Surprise, surprise - six months have already passed since previous edition of Technology Radar. Obviously no-one says it has to be treated as an absolute & accurate snapshot of reality - but if you check the past reports, it clearly visible that they were not that far from truth.

The latest version may be found here (PDF) or here (web).

I'll focus on what's new & what I've found particularly interesting. To makes things easier to follow, I'll use the original topic split.

Techniques

  • Inverse Conway Maneuver (Trial) - Conway's Law gets a lot of love recently & this clearly has to get reflected in trend diagrams like Tech Radar. I have my own thoughts on that subject, but I guess it deserves a separate blog post.
  • Real User Monitoring (Trial) - AKA in-browser tracing (& sending collected batches to the server) - I totally agree: modern SPA applications require different, more sophistated ways of monitoring - sooner or later such a needed has appeared for every application I was working on in past 2 years.
  • Event Sourcing (Trial) - this is not a new entry, but it has been bumped up from "Assess" category. It's not a surprise really - ES works great with functional languages (& their immutability) and modern approach for building distributed systems (for instance: reactive programming) in a truly scalable way.
  • DevOps as a Team (Hold) - VERY, VERY interesting. If you're reading my blog from time to time, you may have seen a topic post about that quite recently. I'm not that eager to say that DevOps as a Team is an absolute no-no, but I can't deny strong pros of distributing DevOps duties between actual development teams.
  • Testing as a separate organization (Hold) - HELLYES. Amen. Nothing to be added here.

Tools

  • Flyway (Trial) - I've picked this one, because ... it's quite exotic for me :) but the key point is that there's whole row of DevOps tools ruling in Tools section: Ansible, Docker, Packer, Foreman & many others. Awesome :D
  • Pact & Pacto (Trial) - never heard of these two. It's not a surprise, because they come from Ruby world (and this is not really my kind of story), nevertheless they are worth mentioning, because they aim a particularily interesting topic: testing service in distributed, loosely coupled IT landscapes. Definitely a topic worth deeper consideration.
  • Protractor (Trial) - I couldn't skip my favourite test tool for Angular.js, could I? :) Protractor is a big step forward from angular-scenario, I use it personally & I find it a model of how client-side test tools should look alike.
  • Consul (Assess) - I've made a separate blog post about it: I love the idea of configuration server as a way to decouple software so I will definitely be tracking what's happening with that project.

Platforms

  • DigitalOcean (Assess) - the recent cloud hosting star for developers: fast, cheap, flexible & sexy. I've already recommended it to some people - hopefully it wasn't premature.
  • CMS as a Platform (Hold) - it didn't change for last 6 months, but I find it important, so let me go through that again: there's nothing wrong in using CMS, but when you're using CMS as an application platform to develop custom applications, YOU'RE DOING IT ALL WRONG. Yes, I DO refer to SharePoint.
  • OSGi (Hold) - oh, that was a surprise for me. Quite recently I've heard a lot of good stuff about OSGi, how well it works and how it helps in separating the concerns & building modular solutions. It seems that I'll have to dive a bit more to make my own opinion on that.

Languages & Frameworks

  • Go language (Adopt) - you can't miss it really, Go (Golang?) gets more & more popular and it has already proved itself in several known and widely adopted projects (like Docker). If you're looking for a modern language for server-side system development: you should consider Go.
  • Reactive Extensions (Adopt) - don't get me wrong: I love both reactive appllications & Rx as a way to write reactive code, but ... somehow it's always easier, faster, safer & more readable to NOT use Rx than to use Rx ... #puzzled
  • AngularJS (Trial) - #flex #flex #flex #likeaboss On more serious note - Google did awesome job with starting this project and it goes as well as it possibly could go. Community is growing rapidly, adoption gets higher & higher plus the number of companion libraries skyrockets. What one could wish more for?

P.S. Where the hell is Clojure? :D

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