How The Dev World Will Change In 2017: Top 5 Predictions

It’s hard to think of an industry that changes faster than IT, and it looks like 2017 will be no exception to this rule. Developers will be asked to wrap their heads around new technologies, new platforms, and new methodologies. Here are the five forces experts think will shape the dev landscape in the coming year.

Move Over Native Apps

If you’ve never considered web apps, now’s the time. Gartner says that mobile apps aren’t delivering the ROI that brands had hoped for, with many of them struggling just to acquire downloads. “By 2019, 20% of brands will abandon their mobile apps,” the firm says.

The problem Gartner was pointing at is easy to recognize. A native app has to be found in an app store, downloaded, kept up to date and given space on someone’s phone. For a brand that a customer visits a few times a year, that’s a lot to ask. A web app, by contrast, opens from a link and works on any device with a browser.

For developers, that means the skills that matter most for many projects are the web basics: HTML, CSS, JavaScript and a good understanding of how sites behave on small screens and slow connections. A well-built mobile website can do much of what a brand’s app was meant to do, without the download.

Goodbye Bimodal

“In early 2016, many CIOs fell for the false promise of a bimodal strategy,” says Forrester Research, and it expects this will reverse itself in 2017. The idea that IT could be split in half and run at two different speeds, with two fundamentally different approaches, has proven unmanageable for most organizations.

Bimodal IT meant keeping one team on the slow, careful work of running core systems, while a second team moved quickly on new digital projects. On paper, it protected the systems a business can’t afford to break. In practice, the two halves had to share data, budgets and people, and the fast team kept running into the slow one.

What replaced it, in most organizations, was an attempt to make the whole of IT faster and safer at the same time, through practices like automated testing, smaller and more frequent releases, and closer work between developers and operations staff.

Older Skills Remain Crucial

Despite the massive trends of IoT, AI, VR, and cloud, Robert Half Technology says that the skills most likely to earn devs a boost in salary are the ones that have been in demand for years. Specifically: ASP, C#, Java, and .NET, which could deliver a seven percent salary increase this year.

That makes sense once you think about where the money is. Banks, insurers, governments and large retailers run huge systems written in Java and .NET, and those systems don’t get rewritten just because a newer language is fashionable. Someone has to maintain them, connect them to new services and move them to the cloud, and those people are hard to find.

Can’t Stop The Blockchain

The buzz around blockchain, the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, started to grow in 2016 and will become louder still in 2017. With applications in the financial sector being the obvious starting point, the technology will also find a home in the IoT as it provides a secure and trusted way to share transactional data between devices and companies. “By 2022 a blockchain based business will exist with a value of $10 billion,” according to Gartner.

Finance did turn out to be where blockchain made its biggest mark. In January 2024, U.S. regulators approved 11 spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds from major asset managers including BlackRock and Fidelity, bringing the oldest cryptocurrency into ordinary brokerage accounts. The IoT uses that seemed so promising in 2016 have been much slower to appear.

The Future Is Open

Open source’s allure will strengthen this year, thanks to OpenStack. With its open tools, technologies and broad, vibrant developer communities, Forrester predicts that “In 2017, we will see the vast majority of development organizations embrace open source/OpenStack.”

OpenStack is open-source software that lets an organization run its own cloud, with computing, storage and networking that can be handed out on demand, much like a public cloud provider does.

How the Predictions Held Up

The broad bet on open source was right. Open source became the default for much of modern development, from programming languages to databases to the tools used to run cloud applications.

OpenStack’s own path was more complicated. As TechCrunch put it, after years of hype the project “hit a bit of a wall in 2016, as the market started to consolidate,” and found its niche in the telecom industry rather than across every development team. In October 2020, the OpenStack Foundation announced it would rename itself the Open Infrastructure Foundation starting in 2021, reflecting the projects it had taken on beyond OpenStack.

The other predictions follow a familiar pattern. The direction was mostly right, but the change was slower and messier than the forecasts suggested. Brands didn’t give up on apps all at once, older languages kept paying the bills, and blockchain’s big moment came in finance, through regulated products, rather than across the IoT.

For developers, the lasting lesson from this list is a practical one. New technology gets the headlines, but solid skills in widely used languages and a habit of learning open tools have stayed valuable through every one of these shifts.