The Trends #1: Software Development Trends 2023/2024 — Vol. 1.

9 min readJan 4, 2024

At the start of 2024. we will look at the summary of significant software development trends we observed in 2023. That will follow us in 2024. too.

In this article, we will review the following:

Software Architecture InfoQ Trends Report 2023.
Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2023.
2023 State of the API Report by Postman
ThoughtWorks Technology Radar — Volume 29.
The State of Developer Ecosystem 2023 by JetBrains

So, let’s dive in.

Software Architecture InfoQ Trends Report (April 2023.)

In the latest report by InfoQ, we got some new insights on Software Architecture and Design:

Design for Portability is becoming more popular as architects can decouple business logic from implementation details because frameworks like Dapr emphasize a cloud-native abstraction model.
Large language models will significantly influence, from enabling a new generation of low-code and no-code developers to understanding architectural trade-offs.
In the upcoming years, the Sustainability of software will be a crucial design factor. As a result, improvements are being made to how the carbon footprints of software systems are measured and then reduced.
Architects constantly seek ways to document better, explain, and comprehend decisions. Large language models might also be used in this field, functioning as forensic archaeologists to search through ADRs and git histories.

Also, some exciting changes to the graph: Serverless is now in the Late Majority, while Architecture Design Records (ADRs) entered the Early Majority. Modular monoliths are still a part of the Early Majority group.

Software Architecture InfoQ Trends Report — April 2023.

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2023. (June 2023.)

Guys from Stack Overflow surveyed more than 90,000 developers about how they learn and what programming languages and tools they use. Here are the results:

Developer profile

Developers have Bachelor’s or Master’s degrees (>64%)
Most developers learn from online resources (videos, blogs) > 80% and then books 51%
The most used platforms are Udemy (66%), Coursera (35%), Codeacademy (24%), and Pluralsight (23%)
48% of respondents have been coding for less than ten years
More than 33% of developers classify themselves as full-stack developers

2. Technology

JavaScript is still the most popular programming language, followed by Python
SQL is the third most used language
We saw some technologies gain traction this year (Bash/Shell, C, Ruby, Perl, and Erlang)
PostgreSQL is the most used database, followed by MySQL and SQLite.
AWS is the most used cloud technology (49%), followed by Azure (26%) and GCP (24%)
Node.js and React.js are the two most common web technologies all respondents use.
.NET (5+) is again at the top of the list for other frameworks and libraries this year.
Docker is the top-used other tool (53%), while npm is the second (49%)
Visual Studio Code remains the preferred IDE (73%), followed by Visual Studio (28%)
Jira and Confluence are the top two async tools among all developers
Erlang is the highest-paid language to know
We saw an 8% salary increase in all main languages from the last year

3. AI

83% of respondents have used ChatGPT as a search tool
AI is used for writing code and debugging
GitHub Copilot is the pick for the most used AI developer tool (55%)

4. Work

70% of developers are employed full-time, while 16% are freelancers
42% work in hybrid mode, and 41% work remotely
40% of respondents work for an organization that has less than 100 employees
Most Developers code outside of work as a hobby (70%)
90% of developers interact with members outside their team at least once per week
63% of developers spend more than 30min a day searching for answers or solutions to problems
Most Developers report having CI/CD, automated testing, and DevOps available at their organization

2023 State of the API Report by Postman (June 2023.)

More than 40,000 API professionals and developers were polled about issues like development priorities, API tools, and the future of APIs. The questions were updated this year to include pertinent information on API monetization and generative AI.

Here are the key findings:

APIs are a moneymaker for most — Nearly 2/3 of respondents claim that their APIs bring in money. 43% of the respondents stated that their APIs account for over a quarter of their business’s income. Revenue was crucial in the financial services and advertising industries. It was ranked as the №2 indicator of a successful public API right after usage.
API pricing increasingly matters — Price is the primary factor, according to 47% of respondents, when determining whether to integrate with an API. In each of the previous two years, that number was 41% lower. Although other variables were given a higher priority, this result may indicate that API consumers are becoming more cost-conscious in the wake of the industry’s downturn.
Most API professionals use AI To help with coding — Sixty percent of respondents claim to employ generative AI. Over half of them use it to identify faults in their code, and more than a third use AI to create new code. Building AI-powered apps came in first when developers were asked what kind of project they were most excited about in the upcoming year.
The outlook for API investment has brightened — Ninety-two percent of respondents — up from 89% last year — say that investments in APIs will increase or remain unchanged over the next 12 months. This growth may indicate that some people believe the worst of the technological sector’s economic decline is behind us. However, fewer respondents anticipate reducing API investments this year.
API security is improving, but some sectors have work to do — For most responders, API security has improved, and incidents will happen less frequently in 2023. But certain industries performed worse than others. Participants in the poll said that monthly events happened at higher rates than normal in the automotive, educational, and retail sectors.
The number of API-first leaders swells by almost half — An increase from 8% in each of the previous two years to 11% of respondents who identified as leaders who prioritize APIs. This exclusive group performs exceptionally well across practically all metrics, including how rapidly APIs can be produced and quickly recovered after an API failure.

ThoughtWorks Technology Radar — Volume 29. (September 2023.)

In the latest Technology Radar released in September by ThoughtWorks, we saw different themes emerging:

AI-assisted software development: AI-related topics dominated the conversation. There’s a significant interest in using AI to assist in software development. Tools like GitHub Copilot, Tabnine, and Codeium were discussed. There’s also excitement about open-source LLMs for coding.
How productive is measuring productivity? The industry has moved away from using lines of code as a measure of output. Instead, the focus is on engineering effectiveness. Tools such as DX DevEx 360 address this by focusing on the developer experience.
A large number of LLMs: Large language models (LLMs) form the basis for many modern breakthroughs in AI. The core competing ecosystems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and others were discussed.
Remote Delivery workaround matures: The pandemic’s impact solidified complete remote or hybrid work as an enduring trend. Remote software development practices and tools have developed, with teams focusing on effective collaboration in a more distributed environment.

Techniques

Adopt: Design systems and a lightweight approach to RFCs.
Trial: Accessibility-aware component test design, attack path analysis, automatic merging of dependency update PRs, and data product thinking for FAIR data, among others.
Assess: Dependency health checks to counter package hallucinations, design system decision records, GitOps, and more.
Hold: Ignoring OWASP Top 10 lists and web components for server-side-rendered (SSR) web apps.

Tools

Adopt: debt, Mermaid, Ruff, Snyk
Trial: AWS Control Tower, Bloc, cdk-nag, Checkov, etc.

Platforms

Adopt: Colima is an alternative for Docker on macOS.
Trial: CloudEvents, DataOps. live, Google Cloud Vertex AI, Immuta, etc.

Languages and Frameworks

Adopt: Playwright
Trial: .NET Minimal API, Ajv, Armeria, AWS SAM, etc.

ThoughtWorks Technology Radar — Volume 29.

The State of Developer Ecosystem 2023 by JetBrains (November 2023.)

In November, JetBrains announced their new State of Developer Ecosystem 2023 report based on answers from 26,000 respondents.

Here are the key takeaways:

AI usage

77% of developers use ChatGPT, and 46% use GitHub Copilot
Developers use it primarily to ask general questions and generate and explain the code

2. Programming languages

In 2023, Scala, Go, and Kotlin developers ranked as the top three highest-paid
JavaScript decreased in the last three years, giving space to TypeScript, while SQL gained 3% in usage.
Rust is ranked №1 when asked about migration to new languages, which aspire to replace C++ with its strict safety and memory ownership mechanisms. Yet, Python C/C++ still rules the embedded world
Most Kotlin developers (66%) use the language for Android and server-side applications
Also, Objective-C is objetively retired

3. Developer background

For most people, reasonable working hours and salary are the most important, but you also need a feeling that you have achieved something
Most professional goals are related to learning new technologies and tools
Most of the developers have a formal education (70%)
Only 5% of developers are women, which stays the same as in 2021
Seniors become at the age of 25 years!
Architects are better paid than C-level
70% said they code for fun on weekends

4. Learning

Developers mostly learn from documentation and APIs (67%), blogs/forums (53%), and books (40%), and they spend around 3–8 hours per week.
Written content is still the most often used for learning (53%), followed by video (45%).
Yet, 75% said they had quit a program or course before finishing it due to a lack of time or content needed to improve.
Most respondents said they got IT news primarily from social media, websites, and YouTube.

5. Wellbeing

More than half of respondents said they don’t care about mental health, while 34% said they use some psychological techniques on their own.
Yet, 73% experienced burnout, which is interesting compared to the previous statement and probably connected.
11% use medications for mental health issues, while 9% visit a therapist

6. Big Data

Spark is most used for batch processing, while Spark Streaming is used primarily for streaming
Airflow is the most used orchestration tool
Data lakes are still primarily built using traditional relational databases, and a majority (64%) reported not using any engines for their data engineering tasks
59% don’t use any testing framework

7. Databases

The most used databases are MySQL(48%), MS SQL Server (40%), and PostgreSQL (39%), while popularity changes by region.
The usage is also bound to programming language selection. E.g., the share of MongoDB among Python users is 29.2%, whereas its general share is 26.6%. PHP developers and MS SQL Server with C# developers mostly use MariaDB.

8. Development

61% use native tools for mobile development, while 49% use cross-platform technologies (Flutter and React Native mostly).
Only 33% use automatic static code analysis.
82% use microservice architectural style!
40% use pair/mob programming.

9. DevOps and Cloud

AWS is used by 60%, and Azure by 25% of respondents
63% of developers use Docker

10. Testing

Developers mostly write unit tests (63%), then integration (47%), and then end-to-end and performance tests (~33%)
Cypress is much more used than Playwright (about a half)

2023 State of Developer Ecosystem by JetBrains

Thanks for reading, and stay awesome!

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Originally published at https://newsletter.techworld-with-milan.com on January 4, 2024.