It is exciting to see software development velocity hit the main stage as companies realize that developers and their productivity are becoming the most critical resource of a company. Companies of all sizes unanimously agree that an investment in software velocity is critical to staying competitive.
Software development is still young and we can expect to see the tooling to help developers create better software will continue to advance.
Heavybit's community of developer-focused entrepreneurs, advisors and investors weigh in on what excites them most about the future of software development:
1. It is just getting started
We're only in the first, maybe second, inning of a platform shift from monolithic to distributed application and systems architectures. In 2015 we've seen the emergence of some standards (open container initiative and cloud native foundation amongst others) and best practices and I think that will go a very long way in 2016 in terms of unlocking real business value.
Lenny Pruss
Principal, Redpoint Ventures
2. The "Creation of Things" to become more accessible
A number of factors are converging to make the creation of things (via software) more accessible and attainable to more people. Thrilled to see the barrier to learning the language of code more accessible and for the continued of advancement of software to be built for the purpose of making other software usable by people who don't (yet) know the language of code.
Justin Johnson
VP of Developer Advocacy, Keen IO
3. The power a small team of developers will have at their fingertips
The power small teams have today is amazing and it's only going to get easier and easier. Developers will be able to do more than ever by taking advantage of powerful APIs that are backed by rock solid distributed systems and open source projects that are rapidly changing how to view software development and infrastructure management.
Justin Johnson
VP of Developer Advocacy, Keen IO
4. Containers to attack the development of software
I have seen a number of tools start to spring up that are trying to tackle building up a development environment. At the moment, these tools do a good job of being able to build an environment but still feel slightly heavyweight.
Ian Saunders
CTO and Co-Founder, BillForward
5. The commoditization of machine learning and other AI techniques
Machine learning techniques generate a tremendous amount of buzz at the moment but most non-practitioners struggle to define their capabilities, limitations and implementation details. As the software and services to enable it become more widespread there will be a lot of disillusionment around its failings but for many developers it will move out of the data science black box and be more easily applied.
Cliff Moon
CEO and Co-Founder, Opsee
6. Developer Experience to continue to evolve and improve
Thrilled to see the enormous potential of continuous delivery to allow developers to iterate faster and deliver more value to end users. What was state of the art now looks dated compared to lightning-fast newcomers. By breaking down the wall between developer and operations, faster feedback cycles are possible. End users can be the ultimate judge of what really works (and what doesn't).
Edith Harbaugh
CEO and Co-Founder, LaunchDarkly
7. Different choices to build your product on
Just looking at the Hadoop ecosystem, there are so many tools to choose from. This is overwhelming: which EC2 instance to use? Which NoSQL database? Which distribution of Hadoop, and which programming language for my next API server? More developers will turn to high-quality 3rd party services to help them fight the paralysis of choice.
Hiro Yoshikawa
CEO and Co-Founder, Treasure Data
8. Distributed software development to go mainstream
Distributed systems are more flexible, scale better, and – let's be honest – are more fun to work on as engineeers. As of this year, we can say that they're accessible, too. This is going to make engineers and their employers more efficient as they iterate more quickly and spend less of their time trapped in fossilized, monolithic systems.
Ben Sigelman
Co-Creator of Google's Dapper distributed tracing system
9. The wave of consumer-ready products and public adoption of IoT
Excites me to see companies move beyond the concepts and theories of IoT and actually ship products that consumers can use in their daily lives. APIs are already enabling early IoT products like smart homes and wearables, so the next wave will bring more challenges and opportunities to businesses' infrastructure and services they rely on to power these products reliably.
Neil Mansilla
VP of Developer Relations, Runscope
10. Basic constructs of software development to be challenged even more
Logging has been pretty much the same over the last 20 years and it excites me that with new tools, you're able to stop using log files for debugging. When something bad happens in your application, you're able to see the exact state and variable values that caused the error. You get an alert in Slack, with the steps that led to the error and then you're able to open it and see its full analysis. Two clicks and immediate results that previously would have taken hours and sometimes even weeks to produce through traditional logging.
Tal Weiss
CEO, Takipi
Malia Powers is PR Manager for Heavybit
