What’s Next in Software Development? Our 2024 Predictions Based on the Topic Devs Crave Today
Our goal at DZone continues to be the developer’s go-to source for all relevant software engineering information. To make sure our content, articles, and resources are all valuable and progressive, we prioritize staying ahead in this dynamic tech landscape.
To make sure we’re keeping our audience satisfied with relevant topics, we looked back on 2023 trends to understand top interests, themes, and categories. We also pay attention to who our readers are, where they’re located, what industry they’re in, and what their jobs are. We use this same information and engagement metrics to predict 2024 topics based on our developer community interests.
Let’s dive into what we’ve learned this past year and what we expect in 2024.
2023 Trend Recap
According to our 2023 community survey, 89% of our audience seek professional development through online communities like DZone. This tells us there’s a need for content like ours. That same study told us 76% of our average visitors identify themselves as either very satisfied or satisfied with DZone content and articles.
But if we want to get into detail about what resonates best and drives high engagement, we have to look at an overview of popular topics on DZone and the wider developer community. With the vast majority of our audience being in information technology, we had over 9 million visitors in 2023.
And in looking at 2023 overall, we found that the highest interest areas included Java, JSON, microservices, code search, and Git. Coding from a holistic point-of-view, from programming language preferences (Java), to code management and version control (Git), and finally navigating and understanding code (Code Search) tells us how software development teams collaborate efficiently to build enterprise-level applications. Finally, the developer’s interest in microservices architecture and Kubernetes (which falls in our top 10 audience interests) shows how today’s software development practices are aligning to the needs of modern, distributed, and cloud-native applications. Collectively, these areas of interest demonstrate that the DZone reader is focused on technologies and practices that enhance productivity, maintainability, and scalability.
That directly lines up with the overall tech market insights that prove security, emerging technologies, software engineering, IT management, and product development are all key interests for our audience. Some topics that increased in search and interest volume over the year were homomorphic encryption, velcro, and Google optimize. In that same boat, the top topics with a decreasing interest were enterprise mobility suite, software licensing, and sourcegraph.
What this information tells us is the interest of our readers aligns well with the market interest with some differences. As time goes on, there are notable trends in technology content that directly reflect what’s happening in the world. This can include programming languages, privacy and security, and new tools like generative AI. Keeping up with this ever changing landscape requires you to also monitor other online communities that host forum discussions or even social media.
Software Development Predictions for 2024
It should be a priority for anyone, but especially developers, to stay up to date on emerging technologies. Developers want to know what cutting-edge technologies are gaining traction in and around their respective industries. They typically rely on sources like DZone or other communities to learn more about these emerging technologies. This way, they’re able to begin their individual training or exposure with the product or software.
Going into 2024, there will be a continuing evolution of popular languages, policies, and frameworks that’ll require educational resources for developers to reference and understand. Our audience will want to know what’s happening, where it’s happening, and what it means to them all through simple, clear, and concise content.
Security and privacy was a major topic of interest in 2022, 2023, and no doubt will be one in 2024. There’s an increase in concerns about software security, but there’s also an increase in solutions. A major drive in conversations around software development will be privacy-focused approaches and strategies. Safety, privacy, and accuracy continues to be a major priority for developers.
There’s a lot of speculation around the role generative AI will play in everything, but particularly in software development. According to a survey by SlashData in Q3 of 2023, 80% of developers agree or strongly agree that generative AI will increase their potential and productivity at work. Any conversation about AI in general typically does extremely well in developer communities because it’s such an unregulated technology.
In that same study just mentioned, 61% of architects and 55% of programmers disagree that generative AI will surpass their skills and render their jobs obsolete. So our prediction is conversations around generative AI and how it’ll shape software development will be a major topic of discussion within tech communities and beyond.
The Marketer’s Perspective
It’s critical for B2B and tech marketers to understand these developer trends. Whether you’re reflecting on the previous month, quarter, or year, there’s a lot of valuable information in developer trends that can positively influence upcoming marketing strategies.
Tailoring marketing strategies based on shown and predicted developer interests is a great catapult into successful tech marketing. In our case, we like to visualize which kind of content resonates best with our audience. According to our community survey, 92% of our audience prefer to interact with our articles, 66% enjoy our Refcards, 60% selected Trend Reports, and 52% engaged with events, which can include webinars, virtual roundtable discussions, or fireside chats.
This information is extremely valuable to how we, or any company, should strategize content moving forward. Our audience is telling us exactly what they enjoy interacting with the most and secondly, what kinds of content aren’t getting the engagement we might have anticipated. This way, in the future you can churn out content that’ll directly resonate with your audience in their buying stage and not waste time or resources on content or marketing that isn’t as productive.
In this new age of digital marketing and feeling the need to keep up with it, tech marketers have started implementing and leveraging AI technology in their outreach efforts. Defining how to use AI ethically and purposefully is a new topic that marketers for all industries are learning to navigate.
Bottom Line: What’s Next in Software Development
As broad of a subject as it is, software development will continue to be a trending topic. Young professionals and seasoned experts alike remain interested in engineering, technology advancements, coding languages, and development as a career.
DZone services a range of developers at any level of expertise as a hub for relevant information across the topic. This includes how-to guides, credible advice, thought leadership, and technology updates to help any developer reach their goal. Any given audience can be made up of people from all over the world, across industries, or with a range of job titles, but they can all benefit from one thing: relevant insight that’ll help them strategize and deliver great work and advance in their career.