Tech Focus for 2018
If you are like me having a keen eye on the every growing Tech scene, year by year, then join me in this journey where in I lay down my views for the Tech focus for this year. To be able to evaluate and digest this, you can be at any stage of your Software Engineer / Technology profession pursuing opportunities across the vast spectrum of future software Engineering.
Data Focus
With every day activities such as reading software encyclopedias, writing software, committing transactions etc. billions of people create astronomical amount of data. That being said, it should be no surprise for any one to realize that data is money. In all of this, security is the paramount as we don’t want to embroil ourselves in the world of data loss, hack etc.
The first and the primary focus for this year has to be Study of Data / Data science. This includes Data analytics, Big Data which is also crucial in Machine / Deep Learning. There are various forms of data science studies and activities which would involve dealing and transforming with all types of data within a database ecosystem and in an Integration Platform which slightly falls into the Application landscape arena.
To put things in perspective, as of early 2017:
Colossal 2.7 Zetabytes of data exist in the universe
30+ Petabytes of user generated data gets stored, analyzed and 30 billions pieces of content shared on Facebook, every month
Production of data will be 44 times greater in 2020
With the amount of data today, it is equivalent to 200 billion HD Movies that would take a person 47 millions years to watch
I could go on… but many Organizations make a living out of a viable business model with data at the center of their core. Data is the key for business processes around millions of Applications. Data is and must be governed too; compliance requirement such as the EU GDPR (which is intended to strengthen and unify data protection for all individual within the European Union) which lays down the law of how the data should be handled within the EU, in terms of clarifying the need of holding onto a company or individual’s data either on-premise of a company or in the data centers / cloud etc.
So, when you are working with data — either you are creating or playing with existing data, always remember that you data is power and with power comes great responsibility. Whatever your business might be in, you need to follow strict guidelines and create processes around taking good care of the data in terms of their tractability, archival, retention etc.
Cloud Variant
When the software / technology startup craze took over the world a few years ago, many businesses created their own Infrastructure which was fit for purpose but they weren’t scalable. It didn’t matter if an Application (multiple Microservices) provided the needed throughput for the amount of the expected users and reasonable response time. Obviously, the core business ability the Application offered was very important. It is hard to architect an Application for scalability once it is designed and implemented that fits the Infrastructure like a glove.
The companies were happy to have their own data centres which gave them full autonomy over how they were configured, OS / platform management etc. but not everyone was happy since it incurred a lot of operational costs and the best practices were in place but it wasn’t followed hence out of the window. It needs a Infrastructure architect with specific expertise in the Networking, Resiliency, Storage engineering etc.
In came the Cloud computing, with Amazon spear heading (still is — argumentative!) with offering such EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) which helps in auto scaling the needs for Applications. There are many categories within Cloud computing such as IaaS (Infrastructure as Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), FaaS (Functions as service i.e. Serverless), NaaS (Network as a Service) to name a few….. that offer different services depending upon the provider. Ms Azure and Google Cloud platform also offer similar offering like AWS, only that Amazon is believed to have pioneered the cloud offerings thus far.
There are emerging industry needs specifically for Cloud architects / engineers who have the expertise to guide the companies and help them to achieve NoOps which essentially means that an oganization doesn’t need to have any responsibility over the Infrastructure or Platform but they can scale and spin up as many environments as they like, depending upon the needs; ideally auto scaling based on the configuration — Infrastracture as Code! This is the future of software delivery on the cloud and something your plane doesn’t want to miss out.
A good start to the academics on this would be to read the AWS Solution Architect and Azure Certification material which will give the chance to perform a deep dive and disappear in the cloud.
Crypto Eye
Believe it or not, like it or not, want it or not, Crypto currency is on the rise. It is rise of the Machines with AI but Crypto market has shone a vast amount of potential in a truly global way. First came Bitcoin, then in August 2017, as a result of fork of the Bitcoin classic resulted in Bitcoin cash! Even before that many Altcoins were born. Altcoins are the alternative cryptocurrencies launched after the success of Bitcoin.
Coinmarketcap tracks most of the Altcoins along with Bitcoins with the details such as Total Marketcap, Current Price, Volume, Circulating supply and Change in the price within 24 hours. This provides a good benchmark for the Crypto currency investors. There also many Crypto currency exchanges such Coinbase, Binance etc. on the rise on which you can enroll, verify and buy virtual currencies. Moreover, there are Crypto currency transfer services such as Changelly who provide real time wallet transfer.
Apart from investing, there is also Crypto mining. Cryptocurrency mining includes two functions, namely: adding transactions to the blockchain (securing and verifying) and also releasing new currency. Individual blocks added by miners should contain a proof-of-work, or PoW. Mining needs a computer and a special program, which helps miners compete with their peers in solving complicated mathematical problems. This would need huge computer resources. In regular intervals, miners would attempt to solve a block having the transaction data using cryptographic hash functions.
As of this moment, there is a huge demand in blockchain developers. It should come to you as there are no surprises; there is a huge a learning curve that one has to climb on, beat the slump and learn the new way of managing decentralised ledger and virtual banking system. The focus and need for this industry is every growing and this year with the Altcoins such as Ripple, Neo etc. being predicted to reach new heights, it is imperative to watch this space on an hourly basis.
Conclusion
Once you have a clear focus as to what you want to learn and gain from the industry this year, make a wise move. Read more about the area you want to focus on, gain knowledge, put it to work and become a good subject matter expert. Courses from Plural sight, Udemy can help teach you the basics and also refresh with more advanced topics from Coursera etc. Once you have learned something, try and write up a Case study and publish your GIT source and learn with the community.
If you have arrived at the junction about investing in Crypto currency, then please make sure that you are doing this at your own risk and you have to get financial advise before you making the move. It is very hard to evaluate if something is fit for the purpose without testing the waters, hence you have to tread carefully.
If you like these focus points or not, please comment your views.
