Our take on 2021 tech trends

We did a virtual roundtable with our technical team (devs, AI and UX/UI) to discuss trends and innovations that they thought would be relevant in the next year. We’ve summed up the technologies to follow and our thoughts on tech themes that will dominate conversations.

Technologies to follow

Mobile development: Flutter on the rise to compete with React Native

Our team has experience working with both technologies, Flutter and React Native, in the past few years. While early on, we saw the rise of React Native, Flutter has been catching up quickly. In 2020, Google Trends has placed Flutter as the second most leading software development kit (after React Native) for developing cross-platform mobile applications. While our teams found both options similar, they are really looking forward to what place Flutter will take in the future compared to React Native. If you want to know more about Flutter, we share with you our quick tips and best practices for this cross-platform app development framework.

TypeScript continued growth

TypeScript is a programming language developed by Microsoft. It originated from the shortcomings of JavaScript, and adds features such as static typing, to build large-scale applications. We are seeing the introduction of similar technologies with Mypy in Python and RBS & Sorbet in Ruby.

TensorFlow

TensorFlow is an end-to-end open source platform for machine learning. We expect it to continue growing in popularity with the rise of AI.

Increase of re-skins of old programming languages

Our team expects to see more 25+ years old programming languages that will get facelifts and be used more and more. Elixir and ReasonML/ReScript are some recent success stories. Languages like these are robust and proven technologies, but could use a refresh to make them more attractive to new developers and to bring in new features, ideas, and best practices without having to completely change the original language.

Tech themes that will dominate our conversations

Education and Technology

“The use of information and communication technologies in education can play a crucial role in providing new and innovative forms of support to teachers, students, and the learning process more broadly.” - World Bank

There is a great opportunity to bring the education sector up to speed with technology. More specifically, with the lockdowns we experienced during the pandemic of COVID-19, we believe the education sector will be propelled to innovate faster.

Privacy by design

Public pressure for privacy in technology will become more and more essential. We believe companies in our industry should be drivers of privacy, being the bridge between the legal entities and privacy advocates with companies trying to grow their business through data access.

Reshaping how we organize software teams

A few innovations will have a major impact on our industry:

• Automation of processes to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
• Rise of configuration experts and partner networks for platforms developed by tech giants (Azure, AWS, Google).
• Platform engineering will help build systems for the core software teams to make solutions easier to deploy.
• The culture of DevOps will take more space in organizations.

Photo credit: Rodion Kutsaev