Blockchain
What better way to start the year, than seeing the blockchain technologies and its respective speculative prices blow off the roof.
Not only that, we are also starting to see big enterprises starting to realize the potential of the emerging technology. We already have IOTA blockchain being used to track Covid-19 test results at Frankfurt airport, VET being widely used in supply management and I could list many other examples.
I think some reasons why blockchain will trend in 2021 are the following:
- A better, faster and safer alternative to money transfer with lower fees
- Simple and easy to use
- Decentralized - helps prevent scandals, privacy violations, etc.
- Easy to integrate in existing tech stack, like AI and IoT
- Easy to create and sell new digital products
- High interoperability
- Can be used for digital identity
Machine learning / Artificial Intelligence
After I finished my masters degree a few years back, I was really considering doing a PhD at ETH about Artificial Intelligence. I am really astonished by the broad horizons that this technology can bring to our lives and I feel like there are lots of high value use cases that require further research. Autonomous driving is one popular use case with an increasing trend that I’m particularly interested in and fascinated by what Tesla, among others, are doing.
AI-based chatbots
If something is popular in 2021 that makes website owners and users upbeat, it is undoubtedly AI-powered chatbots. The introduction of bots to the websites has massively impacted the user engagement, and some statistics show that almost 90% of companies have implemented chatbots on their websites. Top web app development companies have chatbots implemented on their websites and recommend their customers the same to take their business to the next level.
Meta-frameworks
In 2021 one framework is not enough anymore. Thus, we need meta-frameworks to enhance the developer experience. I am really willing to try out Next.js and N**t family of frameworks, since I haven’t touched React for a while now and would like to catch up in that regard.
Gatsby has also been a force in the industry over the past few years, so I am really excited to put it on test for some of my personal projects, possibly also in combination with Drupal 9.
The cloud
This is nothing completely enw for 2021 per se, but I just started learning more about it now. I remember manually deploying apps on servers in my first student job. It was a completely manual process and prone to errors, but also didn’t scale at all. Cloud computing and AWS are nice skills to have nowadays, so I am really looking forward to dive deeper into this topic this year.
New frameworks
I think that we, as software developers must never stop learning and adapting to the changing technologies. Especially in the past few years, things are moving at the speed of sound in the “frontend world” with all the new JS frameworks and styleguides, that it can feel overwhelming. Because I really hate the feeling of stagnating, I’m excited about the newer performance-focused family of frontend frameworks. Svelte seems like a good fit in today’s stack, and functional programming with the super tiny 1kB framework Hyperapp seems intriguing.
Remote work
Last but not least, although in unfortunate circumstances, I am really happy that the World realized that remote work is not easy, but definitely possible. Although it requires a lot of self-discipline, organisation and motivation, I am happy to see that the tooling, team structuring and communication are improving significantly. I personally would love to return to working in an office someday, but I think that the movement to allow more remote work is an overall positive.
Conclusion
Although some of these technologies are not completely new, I will try to learn as much as possible and write frequently about my progress. Let 2021 be full of exploring, enhancing our perspectives and broadening our horizons.
