Friday, December 30, 2005
An addendum to "What Tech Skills Are Hot for 2006?"
Despite a promising title and huge online buzz, I found ComputerWorld's "What Tech Skills Are Hot for 2006?" to be derivative and disappointing. While certainly accurate, it's incomplete. The three major (and only) areas cited that should be attractive were (1) software development, (2) security, (3) project management. I beg to differ.
Far be it for me to rip on the work of a fellow journalist, but I found the article's explanations, while well written, to be too terse. What kind(s) of programming and with what platform(s)? Is Java really on the decline? Can/should/will Ruby on Rails have relevance in enterprise development? Should .NET programmers be valued any more/less higher now that 2.0's out? Security - in what context and with what specific tools? Project management - that's a given for any year.
If I may be so bold as to append items to this list, I'd also add that knowledge workers also need to possess strong multimedia savvy and continually work towards multiplatform content distribution. Knowing how to Wireless application development continued to really take off in '05, so I see no need to stymie this momentum going into '06. Managers, architects and coders need to be aware of emerging platforms, specifically Web 2.0. This is inclusive of being able to pragmatically apply technical concepts like AJAX, RSS/Atom and developing public APIs; as well as distribution theories like serving the Long Tail and fostering network growth.
Additionally, web services - both SOAP and REST - are going to be key with the emerging popularity of companies encouraging application mash-ups and remixing of their core data. Inclusive to this skill set should also lastly be modern scalability planning (hardware growth, app-level caching).
Now more than ever, if we can agree that the Internet was reborn in 2005, platform translation to allow access via the Web and mobile markets, as well as via RSS syndication is key.
So in addition to the generalities that will always be needed for mainstream technical work, I think a more specific set of tools within one's quill are going to come in very handy in 2006.
Far be it for me to rip on the work of a fellow journalist, but I found the article's explanations, while well written, to be too terse. What kind(s) of programming and with what platform(s)? Is Java really on the decline? Can/should/will Ruby on Rails have relevance in enterprise development? Should .NET programmers be valued any more/less higher now that 2.0's out? Security - in what context and with what specific tools? Project management - that's a given for any year.
If I may be so bold as to append items to this list, I'd also add that knowledge workers also need to possess strong multimedia savvy and continually work towards multiplatform content distribution. Knowing how to Wireless application development continued to really take off in '05, so I see no need to stymie this momentum going into '06. Managers, architects and coders need to be aware of emerging platforms, specifically Web 2.0. This is inclusive of being able to pragmatically apply technical concepts like AJAX, RSS/Atom and developing public APIs; as well as distribution theories like serving the Long Tail and fostering network growth.
Additionally, web services - both SOAP and REST - are going to be key with the emerging popularity of companies encouraging application mash-ups and remixing of their core data. Inclusive to this skill set should also lastly be modern scalability planning (hardware growth, app-level caching).
Now more than ever, if we can agree that the Internet was reborn in 2005, platform translation to allow access via the Web and mobile markets, as well as via RSS syndication is key.
So in addition to the generalities that will always be needed for mainstream technical work, I think a more specific set of tools within one's quill are going to come in very handy in 2006.
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