Sunday 6 January 2013

Why it's Great to be a Developer in 2013

At NerdAbility we have been chatting about how great it will be to be a developer in 2013 and wanted to share some of our predictions, to help keep you one, two or even three steps ahead of the pack!

Startup Life


With the London startup scene still booming we think that the hunt for the best developers will really intensify and the need to stand out from the masses will continue to be a key factor in joining the hottest tech startups and SME's. Also (surprisingly) we expect to see companies moving away from CV's and resumes and relying more on GitHub and StackOverflow for screening candidates. There are also companies offering to test coders for you (at a cost of course), one that we think looks interesting is Codility. They offer online coding tests that you can customise and support a range of languages. Codility also offers the ability for developers to self certify by completing a monthly challenge.

We expect increased collaboration between startups to maximise their visibility as the UK economy improves in 2013. Also don't be shocked to see more collaborative / integrated services launched between startups and the SME's (maybe even enterprise?!). Take a look at the Argos and Shutl (delivery startup) collaboration for products ordered on www.argos.co.uk as an example of a big business working with a startup / SME. Hopefully this will lead to lots of exciting opportunities for developers!

Argos Shutl Collaboration Example

Call Me Maybe? 


Will 2013 be the year of the meetup? We think so! Well tech meetups have been round for a long time, but we think 2013 will see their traction deepen as sites like meetup.com increase the accessibility and visibility of the great events being hosted around the UK. We hope to see companies encouraging their staff to get involved, present and share insights into their technical operations and innovations! Many events also have slots for new presenters in what are being called lightning talks. These are short presentations, demo's or talks that are the perfect way to share your thoughts, cool things you have made and get experience with an audience. So get involved and give a talk in 2013!

Is 2013 the year the world learns to code? 


Well the site CodeYear sure tried to make it happen in 2012! CodeYear received big support from around the web and even got NYC's Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed up! We think the best thing to come out of this initiative was the Codecademy platform. Here you can follow a range of programming courses for free and record your progress. This is a great alternative to sites like Code School that charge a monthly fee. It's worth noting with code school you do get access to great video content and the courses cover the latest technologies in depth. We think that the technical education space will continue to expand in 2013 as interactive learning technologies mature, which is great news for developers and students alike. We hope to see more people and groups (open source contributors, enterprises, developers) getting involved creating material for these platforms!

Engagement!


We predict your online and offline technology engagement will matter even more to companies this year, so now really is the time to start building your online portfolio and growing your engagement with the community. We thoroughly recommend joining StackOverflow and getting involved with the Q&A, uploading / open sourcing your interesting hobby projects to GitHub or BitBucket and blogging about any of the tricky problems you have solved. Also go along to interesting meetups and talks, with many of the best listed on meetup.com. If you are in London why not check out the London Java Community for a range of great events.

Remember a great place to show all that you are involved with is NerdAbility.com. We integrate with GitHub, StackOverflow, Geeklist, BitBucket, Google Code and all RSS / Atom blogs, so come on over and create your free profile now!

1 comment:

  1. Really great piece put up in smooth manner. Quite helpful insight to know about.

    ReplyDelete