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!

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!

Technologies You Can't and Won't Miss in 2013

With the new year welcomed in around the world, here at Nerdability we wanted to highlight some of the tools and frameworks we have followed / used in 2012, which we think will continue to grow and have a strong 2013.

The Meteorjs framework / application platform made a big splash in the technology ocean this year when the group behind it received a ton of funding ($11.2m) to focus on developing the open source project. Meteor is great for building responsive web applications and components that run in a modern distributed environment. Meteor is based around the concept of smart packages, offering bundles of functionality that can be added to your application. These smart packages  help keep things nice and lightweight and also offer functionality that you would spend way to long making yourself. However Meteorjs is in what they are calling early preview, so things will be changing and if you want to run the latest version your application will require updates and changes to keep up with new Meteor releases. Also we would say Meteor is an advanced framework, and you will need to have a grasp of the underlying technologies (Node.js / HTML 5) to really get the most out of it. We think 2013 will see Meteor make a deep impact, so why not give it a try by following their quick start guide and looking through some examples here?

jClarity have just launched their first JVM performance tuning tool focused on garbage collection log analysis called Censum. Censum tries to solve your GC and memory nightmares, which we all know can be a very long winded process! From what we have seen so far jClarity seem to be on top of the needs of developers wanting easy to interpret information about what is happening under the hood of the JVM. What we really like about Censum is the fact it can be used in any organisation and comes in at a very reasonable price point. Also jClarity is run by three Java heavy hitters, Ben Evans, Kirk Pepperdine and Martijn Verburg, so we are sure that there will be much more to look forward to over 2013.

The NerdAbility team have really enjoyed using the Twitter Bootstrap framework over the past year while working on NerdAbility and other projects. The Twitter Bootstrap framework has really grown in popularity in 2012, and there are now so many kick ass add-ons that supplement the already vast Bootstrap features. A great list is provided by @bootstraphero here. If you haven't tried the framework yet then check out some examples. 

In December (2012) we moved over our Git hosting to BitBucket from CloudBees. We made this decision due to the fact there is now a very similar interface to GitHub, with issue tracking, code reviews and a smart desktop client (SourceTree). Even though many are saying BitBucket has simply cloned GitHubs features, BitBucket is free for the first five users with unlimited repos and has a reasonable price plan starting at $10 for 10 users. For a small team this is a great freebie! While we have a small team and a small number of repositories we are quite happy with using BitBucket. It seems that when choosing between GitHub and BitBucket it will be down to brand or price plan preference. GitHub charges by the number of private repo's, BitBucket by the number of users. We expect BitBucket's popularity to grow among small teams looking to keep costs down while still getting some great features.

 

While neither of these frameworks are new in 2012, the last year has seen some big releases for both Grails and Play frameworks. They have both passed the 2.0 milestones and continue to go from strength to strength.

We are excited by what Typesafe are doing with the Play framework and the move towards Scala. We have seen some great examples of how you can use the framework and Scala to write precise and elegant code that is just not possible with Java. Also Typesafe have had a sizeable amount ($14m) of investment this year, and the Spring legend Rod Johnson has joined as a director. We like the approach Typesafe are taking with the 'Typesafe Stack' which should help keep the various technologies focused.

The team at SpringSource have also been very busy with Grails. Behind the scenes Grails 2.2 is running Groovy 2.0 and is still built on Spring. Additionally the plugin repository is ever growing and we are now seeing many well established add-ons. This makes Grails an attractive framework, and we expect it to continue to grow in usage in enterprises and startups.

Here at NerdAbility we will be working hard in 2013 to keep improving the site. We are working on many new integrations for your profile, so in 2013 you will be able to show off even more of the cool tech things you do on-line. Help NerdAbility grow by sharing your profile URL on forums, Twitter, LinkedIn and especially when you are applying for jobs. There is no better way to stand out than showing that you are an awesome developer in and outside of work!

Come check us out today and signup for a free profile. You can then connect to sites like StackOverflow, GitHub, BitBucket, Google Code, Geeklist and have all the awesome stuff you do shown on your NerdAbility profile.