| 1. Bots become more prevalent on the business end Developers and designers work best when they're not interrupted. Asynchronous communication enables workers to ride the flow when they're focused and address communication when they take a break. A bot that requests a daily status, collects results throughout the day, and summarizes them would save the time wasted in unnecessary meetings without sacrificing communication. Managers tend to piss off their workers because they perceive their time as more valuable and expect their workers to drop everything for a status update. Bots have no ego, can collect all the necessary data, without being intrusive. That's just one example. Why are we still paying people to manually aggregate data? Bots can and should be used for menial/repetitive work. I think startups will start to popup to 'spread the bot love' to our less-technical business counterparts. 2. ChatOps and greater cross-platform integration Microservices are on the rise, everybody is talking in REST, and ChatOps is becoming the backbone of successful organizations. Slack is a good example of this. What it can't integrate with by default it can be extended with using bots or glue services like Zapier. It's time we ditch the push/pull models of communication. It doesn't scale and it's too easy for bad actors to game the system. Work, progress, and status should be tracked passively and in the open. No more lazy people hiding from their responsibilities, no more bad actors advancing by kissing ass and taking credit for other's work. Many sites/services have been exposing public APIs with a 'build it and they will come' mentality. It's about damn time we tap those resources. 3. Unikernels will start to be used in production For stateless webservices, it simply doesn't make sense to use a full-featured general purpose OS. A unikernel drastically reduces the surface area for security vulnerabilities, requires zero maintenance, requires very little memory/space overhead, and is small enough to fit in version control. Docker containers will live on as a scaleable approach for 'pets', unikernels will start to emerge as a replacement for 'cattle'. To take this a step further. If we're running a service that doesn't require mutable state, why the hell are we running it on a mutable operating system? DevOps is expensive and difficult to setup. Organizations that figure out how to embrace this new approach will be able to move fast and not break things.. ----- Bonus: Anti-trends 1. TDD will be on the decline Devs start to question whether TDD is just another form of 'waterfall' model. If we collectively agreed that making a ton of assumptions up front before starting development is a bad idea, why has that practice been pushed into the testing domain. The important question to ask isn't, "how much test coverage do we have?" It should be, "how many tests are we throwing away?" On a short timescale, startups will start looking to 'trim the fat'. 2. We reach 'peak mobile app' Apple has been coasting on the success of mobile since the passing of Steve Jobs. They're betting the future on mobile at the expense of everything else. Safari has become the new IE and the updates to OSX have been lackluster. OSX is the preferred platform for a large percentage of Developers/Designers and nothing pisses them off more than watching their favorite tools/ecosystem fall by the wayside. Resentment toward Apple will grow. To make matters worse, both React and Angular2 are aggressively pushing to be the platform of both the web and mobile. UI responsive issues have been resolved with the VDOM, and they've effectively built architectures that separate the application from the UI rendering layer. Mobile has never been scalable from a business sense. There's only a limited amount of screen real estate for apps. Mobile development strongly favors the few at the expense of the many. Plus, proprietary platform lock-in sucks. The mobile app ecosystem will contract as well as any -- but the most successful -- startups that depend on it. 3. 'Nobody ever got fired for purchasing Oracle' will become a past time Amazon AWS is aggressively pushing to eat Oracle's lunch. With the recent launch of services that achieve feature parity with Oracle's db as well as tools that assist the migration, Oracle will be on the decline. Not to mention, the business world finally overwhelmingly accepted the cloud as the future in 2015. Amazon AWS is the sleeping giant that just woke up holding a can of whoop ass in one hand and a can opener in the other. Startups that specialize in data migration to the cloud will be flush with cash. |