Software developers should be excited about the potential this year. The introduction of modern tools, innovations and frameworks will provide more opportunities for greater efficiency and much more satisfaction from working as a programmer in 2023.
Yoav Abrahami, chief architect and supervisor Velo in Wix Codetold why he sees such bright prospects for 2023.
“I see the best year, but I can’t guarantee that there won’t be even better years in the future,” he said. “I think there are a lot of really exciting things that are changing the way the world code.”
To this end, Abrahami believes that several things are happening simultaneously. One of them is the long-term trend of switching to major platforms, which continues in full force. Another is more innovation that comes from bringing designers into the development team. Bridging the gap between designer and developer is important, he noted.
6 predictions of developers for 2023
Looking at the future through the eyes of a software developer, Abrahami sees a fantastic year for the developer. Here are his six predictions for what to expect:
- Developers will be able to solve more complex projects at scale.
- Collaboration between developers and designers will be more effective and inspiring.
- Cloud platforms and low-code tools are consolidating, offering a range of new products, including websites, web apps and mobile apps.
- The trend towards more managed environments will continue, offering new and better managed services.
- AI will clean up code and free up developers to do more creative work.
- Developer talent will be more decentralized than ever before, which means more diversity and a broader reach in end products.
If the predictions require you to be convincing reasons and as read on for Abrahami’s more in-depth explanation of his vision for the developer community.
DevOps has closed the gap
This history of the development community is marked by constant disputes between “systems people” and software developers. Often developers delivered software that didn’t meet expectations, and then it was the systems people’s job to make it work, causing more friction.
“We solved this contradiction by introducing the idea of DevOps. He shifted responsibility for failures caused by system changes back to the developers to become one team,” Abrahami noted.
Another approach that helps empower developers is to have both in the same workspace, he suggested. His company uses this team building method for software development.
Wix’s solution: Let the designer take responsibility for the design and create a single team that includes both the designer and the developer. All participants receive the same tools.
“In the same environment, the designer designs the UI and the developers write the code to work with the UI. The reality is that 99.9% of teams will choose more modern tools, as happened with DevOps — and this revolution will happen for developers. It’s happening now and we’re seeing it simply because projects are being delivered at a rate we never imagined. It’s so amazing to see that,” he exclaimed.
Delve into the developer environment
My conversation with Yoav Abrahami continued with these questions and answers
What enables developers to tackle more complex projects at scale?
Yoav Abrahami: No one who was added to the team is against the joint work of developers and designers. This means you can work much faster and be much more productive. But beyond that, we will continue to move to more managed environments. This means that you will be much more efficient in terms of all your software.
What is changing in the development community?
Abraham: You have to remember what managed software actually is. It’s always a trade. You trade your freedom of choice, such as which service works.
Years ago, you worked on your own machines and chose your OS. Today you don’t even do that. Years ago you were building servers and trying to figure out what framework to use. Today, you can use multiple lists and not really care what happens under them.
Looking at what we have today, we even take it one step further. You don’t even choose your external framework. We provide you with an out-of-the-box solution where your ID, development environment, database, back-end, and front-end all work together.
How common is this innovation? Is Wix in the minority with these approaches?
Abraham: We are not the only ones who do this. This is happening across the industry. You can see more and more solutions with online development environments without configuring the required platforms.
To see what I’m talking about, consider how long it would take to create a call center where thousands of volunteers can sign up, go through a verification process, and then be able to call people and ask if they need help with medicine, food, or any other during covid. It will probably take months, even two years, for normal construction.
We built one in two weeks. In a month, 700 volunteers used this system. He used Twilio for telephony, an off-the-shelf solution available for the user interface for two different applications. This is where we are moving to be much faster.
I’d say if you’re trying to build products for months these days, you’re doing something wrong.
How impactful is the use of cloud platforms and low-code/no-code tools?
Abraham: The idea of low code is to make you much faster in terms of what you build. You don’t need to write all the code and get it on the main platform. You just add a little bit, a few lines of code here and there, and we have a solution.
But then low code can also be a failure when you want to do something like compare 600 coding steps and you want to change something. How do you check this? How to verify this change? How do you know the impact? How do you generally see the change between one version and another?
How does artificial intelligence affect what’s happening in the development community right now?
Abraham: Honestly, no one knows. But we know it will ruin everything. This is reality.
Let’s say you ask the best artificial intelligence to write code for you, and that code is part of the software to run your train. Who do you blame when that train crashed because of a bug? Is it the fault of artificial intelligence? Is it the fault of the AI manufacturer? Is it the fault of the person who wrote the buggy code the AI was trained on?
All of these questions boil down to one big problem: How will it work? We dont know! But we understand that AI coding has potential.
Are you looking forward to AI as a friendly tool for developers?
Abraham: I see huge potential in AI. We look at quality, and there are two things about quality that we don’t know how to measure. We don’t know how to measure usability, and we don’t know how to measure correctness. Now AI can give us the answers, and I might be able to create an AI that will give me that.
Where do you see all this potential?
Abraham: Consider the ease of use of an application programming interface (API). This is much easier to do than to measure whether you can try to write code that solves your next big problem. Now this is just one example. Another example you can think of is AI.
When should I zoom in or out? When should I perform failover recovery? When should I stop one service because it is causing problems with other services? And so on.
Perhaps all these things can be automated with AI. Automation can prevent faulty software from being shipped through early bug detection. So there is a lot of potential. There are many things we can do today with AI to change the way we as developers work. Things we trust about AI, like tools to help you do what you do.
Another example is semantic search. Often you fall into a category, especially in larger organizations. You’re pretty sure someone in the company has done what you’re looking for, but you don’t know how to search for it because you lack the exact syntax.
