Keeping up with trends

Note: I am in no way, shape or form affiliated with ThoughtWorks.

Continuous learning is a BIG part of working in the IT industry, be it architecture, development or otherwise, things change, and they change fast.

Keeping up with trends can be hard, especially if you don’t work on the forefront of technology, its very easy to settle into a stack and completely loose track of the industry.

With the pace technology is moving, and has always moved, it gets increasingly hard to keep up. This is why to save some time and effort I like to check out the ThoughtWorks radar a couple of times a year (it gets updated roughly every half year.)

The Radar

This is what they say about it

The Radar is a document that sets out the changes that we think are currently interesting in software development — things in motion that we think you should pay attention to and consider using in your projects. It reflects the idiosyncratic opinion of a bunch of senior technologists and is based on our day-to-day work and experiences. While we think this is interesting, it shouldn’t be taken as a deep market analysis.

The radar is divided into 4 categories (Techniques, Tools, Platforms, Languages & Frameworks), each with 4 segments

1. Adopt: “We feel strongly that the industry should be adopting these items”
2. Trial: “Worth pursuing”
3. Assess: “Worth exploring to understand how it could impact your enterprise”
4. Hold: “Proceed with caution”

How I like to use it

Go into any of the 4 categories (Techniques, Tools, Platforms, Languages & Frameworks)

Go under “Trial” or “Adopt” and start looking at these technologies, if something if something peaks your interest dive deeper.

Why bother?

We can only solve problems, within our own context.
Broadening the horizon is critical to solving problems (Thinking outside of the box, as they say). Any and all learning, be it small or big, helps us grow and expand our context.

But it is also a great tool to simply see what going on currently. Often we can get stuck for years doing the same technology stack, and this is a good way to go beyond that, without having to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what is trending yourself.