As a developer, it's important to keep your skills up-to-date. We’re called upon to not only be experts in our day-to-day technologies, but to also stay informed of up-and-coming technologies. This allows us to continue to make the best decisions for our products and teams. Knowing the newest tech and in-demand skills is not only satisfying, but it also keeps us employed. In this article, we'll look at five trending technologies to keep an eye on in 2020. These are technologies that if you don’t already know, you probably should. 1. Languages on the Rise – Python and Rust 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. , 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 in surveys, and over the past year has finally broken into the “ ” surveys. This could be the year that Rust breaks into the mainstream. Rust the most-loved language most popular programming language , on the other hand, is already very popular. It’s the darling of data science, AI, and scripting, and has continually . Python recently passed Java in popularity in the , and is the second most-loved language behind, you guessed it, Rust. You can’t go wrong adding Python to your language arsenal. Python risen in popularity over the past five years latest stack overflow survey 2. 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. (the programming language of Ethereum) was on LinkedIn. Twitter . Additionally, even larger, established companies, such as and , are releasing production-ready blockchain products. Solidity ranked as the #1 overall desired tech skill in 2019 announced it wanted to move to a decentralized (blockchain) platform Microsoft Salesforce 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 3. 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 in popularity over the next few years (15-20% projected growth per year for 2020-2022). to continue to grow If your company isn’t using SaaS or PaaS, there’s a good chance it will soon. Companies like and 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. Take some time to learn what services are provided. You’ll give up granular technical control, but gain time to spend on your business differentiators. Salesforce Heroku 4. Hybrid Clouds, Multi-Clouds Everywhere Continuing on that last trend, 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, 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: in a recent survey by Gartner, 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. 5. 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, , autonomous cars) and feared ( , , privacy intrusion) advances in engineering. Companies like Facebook and Google are looking to leverage AI to help continue their growth and bring in revenue. reducing fake news face recognition deep fakes , 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 and , and are about to hit a wall. According to this report from Stanford University too expensive too centralized 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 for a great overview on getting started in AI. read here Don't Let Your Skills Stagnate Development trends are hard to predict, but it’s important to broaden your knowledge. Don’t let your skills stagnate. Start by researching some of the tools and technologies we provided above, learn something new, and keep your skills relevant in 2020 and beyond.

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I write about technology michael.bogan@gmail.com

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