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2021 State of the Developer Ecosystem

We dive into JetBrains’ findings after they recently released their State of the Developer Ecosystem for 2021 while Michael has the open down pat, Joe wants the old open back, and Allen stopped using the command line.

The full show notes for this episode are available at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode164. Stop by, check it out, and join the conversation.

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Survey Says

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What's your IDE of choice?
  • I prefer a light weight IDE, such as VS Code or Atom.
  • I like a fully functional IDE, like Visual Studio or IntelliJ
  • I like to use editors like VIM and tell others that it's an IDE.
  • I like to use editors like Notepad++ or Sublime, bury myself in plugins, so that it can act like an IDE.
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News

Check out Allen’s Quick Tips!

Why JetBrains?

JetBrains has given us free licenses to give out for years now. Sometimes people ask us what it is that we like about their products, especially when VS Code is such a great (and 100% free) experience…so we’ll tell ya!

  • JetBrains produces (among other things) a host of products that are all based on the same IDEA platform, but are custom tailored for certain kinds of development. CLion for C, Rider for C#, IntelliJ for JVM, WebStorm for front-end, etc. These IDEs support plugins but they come stocked with out-of-the-box functionality that you would have to add via plugins in a generalized Editor or IDE
    • This also helps keep consistency amongst developers…everybody using the same tools for git, databases, formatting, etc
  • Integrated experience vs General Purpose Tool w/ Plugins, Individual plugins allow for a lot of innovation and evolution, but they aren’t designed to work together in the same way that you get from an integrated experience.
  • JetBrains has assembled a great community
    • Supporting user groups, podcasts, and conferences for years with things like personal licenses
    • Great learning materials for multiple languages (see the JetBrains Academy)
    • Community (free) versions of popular products (Android Studio, IntelliJ, WebStorm, PyCharm)
  • Advanced features that have taken many years of investment and iteration (Resharper/Refactoring tools)
  • TL;DR JetBrains has been making great products for 20 years, and they are still excelling because those products are really good!

Survey Results

  • Survey was comprised of 31,743 developers from 183 countries. JetBrains attempted to get a wide swath of diverse responses and they weighted the results in an attempt to get a realistic view of the world. Read more about the methodology
  • What would you normally expect from JetBrain’s audience? (Compare to surveys from StackOverflow or Github or State of JS)
    • JetBrains are mainly known for non-cheap, heavy duty tools so you might expect to see more senior or full time employees than StackOverlow, but that’s not the case…it skews younger
    • Professional / Enterprise (63% full-time, 70.9% on latest Stack Overflow)
    • JetBrains 3-5 vs StackOverflow 5-9 years of experience
    • Education level is similar
    • 71% of respondents develop for web backend!

Key Takeaways

  • JavaScript is the most popular language
  • Python is more popular than Java overall, but Java is more popular as a main language
  • Top 5 languages devs are planning to adopt:
    • Go
    • Kotlin
    • TypeScript
    • Python
    • Rust
  • Top 5 Languages devs learning in 2021:
    • JS
    • Python
    • TS
    • Java
    • Go
  • Languages that fell:
    • Ruby
    • Objective C
    • Scala
  • Top 5 Fastest Growing:
    • Python
    • TypeScript
    • SQL
    • Go
    • Kotlin
  • 71% of respondents develop for web backend
  • Primary programming languages, so much JS!
  • Developer OS:
    • 61% Windows
    • 47% linux
    • 44% macOS

Lifestyle and Fun

  • What sources of information… Podcasts 31%! Glad to see this up there, of course
  • 74% of the respondents use online ad-blocking tools
  • Accounts: Github 84% Reddit…47%?
  • Workplace and Events – pre covid comparisons
  • Video Games are #1 hobby, last year was programming

Databases

  • Used in last 12 Months, Primary…so much MySQL
  • Really cool to see relative popularity by programming language

DevOps

  • How familiar are you with Docker?
  • DevOps engineers are 2x more likely to be architects, 30% more likely to be leads
  • Kubernetes: went from 16% to 29% to 40% to…40%. Is Kubernetes growth stalling?
  • 90% of devs who use k8s have SSD, have above average RAM
  • 53% of hosting is in the cloud? Still moving up, but there’s also a lot of growth with Hybrad
  • AWS has a big lead in cloud services…GCP 2nd!? Let’s speculate how that happened, that’s not what we see in financial reports
  • During development, where do you run and debug your code? (Come to Joe’s skaffold talk!)

Microservices

  • 35% of respondents develop microservices!!!!! Can this be right?
  • Mostly senior devs are doing microservices
  • GraphQL at 14%, coming up a little bit from last year

Miscellaneous

  • How much RAM? (Want more RAM? Be DevOps, Architect, Data Analyst, leads)
  • 79% of devs have SSD? Excellent!
  • How old is your computer? Survey says….2 years? That’s really great.

Testing

  • 75% say tests play an integral role, 44% involved. Not bad…but 44% not involved, huh?
  • 67% Unit tests, yay!

Resources We Like

Tip of the Week

  • The CoRecursive podcast has fantastic interviews with some really interesting people (corecursive.com) Thanks @msuriar. Some highlights:
  • Free audiobook/album from the Software Daily host: Move Fast: How Facebook Builds Software (softwareengineeringdaily.com)
  • Apple has great features and documentation on the different ways to take screenshots in macOS (support.apple.com)
  • Data, Data, Data: Let the data guide your decisions. Not feelings.
  • HTTPie is a utility built in Python that makes it really issue to issue web requests. CURL is great…but it’s not very user friendly. Give HTTPie a shot! (httpie.io)

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