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News and Resources

News roundup – Google opens Early Access beta testing to more developers

Welcome to DeveloperEconomics’ weekly news roundup. In this edition, Google cancels its modular smartphone project, Apple plans to delete abandoned apps from the App Store and Epic releases a new version of Unreal Engine 4. Read on for the full news rundown.

Google opens Early Access beta testing to more developers

Google has expanded its Early Access beta testing, allowing any developer apply for the program. Previously, Early Access was only available to 29 hand-picked developers, who got to test out their apps with early-adopters (although other devs were given different testing options). Google says the Early Access program generated over 1 million beta installs since launching in May and “demand is only growing.”

Google Search can now look-up content within apps

Google has introduced a new search mode in its Google app that lets users perform in-app searches The “In App” feature currently only works with Gmail, Spotify and YouTube, but will soon feature in-app searching on Facebook Messenger, LinkedIn, Evernote, Gilde, Todoist and more. Because the search function involves the OS itself, In Apps currently only works on Android.

Apple removing outdated apps from App Store

Apple will begin removing apps from the App Store if they no longer work, are outdated or “don’t follow current guidelines.” The company will also prevent devs from using overly long app names to game app searches, limiting app names to 50 characters or less. Apple will start reviewing apps on September 7 and will remove the ones that crash on launch immediately.

Amazon rumoured to announce Echo UK launch on September 14

Amazon has sent out press invites to what’s rumoured to be the UK launch of its voice-controlled Echo device, which features the Alexa voice assistant. The event is scheduled to take place on September 14 in London, although it doesn’t mention the Echo. According to Engadget, if you ask Alexa what she has planned for the 14th, she replies “a visit to London.”

Google cancels modular Project Ara smartphone

Google has pulled the plug on Project Ara, its modular smartphone concept. Project Ara was designed to let users upgrade and customise their device with camera, speakers, microphones and other modules. According to Reuters, Google may consider licensing Ara to its hardware partners, enabling some of its features to appear on devices in the future.

Google to reveal Daydream VR and Pixel devices on October 4

Google will reportedly reveal its in-house design for a Daydream VR viewer device at an event on October 4. According to Android Police, the company will also show-off two Pixel-branded smartphones (which replace the Nexus brand) and a 4K Chromecast. The event will also provide more details on Google’s Amazon Echo-rival Google Home.

Qualcomm unveils VR all-in-one headset

Qualcomm has unveiled a new reference platform for standalone virtual reality headsets, which it’s calling the Snapdragon VR820. It’s built upon the Snapdragon VR SDK and is designed to help developers create the hardware, software and content needed to create VR experiences. It’s anticipated that it wil be available in Q4 2016.

Baidu launches open source machine learning project

Chinese search engine Baidu has released PaddlePaddle, an open source software platform for the deep learning community. According to Baidu, the platform provides an intuitive interface for data handling and specifying model structure. PaddlePaddle was originally developed for internal use on Baidu’s deep learning apps.

HP announces machine-learning tool for drag and drop app development

HP has announced Haven OnDemand Combinations, a new tool that combines machine learning APIs and a drag and drop interface for mixing and matching them. The tool is built upon HP’s Haven OnDemand could platform, which has 70 AI APIs and more than 180,000 users. HP says the new tool is the quickest way to add intelligence to apps.

Unreal Engine 4.13 released

Epic has released the latest version of Unreal Engine, bringing over 145 improvements to the game development platform. Major new features include shadow map caching for movable lights, a new live recording feature, Voronoi noise for material creation, new mesh decals and new VR features such as project templates and support for mesh and foliage painting with VR controllers.

Google releases pure JavaScript Closure Compiler

Google’s Closure Compiler is now available in pure JavaScript. Closure Compiler is a JavaScript optimizer, transpiler and type checker. This new version isn’t a rewrite in JavaScript, says Google, but rather compiles the Java source to JS to run under Node.

Bloomberg releases BuckleScript optimising compiler

Bloomberg’s tech arm has announced BuckleScript, a new optimising compiler strongly inspired” by TypeScript. According to Bloomberg, BuckleScript offers an “industrial strength” type system and provides strong type inference, to generate more efficient code. Bloomberg adds that the compiler is at least 10x faster than TypeScript.

HTC invests $5 million in VR start-up Steel Wool

VR gaming start-up Steel Wool Studios has closed a $5 million round of funding, coming entirely from HTC. Steel Wool was one of the early developers for HTC and Valve’s Vive headset, creating the action strategy title Quar: Battle for Gate 18. Steel Wool said the funding does not mean their games will be exclusive to the Vive.

Intel acquiring drone start-up Movidius

Intel is buying Movidius, a start-up that makes computer vision processors used in drones and VR devices. Intel says it wants to combine Movidius’ technology with its RealSense depth-sensing camera tech, covering markets such as VR, AR, drones and digital security cameras. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Categories
Business

Whatever happened to Operator Billing?

In 2003 Europe’s mobile operators launched Simpay, promising to let us buy flowers and concert tickets across Europe, with the price added to our mobile phone bill. By 2005 that had morphed into PayForIt, for UK operators only but with similar aspirations, and a similar lack of success. A decade later, mobile network operators are still being cut out of the payment loop, but not for lack of trying.

Operator billing should be the perfect m-commerce platform: Mobile operators store prepaid credit for 77% of their customers, according to the GSMA, and have credit agreements with the other 23%. They have experience dealing with critical systems, and real-time credit checking systems built to take huge loading, so they should be the obvious winners in the m-commerce business. As then-CEO of Vodafone Arun Sarintold the FT in 2007:

“The simple fact that we have the customer and billing relationship is a hugely powerful thing that nobody can take away from us … Whoever comes into the marketplace is going to have to work through us.”

Only they didn’t, and they don’t, and these days operator billing is a minority pastime everywhere – except Africa and the Middle East.

 

Mobile operators in Africa

The data comes from the VisionMobile Developer Economics survey, which reached more than 11,000 mobile developers at the start of 2016. Almost 2,000 of those developers are involved in m-commerce, but only 16% of those have integrated operator billing into their applications.

In Europe, where operators have perhaps tried the hardest to become the wallet of the future, that number drops to 12%, and in North America only 8% of m-commerce developers have bothered to work with the operator to handle billing. In 2010 Verizon launched its own payment service, based on the BilltoMobile platform, but BilltoMobile has been losing money ever since, and in May this year was purchased by UK payment processor Bango.

The argument against operator billing has always been that of interoperability – developers integrating with one mobile operator’s billing system would have to port their code to support another. That was the problem that Simpay, and PayforIt, were designed to solve, and they are far from alone in solving that.

The GSMA’a OneAPI started out as platform for interfacing with SMS Centres and network call management, but quickly focused into a cross-operator billing system to attract operators who proved reluctant to spend money implementing the whole standard. Even GSMA’s decision to host a OneAPI proxy (making it much easier for operators to integrate) wasn’t enough for the operators, and the standard now languishes as a vertical API within a handful of network operators.

In May 2016 yet another attempt was made, with nine of the largest mobile operators joining up to endorse the “Open API” from the TM Forum (an industry body with a decent history of setting architectural standards in infrastructure). This latest set of APIs covers a very wide remit, but includes much that the OneAPI set out to achieve including the resolution of billing events.

Other cross-operator alternatives, such as Telefónica’s BlueVia, have achieved some level of success, but it is probably too late for mobile operators to become the default billing platform they imagined that they would be. Only in the Middle East and Africa is mobile operator billing being used by a significant proportion of m-commerce developers; everywhere else that role is being filled by other players.

Just as Apple and Google provided operator-independent app stores, those companies provide the perfect alternative for developers looking to collect money. Billing through the app store itself, or via the electronic wallets run by Apple and Google, is increasingly popular – and both companies have extended the functionality in recent months.

Credit cards also remain popular. Most credit card processing is done via third-party companies, such as Braintree and Stripe, who compete to provide the best APIs and value-added services. Meanwhile various banking consortia are jumping into the frame, and Visa and MasterCard are funding various competitions intended to raise the profile of their own developer programs, and demonstrate their utility beyond basic transaction processing.

With such strong competition in place the opportunity for operators to step in and take the market is long gone, and developers won’t be easily wooed away from third-party providers. With a coordinated approach the operators certainly could have grabbed the market, but arrogance, lethargy – and the fear of creating an illegal cartel – prevented that future from happening.

The world of mobile commerce is evolving fast, and is only going to become more important as it grows and changes so rapidly, but mobile network operators will struggle to be more than a big player in it.

If you’d like to know more about which m-commerce platforms are gaining ground, or what developers are looking for in an m-commerce platform, then take a look at The evolving state of mobile commerce, a report published by VisionMobile in collaboration with Braintree.

Categories
Business

Getting users to pay for things remains the biggest challenge for app developers

More than half of app developers are living in “app poverty”: making less than $500 a month from their apps.

We’ve produced an infographic which looks at insights such as this from The Evolving State of Mobile Commerce, a report published by VisionMobile in collaboration with Braintree.

Here are some more of the insights about app developers that are featured in the infographic:

  • Half of M-commerce developers are using the App store
  • Operators are still bankers in the Middle East and Africa
  • Bitcoin is bigger in the Americas

The M-Commerce Ecosystem

This is just a small sample of the insights contained in the report, if you’d like to know more, then take a look at The Evolving State of Mobile Commerce report.

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Community Languages News and Resources

[Infographic] The most global developer survey

The new Developer Economics Infographic is out! The most global developer survey so far has reached over 16,500 developers from 145 countries. Have a look at the findings and let us know where you stand in the global ecosystem. Bonus: hear it from our survey prize winners!

Developer Survey: Developer Economics Q2 2016

global-dev-survey (1)

Interested in more findings? Check out our more recent reports, here.

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Business Community

Developer Tools Survey – Winners

Welcome to the full rundown of the Developer Economics: Developer Tools Benchmarking (April-May 2016) prize winners. Below you’ll find a table comprised of both the email addresses and countries of all the people that won (the emails are obfuscated for security reasons).

Winners have already been notified by email – if you recognise the email fragment as yours and we haven’t contacted you, please drop us an email at survey@visionmobile.com

Improving ourselves by listening to what you have to say is one of our top priorities so don’t forget to complete the short feedback form we have prepared for you. Our aim is to improve our offering by identifying your interests so we cannot stress enough how important your contribution is!

Complete the form

Survey Prize Winners

Email Prize Country
v*si**m**i*e@pa**l*onp***ures.co.uk Lumia 635 United Kingdom
re***mat@mail.ru Lumia 635 Russia
h*n*okos**@gmail.com Windows IoT dev kits Indonesia
t**as*aj**@gmail.com Windows IoT dev kits Hungary
s***i.t**ral**@gmail.com BQ Aquaris M10 – Ubuntu Edition Tablet The Netherlands
e*@po***hed-pi**ls.com Fossil Watch United States
jar*ds*i*h***@gmail.com Frontend Masters United States
r*ngle**@hotmail.com Balsamiq Desktop United States
ti***a*ti*r@gmail.com Wearables TechCon 2016 – All access pass $645 United States
j**oda*d@ch**ke*dist.com AnDevCon United States
r*d*ar*h@gmail.com GMIC Bangalore 16-17 November Gold pass $200 India
aca*l**@gmail.com iPhone 6S United States
am***o@gmail.com Nexus 6P United Kingdom
a*i*u*@gmail.com Xperia Z5 India
fu**@live.in Choice of Jetbrains IDE up to $300 India
x*c*c*i*96**@gmail.com BlackBerry PRIV Italy
m*i**y**@gmail.com MS Surface 3 tablet United States
ghl****r*@gmail.com Sublime 3 text license Canada
j*n**vid@sch**er.org Intel Galileo Gen 2 Board United States
m*r*st*7*@alice.it Raspberry Pi 3 wi-fi edition Italy
ch***i*s*n*993@gmail.com Developer T-shirts Malaysia
1*3**033*80@163.com Developer T-shirts China
tata**11@gmail.com Developer T-shirts Poland
dra*****ig*t1*21**@yahoo.com Developer T-shirts Vietnam
m*sr*ca*do@gmail.com Developer T-shirts El Salvador
alek***.ma*ar*in@gmail.com Developer T-shirts Russian Federation
a*d**ns**h*****nsyah9@gmail.com Developer T-shirts Indonesia
t*u*gv*@an**ing.com.vn Developer T-shirts Vietnam
e*en**0*@hotmail.com Developer T-shirts Colombia
u****gyu@gmail.com Developer T-shirts United States

Panel Prize Winners

Email Prize
hla***i@hotmail.com GoPro Hero Session camera
al*i**l*ur*c*is@gmail.com GoPro Hero Session camera
d*v@drea**yte.eu WD My Passport Ultra 3TB
mryo82*@gmail.com WD My Passport Ultra 3TB
ben*a***en@protonmail.ch WD My Passport Ultra 3TB
a**ng5**@126.com WD My Passport Ultra 3TB
d*ogo***a@gmail.com WD My Passport Ultra 3TB
kma*du*@gmail.com Udemy courses of your choice (up to $80 USD)
si*e*****el***r*con**ic*.c*m@ru**ell.mat**uli.org Udemy courses of your choice (up to $80 USD)
tr*nt**ntru**l**t*990@gmail.com Udemy courses of your choice (up to $80 USD)
h**kon2**@gmail.com Udemy courses of your choice (up to $80 USD)
huy**ie*25*@gmail.com Udemy courses of your choice (up to $80 USD)
a**x***er.ra**rd*o@gmail.com Udemy courses of your choice (up to $80 USD)
em*r*o***@gmail.com Udemy courses of your choice (up to $80 USD)
i***.mal@mail.ru Udemy courses of your choice (up to $80 USD)
31**8**5*@qq.com Udemy courses of your choice (up to $80 USD)
hhp*z*@126.com Udemy courses of your choice (up to $80 USD)
Categories
Platforms

Using Bash in Windows – today

bash_windows
using bash in windows today

“… However, when we talked with web developers, they still struggled with using Windows as their primary devbox.”

The above quote is from Kevin Gallo, the VP of Windows Dev platform, and was delivered around mark 0:38 of his presentation in Microsoft’s Build 2016 keynote. He then continued with the observation that “… many of them have workflows which rely on open source command line tools, scripts and frameworks”, and finished with a slide that his audience was – at first – slightly unsure on how excited to get about: Bash is coming to Windows.

Screenshot #1: Kevin Gallo’s slide from Build 2016 announcing Bash coming to Windows
Screenshot #1: Kevin Gallo’s slide from Build 2016 announcing Bash coming to Windows

If you let the video play for another 7 seconds, you’ll also catch a glimpse of Gallo’s audience. You can see the emotions depicted on their faces form a picture that explains perfectly the complex (and sometimes tumultuous) relationship of Microsoft with Linux and the Open Source world. Three persons are smiling excitedly and beginning to slow clap (the ones that suddenly realise how much easier managing their OS stack or scripting their Windows environment will become). You then have the classic cautious indifference of the majority of developers that wait to see whether this is “worth getting excited about”. Finally, you can also detect some unguarded annoyance from the fanboy crowd (“Seriously? I have to sit and hear about Bash? What’s wrong with PowerShell?”).

Personally, I belong to the first group. Despite working with open source technologies since the beginning of my professional career back in 2003, I’ve never managed to move away from Windows. To this effect, when I saw Rich Turner and Russ Alexander casually doing a apt-get install git on Windows to install git, I was excited. A lot.

But until the functionality showcased in the video above is mature and stable enough to be rolled out, I’ll continue using my current workflow which has served me faithfully since 2011: And that is bash on Windows (To be precise: A more “cut down” version of Bash. Read on for details).

The challenge: Production-strength command line workflow in Windows.

One might argue that Windows was never meant to be “driven” from the command line.

Microsoft tried to mitigate this back in 2006 by rolling out PowerShell, a shell and scripting language that gives users full access to their whole Windows environment. For Windows devs this was a great extra tool but for all other developers it was still not enough to lure them away from the power and versatility they found on the Linux command line.

Add to this the strongly opinionated naming conventions and approaches that PowerShell inherited from the .NET Framework (did you know that cd is but an alias to the “proper” command which is Get-ChildItem? That’s camelcase _and_ a dash that autocompletes with tab even if you type it in lowercase. Strange stuff) and you can see why it’s really hard for e.g. a PHP developer to consider it for his dev workflow.

When every single blogpost or article or tutorial written about a subject, e.g. “how to rebase branches in git”, includes instructions and screenshots that clearly demonstrate the flow in a Linux shell, it’s only natural for the developer to assume that this is the correct way of doing things.

Towards a solution: Install Git for Windows

For my frontend-with-a-bit-of-PHP-but-from-a-Windows-OS workflow I always relied on certain “battle proven” tools. WinSCP was the weapon of choice when files needed to be moved from one place to another (either via FTP, SFTP, SCP or even rSync). Putty allowed me to connect via SSH to all my dev boxes. TortoiseGIt ensured that I could use git directly from my Windows explorer interface.

The first “lightbulb / aha” moment for me occurred when I installed Git for Windows after being prompted to “try it out on the command line” by a colleague.
One of the steps of the install wizard prompts you to choose “How would you like to use Git from the command line?”:

Screenshot #2: Choosing how to use Git for Windows
Screenshot #2: Choosing how to use Git for Windows

… and it mentioned “Bash”!

Installation completes and suddenly I get a shell in Windows that looks suspiciously similar to what I’m used to in Linux or iOS installations:

Screenshot #3: MinTTY terminal emulator window
Screenshot #3: MinTTY terminal emulator window

Bash in Windows: How it works

Kudos? To the awesome devs that worked to bring Git to windows – https://git-for-windows.github.io/.
In essence the installer sets up a unix-like shell environment (MinGW – “Minimalist GNU for Windows”) which – very roughly speaking – creates the needed Unix layer that shells like Bash can run onto.
A terminal emulator called MinTTY is also installed (shown in screenshot #3 above) which is a Windows program that runs the Bash shell which in turn enables you to use quite a good subset of the Linux commands needed for an open source dev workflow.

Looks are important

… especially if you are an ex-designer-turned-frontend-developer. Going from the black and white severity of cmd.exe (where you could not even resize the window to the dimensions you wanted) to MinTTY definitely boosted my “developer happiness” feeling:

Screenshot #4: MinTTY terminal emulator window
Screenshot #4: MinTTY terminal emulator window

In the above example, I manually mapped the colours from the famous Solarized colour theme to the default 16 ANSI colours. For the font I chose the crystal clear Consolas font set at 12 point, although I’ve recently been experimenting with Adobe’s Source Code Pro as an alternative.

The MinTTY window can be resized to any dimension of your choosing. You can also use the same shortcuts as you use in the browser to resize the text on the fly (CTRL+plus, CTRL+minus or CTRL+mouse wheel). Finally you can launch as many instances of MinTTY as you want, enabling you to lay out a series of windows into your codebase and file structure, exactly as it suits you:

Bash in Windows Screenshot #5: Multiple instances running at the same time at different dimensions and font-size
Screenshot #5: Multiple instances running at the same time at different dimensions and font-size

I can now do {{thing}} from the command line

The list below demonstrates just a small subset of the stuff you can do with Bash in Windows that I found particularly useful and / or helpful.

  • Git
    No more “download and unzip”. Git clone any repo of your choosing in any directory in your filesystem. The handy “GIT Bash here…” shortcut that appears when you right click any folder is particularly useful here.
  • Linux command line
    MinGW supports a subset of the various commands and programs available in Linux, things like awk, sed, grep, find are all here, ready to be used. Shortcuts are also available (CTRL+U, CTRL+K for inline editing, CTRL+R to lookup on Bash history etc) as well as piping and redirection.
  • SSH
    OpenSSH works right out of the box. Set up your keys by using ssh-keygen (exactly the same way you would do in a Linux box) and then connect to any of your machines. You can also setup an ssh-agent (exactly the way Beanstalk or Github or Bitbucket explain in their online tutorials) to ensure you don’t retype your password all the time. Of course ftp and scp are available as well.
  • Vim
    No more notepad++ for me. After I went through the steep-as-mount-Everest learning curve I found out that vim was the best tool for quick text edits (I’ve strongly resisted the urge to play with emacs. We’ll see).
  • Bash scripting
    The very first bash script I experimented with (and use constantly nowadays) is z: https://github.com/rupa/z. I no longer rely on lengthy cd statements such as:
    cd /some_directory/nesting/nested/my_work
    But rather do a:
    z my_work
    … and I’m immediately taken to the directory I want.

“You should really switch to {{enter Linux distro name here}}”

Indeed. But even if I do so, there is still a vast number of devs out there who still need / have to work with Windows. One year ago, Isaac Schlueter (co-founder and CEO of the Node Package Manager – NPM) had this to say:

Bash in Windows: this matters
If you want devs using your code, this matters

Until WSL is out … Bash in Windows

The soon-to-be-released Windows Subsystem for Linux is a brilliant (and much-needed) step forward in making the Windows environment a first-class citizen for open source development workflows.Nevertheless, there is no need to wait for Microsoft to make WSL available to everyone.

I’ve been using Bash in Windows – in my daily workflow – for the last 5 years and it’s working like a charm.
If you want to do the same, simply install Git for Windows.

Categories
Business

If there were 100 Developers in the world

Have you ever asked yourselves what would it be like if there were only 100 developers in the world? Well even if you haven’t, we are sure we have just made you think about it.
Based on our Developer Economics survey that reaches 30,000+ devs per year, across mobile, IoT, cloud, desktop, AR/VR, machine learning , we designed a very interesting Infographic illustrating this scenario.

  • How many men and women would this world include ?
  • Which continent would be the most populated ?
  • How many would be Pros and how many Hobbyists ?
  • How experienced are developers  in this world?
  • What is the most popular coding language?

If there were just 100 developers in the world, then:

100-developers-infographic-visionmobile

Embed

Categories
Business

How many IDEs does it take to create a programmer?

Integrated Development Environments have evolved to solve every problem a developer can have, but in recent years we’ve seen a scaling back of capabilities as developers embrace more-basic options. At VisionMobile our latest developer survey is (amongst other things) trying to find out why, though we do have some ideas on the subject.

Integrated Development Environments

When I first programmed a computer I was lambasted, and very nearly ejected from the school computer club, for not having written my program out on paper before arrival. Computer time was too precious to spend composing lines of code. Minutes at the keyboard should be spent entering pre-written programs; not making them up as one went along.

Needless to say that was a very long time ago. These days program composition is done using a screen (or several) with working code being thrown together in what looks suspiciously like a process of trial-and-error. The modern Integrated Development Environments won’t let a compiler crash for want of a missing semicolon, or the use of the Queen’s English (“colour”? Really? ).

A modern IDE will spot variables using the wrong case, and APIs which haven’t been imported, reducing the development time and making life easier for the developer – but, if modern IDEs are so great, why do so many developers choose not to use them?

Vi, Emacs, Notepad++, and Sublime, all make regular appearances in developer toolkits, despite the existence of fully-featured alternatives. You might be a savant mnemonic who’s only outlets are Street Fighter II and programming in Vi, but for most humans a menu structure and “compile” button are essentials.

Microsoft’s Visual Studio is still the standard by which others are measured, though at $499 it’s not the cheapest option which may put some people off. Eclipse provides almost as much utility for a lot less money (none at all), and Visual Studio Code (Microsoft’s free code editor) is now at version 1, and also free. A licence for Sublime Text, on the other hand, will cost you $70 – so the choice is not really about money.

We know that developers increasingly work across platforms, languages, and sectors, and this may provide an answer. Visual Studio can do it all, creating applications for mobile devices, embedded technology, and cloudy servers, but so can Notepad++, and with less effort, and better support.

Take the support site for the Adafruit Trinket (a $7 prototyping board), which provides a step-by-step guide to creating applications using the Arduino IDE, so when I want to program a Trinket then that’s what I use. I’m sure that I could use Visual Studio, and it would be pretty and probably reduce my development time, but it would take effort to get it configured and I don’t spend enough time programming the Trinket to make it worthwhile.

Similarly – if I’m knocking out some Python I’ll boot up IDLE, and when I need a bit of HTML I’ll use Notepad++. These are not the best tools available, but they are the default tools and will work with every library, plugin, and extension available. If I programmed Python every day then I’d find a better tool (or perhaps a better job), but I’m too lazy to muck about getting a proper IDE configured and will make do with what’s available.

Thanks to a dot.com development career I’ve no time for debuggers or unit testing (testing is what users are for) which makes these bare-bones tools ideal for me, but what we at VisionMobile would like to know is why you choose one IDE over another, and how many you’re using on a daily basis.

Which Integrated Development Environments are you using?

When you complete our 11th Developer Economics survey you won’t just be asked which IDE you like to use, but also what you use it for, and why you like to use it. We’ll break down the data, and share information on who is using what, and why.

We’re not just collecting data on how developers create software. We’re collecting data on how developers would like to create software, and what stands in their way. If you have 12 minutes to spare then do join us in finding out.

Categories
Community Platforms

Angelo Kastroulis – Mobile Development Runs Deep

blog_interview

Developer Profile:
Angelo Kastroulis

Angelo Photo (1)

At VisionMobile, we believe in the people behind the numbers. While it’s important to understand numbers, trends and segments, it’s equally important to understand the people who buy our products and services. This developer profile is one in a series designed to help us get to know some of the people behind the statistics.

Job title and company:
Founder, Independent Consultant at Carrera Group

Country/Area:
Florida, United States

Development Focus:
Enterprise software expert for hire. “I like doing independent work,” he explains, “there’s no enterprise baggage.. You’re there to do a job, to solve a difficult problem, to help clients through something.” There’s where he likes to focus: on fixing problems and doing so outside of a company’s culture. He continues, “I know we’re not going to rewrite this whole thing: I’m here to do one specific thing and provide some development help or architectural advice to help get you out of a jam. For six months, I can help with this antiquated technology.”

He works across multiple technologies, but focuses on the healthcare industry.

Languages used:
Kastroulis counsels against getting too caught up in language or platform fanaticism. He recommends using the best tool for a given job. That said, his go-to technologies include JavaScript (Node.js), Microsoft .Net, C, Python, and a “tiny bit” of Java.

Favorite project built recently:
Kastroulis reports how he enjoys working on new projects with new challenges. His favorite project was building a high performance column-store database kernel. Another recent project was an electronic prescribing and ER discharge application for both the web and iOS devices.

Favorite tools:
As do many developers, Kastroulis prefers to use the appropriate toolset for the project – and to choose toolsets he’s most familiar with. Enterprise developers may not have that flexibility, but independent developers often do. His favorite toolset is Visual Studio Code, which works across platforms. He also uses node.js and a lot of JetBrains tools (especially for C and Python). On a Mac he uses Sublime Text and command-line tools. Of course, for source code management he uses GitHub and Git on the command line. “I’ve worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Heroku, but Azure is my cloud host of choice,” he adds. “Azure is easier to work with and it’s HIPAA compliant.”

Best developer-related advice you would give to another developer
While it’s hard to predict the future, Kastroulis advises developers to “get an idea of where the world is headed and try to get there first.” He concedes that you may not always be right, “but follow your gut.” Take advantage of industry knowledge, and take advantage of the expertise you gain focusing in your industry (healthcare, financial, and so on).

Categories
Business

Every year software developers get less experienced

That might sound odd, but it’s one of many conclusions drawn from our biannual study, and presented on developer experience in our (free) State of the Developer Nation report.

The report draws on data from the world’s-biggest survey of those working in software. During the latest wave we reached more than 21,000 developers, and found that they have less experience than they did a year ago.

Developer Experience across all areas

Not individually of course. There’s no memory loss involved here. What happens is that the developer community is growing, and new programmers inevitably bring down the average level of experience. This has serious implications for the future of the industry.

If we take mobile developers, who are typical, we can see that right now 40% of them have been developing software for more than six years, but a year ago that proportion was 43%. At the other end of the spectrum we have 17% of developers with less than a year under their belt, up from 14% this time last year.

Building Developer Experience

That pattern is repeated across all sectors, even IoT (which is so nascent it often bucks the trends). While a good proportion of developers have built up their skills over time, we are going to have to adjust to a world where more software is being created by developers with less hands-on experience, and understand the implications of that trend.

One of those implication is a shift in the popularity of certain programming languages over their more-traditional brethren. This time we’re focusing in on the last six months, but if we again look at mobile developers we can see them embracing scripting languages, at the cost of Java and the various forms of C. Objective C takes the biggest hit, assaulted by Apple’s new wonderkid Swift on one side, and the (JavaScript powered) cross-platform toolkits on the other. Objective C is dropping fast, while C/C++ has a gentle decline and C# is just about holding its mindshare (thanks to Xamarin, which compiles C# to Android and is now a Microsoft property).

On the cloud the trend is less pronounced, but still evident. Java is growing, but so are all the other languages. PHP… C#… Python… in fact all the top languages have gained mindshare as cloud developers become increasingly polyglot while giving up on some of the niche dialects.

Developer Experience: the rise of high level languages

One area on the rise, across all the sectors, is the use of visual tools for software development. These drag-‘n-drop environments are often looked down upon by “proper” programmers, who respect the digital hierarchy (where Assembler is king, dialects of C make up the court, Java is left outside the room, and scripting languages aren’t permitted into the palace). These visual tools are still only used by a minority (25% of mobile developers, 19% of cloud) and fewer still rely on them as a primary tool (5% across mobile and cloud) but that proportion is growing steadily, and relentlessly.

The fact is that there aren’t enough low-level programmers to go around, and most applications don’t need them. Visual tools, and scripting languages, are good enough for the vast majority of applications in any sector. That applies across consumer and enterprise markets, as users of all kinds start creating apps with a few clicks. However, there is a question about how long can we consider those users to be software developers, and the tools they use to be designed for software development.

“If This Then That” (IFTTT.com) is a marvellous tool, enabling anyone to create “recipes” where an event (“this”) triggers an action (“that”). An incoming email can trigger the (Philips Hue) lights to flash red three times, making the owner feel like Batman while simultaneously aggravating his whole family.

IFTTT users can chain recipes together, creating actions that seed multiple events, loop back on themselves, and even branch based on inputs. At some point we have to accept that the IFTTT user has become a software developer, or that IFTTT shows us what the future of software development might look like.

Not all applications will be written that way of course. Lower-level languages will still be needed to plumb the functionality together, but there will come a time when the vast majority of applications will be created by developers with no software development experience at all.

Developer Experience trends

That day is a long way off, but with every year it gets a little closer and our data shows that process is in action. You can see more by downloading our State of the Developer Nation report, or talking to us about custom reports looking at the developer community, while there still is one.