We did an internal survey among our consultants asking what technologies they have used during the last calendar year, what they liked and didn’t like, and additionally, what would be interesting to try out and learn more about in the future. The survey was done with free text fields, so there were no predefined answers, and it can be called conclusive, since we were fortunate enough to get a 100% answer rate!
Our technology categories were: languages, backend technologies, frontend technologies, databases, cloud platforms, operating systems, and last but (definitely) not the least, editors and IDEs.
Since we work as consultants, most of these answers pertain to our customers – they usually choose the technologies they want to use. On the other hand, our consultants have also had the privilege of choosing their clients and the projects they work for. The technical decisions presented here therefore go both ways.
‍
C# is the most used and liked language out of all, with TypeScript, Javascript, Python, and Rust taking the next positions. The database technologies & languages SQL and GraphQL were also amongst the most used and liked technologies. Even though Javascript is used by many of our consultants, almost half of its users reported that they disliked using it, probably the majority of them consisting of the more universally-liked Typescript’s users.
Newer languages (by programming language standards) and functional languages take the trophy when it comes to interest, since Rust & F# both gathered lot of the interest vote, with Go, Clojure, Elm and Purescript not far behind. We’ve heard a lot about the developer ergonomics and efficiency of these languages, and would like to try them out in the wild.
‍
Our strong background in .Net development shows in here as well, as .Net is the most used backend technology by far, with Node.js, and the Python and Node.js server libraries Flask and Express being next. The rest is a blend of cloud platforms’ offerings, database related stuff and alternative runtimes for JavaScript and Typescript. The new stable alternative for Node.js & npm, Bun, gathered the most interest.
‍
It’s no surprise React takes the cake for our most used frontend technology. There are a few technologies here that have been used by more than one person and were universally liked, like Blazor, Svelte, Next.js, Sveltekit, and Vite.
Next.js, Astro, htmx and the juggernaut React gathered the most interest.
‍
Less variance here. Database technologies gathered a lot of answers from the cloud services we and our clients use, with Azure gathering a lot of the vote, and the cheeky Google Sheets thrown in the mix.
Industry standards like PostgreSQL, MongoDB, AuroraDB and Redis were most used from the non-cloud offerings, and all were universally liked or neutral. Kafka hasn’t gathered any usage, but our consultants were interested in it.
‍
Our consultants have had a pretty wide usage of most available big cloud platforms, with Azure getting the most usage and zero dislikes. Most interesting cloud platform was Google Cloud Platform, which also gathered the most dislikes.
‍
A lot of our people use Azure pipelines, Docker and GitHub Actions for their work, and they are also widely liked.
Terraform, Docker and its alternative Podman, Ansible and AWS CDK were the most interesting technologies, with Terraform gathering the vast majority of votes.
‍
Our consultants get to freely pick and choose their personal tools, and it shows in this part of the survey. Windows is our most used OS, with MacOS and (any) Linux distros as close second. There is some interest towards NixOS, which is an operating system / Linux distribution, that by the way turned 20 years old last June! It builds upon the declarative package manager Nix, that produces reproducible builds and very clean application environments. Also, some of our consultants are interested in using the compartmentalized safety-focused Qubes OS and the oldie but goldie FreeBSD.
‍
Arguably the most personal category with the most freedom of choice, it’s no wonder that there are a lot of singular replies here. Still, the most used editors and/or IDEs are VSCode, Visual Studio and Notepad++. The eternal divider amongst software developers, Vim, is not a surprise here, but the interest towards the just-as-eternal Emacs was a bit of a surprise.
‍
Thank you for checking out our State of the Art Survey for this year! What tech are you interested in right now and what personal favourites do you have at the moment? Join the discussion on LinkedIn and let us know!
‍
And if you would you like to hear more about Arado, the tech we use, and what projects we could offer you, reach out to us at hello@arado.fi
We're always happy to talk and offer you free lunch if you're around!
‍
Ps. This blog post was heavily influenced by Nitor's developer survey 2023 -please go and check out the tech they're using here!
