8 Tech Trends I’m Excited About

Here’s the 8 big trends I keep seeing all around. These are exciting trends that I believe will be a huge part of our future. At Packt we want to help tech professionals build this future. What do you see?

1. Conversational UIs and messaging as a platform. WeChat is the one app that rules them all in China — a platform that offers a window into the whole online world, just like the Web does here. But increasingly we use devices to exchange interact via short messages with people and — in Google Now /Siri— apps.
2. Automation of work, particularly white collar work. Apps can now do the work of a manager. Uber has already replaced the taxi dispatcher with an app. Google is working to replace the driver. At a smaller scale, many many routine tasks of work and management can be automated simply and easily.
3. Slackbots bring these themes together in the short term. As Slack becomes the Operating System of the firm, the Slack app might do for work what the mobile app has done for consumers.
4. Machine learning, data science, stream processing. There’s still a lot of work to do helping professionals and systems handle, analyse, visualize and use the huge volumes of data we deal with today.
5. IoT, hardware startups. Small businesses can now manufacture and distribute hardware at scale. Innovation around hardware is an umbrella for wearables, drones, and a lot of other software-enabled stuff that we’ll see catching on in the next few years.
6. Blockchain — distributed, secure and resilient data stores for everything. The Ashley Madison leak and the Politweets take down point to the weaknesses in centralized data stores. Data stores that are simultaneously public and secure have a lot to offer in all areas of tech, not just payment.
7. Future of the Web as it faces serious competition for the first time. If it has a future, what is it? If not, what will replace it?
8. Python as the everything language. It’s emerging as the de facto language for handling data, automation scripts, IoT, and spearheading the “everybody should code” movement. An old language getting a new lease of life.

What do you see going on out there? And how can Packt help?