It’s a new year, and new years mean new challenges. And how can those challenges be faced? By staying up-to-date with technologies and ensuring you have the skills to turn those challenges into opportunities. But there are so many technologies out there, which ones do you learn? I have selected 5 technologies that I think everyone should learn in 2018. These are not necessarily new technologies. In fact, most of technologies listed have been around for awhile and I believe developers can no longer afford to ignore them.
Docker
For the last decade, virtual machines have been used to startup new servers. This work great, but is very wasteful of resources. Not only that, it’s very time consuming to both setup and configure. Docker is much simpler and less resource intensive. Want an Apache server, or a MySQL database? Start a Docker instance with that service. Need to experiment with nginx for a new project? Spawn a Docker server to tinker with your new technology. With thousands of images for a sorts of services, it’s likely that you can find what you need. I run my Jenkins and Artifactory services using Docker – it took minutes to setup and has been running for a year or more. There is simply no faster way to setup servers than using Docker.
Angular
The JavaScript world is in constant flux. Technologies come and go, and it’s hard to keep track of them all. As such, many are reluctant to dive too deep into JavaScript technologies for fear of their pending obsolescence when a new framework come out. However, if you look at job openings for web architectures, you will see over and over the desire for Angular developers. And there’s good reason for that – Angular is a great framework. The best thing about Angular, in my opinion, is how easily it is to write reusable components. In a world where businesses solve the same problems over and over, reusability saves time and money. Outside of the web world, Angular is also used by the Ionic framework for creating cross-platform mobile applications. Thus, if you know Angular you can not only develop cutting-edge web applications, but you can easily move into the realm of Android and iOS development.
Kotlin
This one is a bit more speculation the the other technologies on my list. However, since it’s supported by Android, I expect to see it grow in popularity this year with the possibility of overtaking Java in popularity for native Android development at some point in the future. The Android Developer page for Kotlin lists a variety of reasons to switch to Kotlin – including safer code, concise data classes and lambda expressions, default and named arguments (something very popular in a variety of other languages), as well as being fully interoperable with Java. Numerous JVM languages, such as Groovy and Scala, have failed to gain wide-spread usage, but Google’s support for Kotlin code in Android may just change the game.
Linux
Linux is anything but new. In fact, it’s been around for decades now. However, it’s sad to see how many people in the tech world are still uncomfortable with the Linux command line. With all the technologies available today that use Linux, it’s time to learn it now! What are those technologies? Docker, Raspberry Pi, AWS, Google Cloud, and Android, all use Linux. Mac OSX has, in large part, become amazingly popular with Linux-savy developers because it uses BSD (A Linux variant) under the hood. Countless other technologies run on Linux or simply run better on Linux. For example, setting up a LAMP stack, running Python, or setting up Node is a breeze in Linux – but can be far more painful on Windows. Connectivity tools such as SSH and SCP run natively too – making deployment and configuration of servers and services easier. If you’re not familiar with Linux, you’re probably working too hard to get your solutions working on Windows.
.NET Core
After just enumerating the benefits of Linux, it may be odd to see a Windows technology on the list. However, The .NET Core framework runs on non-windows machines – and that’s exactly why it’s great! Microsoft’s Entity Framework and their MVC implementation both make for greatly streamlined web development. Running it on a Linux server is icing on the cake. I expect to see growth in .NET Core this year as developers exploit the simplicity of .NET development with the control and deployment power of Linux and Docker servers.