for everyone to see and update – read and suggest changes.
  15. Performance monitoring: Modern tools track the network calls for the network of software as well as the performance of individual modules. This is the only way to understand what is going right and going wrong.

Do yourself a favour – go check out the full post on InfoWorld.
Are there any tech tools that have completely changed how you work?  We’d love to hear below.
15 technologies changing how developers work [InfoWorld]
Image by jm3 on Flickr via Creative Commons