4 Tech Trends For Developers In 2021
Each year is full of new technological trends that set the direction of the development of the IT industry, the business world, and society in general. The last 12 months have been marked by the evolution of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and the fight against deepfake — these are technologies that are known to most readers. And what breakthrough solutions are waiting for IT specialists in 2021?
New Cloud Services
PaaS (Platform as a service) public cloud services have their advantages, but sometimes it turns out that they also create limitations that are difficult to accept for large-scale solutions. For example, Azure has recently released two new services: Flexible Server and Hyperscale (Citus) for customers for whom a regular database server is not sufficient. The “Flexible” server allows it to be better adapted to the needs of users, and also offers more power and memory. This solution, unlike the Single Server, does not allow the use of Private Link for communication with the base but allows private communication within the Virtual Network. The built-in PgBouncer option is also a big plus. Citus is distinguished by greater efficiency thanks to the use of sharding, i.e. scaling queries to many machines. Its limitation is that it can only have one database.
Both solutions are in the early stages of development, which makes their use difficult. An alternative is to use Azure Templates for this purpose. Each of the mentioned solutions provides greater efficiency and gives the possibility to adjust the database configuration to the needs of a specific solution. They are ideal choices for systems where the speed of processing database queries is of great importance.
Build applications faster based on the JavaScript stack
There are new tools on the market that facilitate the process of building an application based on JavaScript or TypeScript. Deno is a simple and modern JavaScript and TypeScript runtime built-in Rust (application programming language) and using V8 (Google’s JavaScript engine). Dano is a completely new runtime environment built from scratch. Its huge advantage is TypeScript support “out of the box” and by default access to files, network and the environment is disabled, which gives greater security. Deno also includes built-in utilities such as Dependency Inspector and Code Formatter.
NestJS is a server-side Node.js framework written in TypeScript. It integrates the rich Node.js community. NestJS provides ready-to-use application architecture. The mental model for developing NestJS is similar to the server-side version of Angular or the TypeScript version of Spring Boot. NestJS supports protocols such as GraphQL, Websocket, and ORM libraries.
QAOps
QAOps is a relatively new approach that is constantly gaining popularity. It is based on the integration of quality (QA) with the CI / CD chain. QAOps means better communication between team members and enables faster error detection. This makes the software development cycle shorter and smoother. As a result, companies are able to provide better quality software.
The QAOps process may look like this: The change planned for implementation in the next iteration goes through a set of automated tests for a given area. Additionally, once a day, a test environment is set up where all automatic tests are run for control and, if necessary, manual tests. A positive test result gives the green light to implement changes in the production environment. Ideally, the entire process should be fully automated.
Effective tools for remote work
In addition to tools such as Teams and Zoom, new types of remote work products that simulate the presence of the entire team in a conference room are gaining popularity. The best two examples are Miro and Mural. Miro is an online collaborative platform with a digital whiteboard that can be used e.g. for brainstorming. Miro also includes an integrated library of icons, templates, mockups, and more. Users can also upload files, images, and documents from their computer or Google Drive.
Mural.co is a virtual workspace for everyone who wants to exchange ideas at the same time. The tool is similar to Miro and acts like a huge zoomable wall where users can use virtual sticky notes as well as add images, videos, text, and other elements. The biggest advantage of Mural.co is a rich base of predefined templates that can be used for many typical design, UX and analytical tasks (including various types of tables, matrices, diagrams and ready-to-work models and “canvas”).
