Developer Trends
Analysing developer and programming trends on survey data using Plotly.
Programmers fight a battle to keep their skills relevant. Each year brings new methodologies, frameworks, and languages to learn. Within the context of a changing industry, it’s important to find out which skills, tools, and trends are worthy of time.
At the time of writing this post, the world is suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has a considerable impact on everyone’s life. Many have managed to work using various remote tools and technologies. But jobs of many are affected due to this epidemic. Yet, people are following their responsibilities and are now aware of the consequences. Companies are taking the necessary steps to prevent the loss caused by the pandemic.
Few questions that we are going to inspect and try to answer.
— What role does MOOCs play?
— How were developers using the technologies before 2020?
— Which programming languages are most common?
— Which countries have highest number of developers?
— Are programmers changing their tech stack?
For this, let’s analyze the developer trends for the past two years (2018–2019). The data used is Stack Overflow Survey Data. Stack Overflow conducts a survey every year for the visitors on the site. The respondents were from more than 100 countries and various programming backgrounds. The year 2018 and 2019 had around 90k response.
To view the data visit below,
Where are the top respondents of the developer profile from? 🧐
We can observe that most of the respondents who belong to a programming background are mostly from the United States. The top 10 countries include the USA followed by India, Germany, UK, Canada, France, Brazil, Poland, Australia, and the Netherlands.
Observe how Germany has grown developer respondents from the year 2018 to 2019. It passed the number of UK developers, which shows a decrease from the year 2018 to 2019. Developer responses in India show a considerable drop of 2%.
The United States of America has almost double the respondents as compared to India. It has made a 1 % increase from 2018 to 2019.
Types of Developer 🧑💻
The developer roles have increased with technological advancements. These are in a wide range. Automation, Cloud Technologies, DevOps, and Data Science are the current buzz words. These have also brought significant changes in the business.
Backend Developers and Frontend Developers continue to be on top of the table. Full Stack development role has shown a significant increase from last year. This might overtake the Web Developers (Front End + Back End). DevOps, Data Scientist, Data Analyst roles are also gaining more attention among people.
Academic Researchers show a great increase from last year. This group includes Deep Learning Researchers and Machine Learning Practitioners.
But, Marketing and Sales professionals, continue to show the least percentage for the years 2018 and 2019. Also, a new category added in the year 2019, Data Engineers, which is an important role within a company.
Top 5 countries and their developers 🙋♀️
From the year 2018 to 2019 the percentage of Web Developers in many countries has dropped. The Full-Stack role, however, continues to grow in countries like the USA, Germany, UK, and India. Also, notice an increase in roles such as DevOps.
The majority of roles comprise of Full Stack Developers, Front End and Back End developer. These are highly correlated with each other. These profiles are followed by developers of mobile in the USA. Similarly followed by developers of desktop or enterprise applications in India.
The male respondents continue to dominate the percentage from the year 2018–2019. But there is a significant increase in the category ‘Others’. These include people from the LGBT community.
Observe a decrease in the Student community for each country. There is an increase in academic researchers from the year 2018 to 2019.
Programming Languages 🤖
Technology has completely changed the way companies collaborate. The increase in front end and back end developers proves the high use of Javascript, HTML, CSS. From 2018 to 2019 Javascript is the most used language followed by HTML/CSS, SQL, and Python.
During the epidemic, technological advancements will help various businesses. Recently, the programming language COBOL which is 60 years old, was used by many companies.
C# is gaining popularity and has overtaken traditional C and C++ languages. In the year 2019 Typescript usage overtook the C language. Python and Java have almost a similar percentage of developers using them, and both have a high growth rate.
Training and Courses 👨🏫
Technology is changing very quickly. Within a few years, we have experienced advancements in technologies. This makes it almost necessary for all the programmers to keep themselves updated. Nowadays, many take online courses to fulfill the need. Some prefer onsite training with mentors. Also, there are some programmers that teach themselves, which almost every programmer does.
The use of MOOCs and Bootcamp has significant growth. The online platform(MOOCs) has grown recently. Common platforms are — Udacity, Coursera, DataCamp, Code Academy, and many more. They provide good material and training to the developers, students, professionals, etc.
The developers who teach themselves without any course have decreased in number. Many are now shifting towards more trusted resources. Participation in the opensource contributions, hackathons, and coding competition continues to be fun.
Conclusion 😃
We have observed the developer trends in the year 2018 and 2019. The coming years will be challenging.
The results are observational and NOT a complete formal study result. These are just a few questions coined by the past year’s data. In the coming years, programmers will go through a lot. Hence to have an idea of what was happening before, this analysis is performed.
Few of them that adds to the title,
— How will be the developer’s work-style in 2020?
— Will jobs be completely remote-based?
— Are MOOCs going to be more preferred?
— Will the open source contributions increase?
— How automation of processes will affect developers?
Thank you! 😁
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