Entelect’s Retrospectives
With technology ever-changing, it’s always good to take a step back, and look at a snapshot of where we are right now. We look back at the approaches, languages, frameworks, tools and everything else we need to create quality software that has delivered real business value. Doing this each year allows us to identify trends in technologies and their adoptions - retrospection!
Towards the end of each year we ask our 600 professionals to complete a “State of Technology” survey, asking a variety of questions from the tools and processes we put to use, to some fun and interesting practices. We have spent the year working across multiple industries and tech stacks, in both local and global organisations. This has equipped us with a plethora of knowledge and experience to derive and share meaningful insights via the survey.
Entelect focuses on building large-scale, robust enterprise software utilising best industry practices and fit-for-purpose technologies. We deliver end-to-end solutions by considering all facets involved in solving real-world business problems that help organisations unlock potential. Learn more about how we take organisations From Here to There.
Here are some industry observations we’ve seen in 2019.
Cloud adoption is definitely on the way up, with a number of South African corporates embracing it, no doubt aided by the launching of new local data centres. Microsoft Azure launched in the South African North and West regions, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) is expected to launch in Cape Town in the first half of 2020. This helps fuel the DevOps movement to automate integration and deployment processes, with containerisation and orchestration continuing to be a big theme of 2019.
Appetite for an API economy is still on the rise, especially with financial institutions looking to grow business-to-business partnerships by exposing some of their data and functionality. API managers and gateways are becoming commonplace with controlled access to underlying (micro)services.
The focus on the end-users has led to a big drive in the fields of customer and user experience (CX & UX), with more and more projects kicking off with the goal of ensuring user needs coupled with long-term strategic vision are front and centre.
With respect to coding languages being utilised, expect no big surprises with C#, Java, JavaScript and SQL still dominating the industry. Kotlin and Swift are of course now the languages to use when starting out new native Android and iOS applications respectively (over Java and Objective-C). We do expect to see a bit more usage of Go, Scala and Python in 2019 going through to 2020.
Single-page applications are becoming the norm for web development, with React probably making gains on Angular as the framework of choice for new projects. TypeScript of course has always been popular after Angular took the baton from AngularJS, but is recently drawing more favour from the rest of the JavaScript community, including usage with React and Node.js.
With support and maturity increasing for Progressive Web Apps, they have been growing in popularity with Apple seemingly also turning the corner after historically not embracing them as much as Android. Native mobile development is the preference in general for consumer focused products of larger organisations who can support multiple/hybrid app teams. In terms of hybrid and cross-platform offerings, React Native seems to be the most favoured over Cordova/PhoneGap, with some interest spiking in Google’s Flutter.
In the data space, data lakes are being utilised more and more, while PowerBI is being embraced by more organisations over Qlik and Tableau tools. This year augmented analytics (with the use of enabling technologies such as AI and Machine Learning) has been making insights more prevalent and increasing data literacy across organisations.
Being in a fast-paced environment, it is important to keep up with the latest trends and skills required to deliver quality software. Here’s looking forward to an exciting 2020!
- Greg Schroder. Manager: Solutions Architecture at Entelect