We surveyed Arado’s consultants on what tools and technology they’ve used during the past year, and their sentiment towards those tools. We also wanted to know which tools they haven’t used, but would be interested in trying out.
The survey was once again conclusive, reaching every single one of our consultants at the time of surveying (n=26). The survey was based on our State of the Art survey last year, however the research method of the survey was changed, which makes the data look a bit different from the previous survey.
The survey was split into twelve categories:
1. Consultant's roles
2. Backend technologies
3. Web frontend technologies
4. Desktop development technologies
5. Mobile development technologies
6. Data storage & management technologies
7. Cloud platforms
8. Infrastructure & CI/CD tools
9. Operating systems
10. Editors & IDE's
11. AI/ML tools
12. Project management tools
Our consultants are by default free to use the tools and gear they want to. However, our clients do have opinions on the technology their systems are built on. The choice of tech therefore goes both ways. The survey includes all types of tech use, be that at work or for a hobby or a prototype. This being everyone’s full time job, we can assume most of the tools used are from aradoans’ client projects.
The survey was conducted via an online form. Last year’s survey was done via free text fields, as it was the first time implementing the survey. This year's survey was implemented as list of radio buttons based on last years data and additional open text fields, and this change in methodology of course affects the data quite heavily. Some technologies gained an unrealistic number of new users, such as Shell, PowerShell, SQL & MQL, since these are most likely technologies people didn’t think to mention in the open text survey format. Team members also marked more technologies as "Not used, interested". We felt that these changes in the data were not too drastic to require additional analysis as we are not conducting official research but rather a general overlook of technologies used at Arado for our own and public use.
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Many of our senior developers work in multiple roles throughout the year as is shown clearly in the data here. The top three roles indicate our strong practical role in the development teams in which we can work in both Fullstack and DevOps roles, often in all of them at some point throughout the year.
In addition, we bring expertise in architect and lead developer roles, and we can also strengthen and accelerate development processes in managerial and process-enhancing positions, such as Product Owner, Project Manager, and Scrum Master.
The survey results on back end technologies show our wide range of projects using the Microsoft stack with .NET being our most widely used backend technology. .NET is also very much liked with no negative responses and even some curiosity towards it.
Node.js is the second most popular of the backend technologies used, with a mix of positive and neutral feedback, plus significant interest from potential new users. Express, MediatR, and Entity Framework Core form the next tier of widely-used technologies, each with 8-12 users and varying levels of satisfaction. There's notable interest in technologies like Bun and Deno, despite lower current usage, suggesting potential future adoption either in client or hobby projects.
All in all the answers show a rather positive sentiment towards a wide array of backend technologies, with very few negative responses.
Much like the data from our last year’s survey, React is shown to be our most widely used and well-liked frontend technology. Also TypeScript and React-related Redux show strong adoption, with most users however having neutral to negative sentiment. Newer frameworks like Next.js and Angular have moderate usage with Next being the generally more liked out of the two.
Some technologies show minimal current usage but notable interest levels, such as Astro and Svelte whereas older technologies (that might even be deemed as legacy tech) like jQuery and Bootstrap show lower usage and interest levels.
Our survey data on desktop development technologies also shows a strong Microsoft technology stack preference, while also presenting emerging interest in newer cross-platform frameworks. WPF and UWP are the most commonly used desktop development technologies, with both having similar usage patterns and showing a mix of neutral and positive sentiment among users, plus additional interest from other Arado developers.
Winui and Qt have notable interest from potential users but no current usage shown in the data. Also Tauri, Flutter, React Native, and Avalonia UI all show some interest from potential users but no current adoption.
Most of projects do not contain mobile development, so the survey data shows a rather low usage rate on an even mix of native and cross-platform mobile development. Android and React Native are the most used mobile development technologies, with Android however showing more interest than concrete usage from our developers. iOS and Flutter follow as the next most popular platforms, though Flutter shows dislike among its one user.
Emerging technologies like Expo, .NET MAUI, and PWA show some interest from aradonians.
Our stong cooperation with our clients using Microsoft services also shows in these results with a strong preference for Microsoft Azure-based storage solutions. SQL Server, Table Storage, Cosmos DB and Blob Storage are among the most widely used data storage and management technologies with high user satisfaction as well as strong interest towards them from the rest of the team. This interest might be due to our many Making Sense -sessions thoughout the year, where we have showcased the usage of these technologies. Kafka and Snowflake show lower current usage but notable interest from team members.
In our cloud platforms used Azure clearly dominates with nineteen of us using it and majority of people generally liking it. AWS and Google Cloud in comparison show much lower usage in our developer’s work, but have garnered a significant amount of interest.
Outside of the three cloud giants, other cloud platforms see a small niche usage and Cloudfare and Supabase have gained some additional interest this year.
Regarding Infrastructure and CI/CD tools, Docker, Azure App Service, and GitHub Actions dominate the chart in terms of both likes and interest, indicating widespread adoption as well as strong growth potential. Here again Azure's ecosystem (e.g., Azure Functions and Azure Pipelines) shows strong user engagement and interest.
Tools like Bicep, Bitbucket Pipelines, and AWS Lambda show strong interest despite lower usage, signaling emerging popularity.
By default, developers at Arado are free to choose their operating systems for daily work. This flexibility is reflected in our survey data, which shows a broad usage of Linux. Windows and macOS dominate due to mainstream adoption, but Linux and Ubuntu continue to hold strong appeal among their enthusiasts. However, neutral sentiment for all of these systems also suggests that while people use these OSes, there’s room for improvement in user satisfaction.
Android and Raspberry Pi OS show a lot of interest and one could assume they are rather liked in people’s hobby projects relating to e.g. home automation. Niche systems like FreeBSD, Arch Linux, and NixOS are emerging as alternatives, appealing to specialized use cases like performance, security, and customizability.
Much like in our last year’s survey, Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio are the most commonly used editors and IDE’s, with Notepad++ holding a strong third place. Compared to last year, Zed has garnered one user in the team and a good bunch of additional interest from a few others.
Due to the increasing popularity of different AI tools this year, we started collecting data on them for this survey. Almost the whole company has used ChatGPT this year with GitHub’s Copilot seeing also widespread adoption and especially interest towards it along with OpenAI’s API. The top three of the AI/ML Tools are also rather liked, with almost all of the answers indicating either positive or neutral sentiment towards them.
It’s no surprise Notion is so popular among our developers, since it’s also the tool we use for our internal operations and company information. Also Azure DevOps, Jira and Trello are pretty much standards in the industry with Azure’s tool being the most liked of these and on the contrary data showing some negative sentiment towards Jira.
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Thank you for taking interest in our State of the Art Survey 2024! The data was collected and visualised by Konsta Purtsi and the texts were written by Veli-Pekka Virtanen. AI tools were used in both building the visualisation and generating the text.
See you again next year!
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