Hello everyone, this is Stéphane from the agency ! I've already told you about Redux. Today I'm going to explain how technology watch works for developers.
What is technology watch?
As a developer, my job requires me to keep constantly abreast of what's going on in the new technologies sector.
There are "developer communities" in which people contribute to the development of projects that help us in our day-to-day work, be they tools, languages or even libraries. So there's a real interest in keeping abreast of the various tools and their reputations, knowing about updates, performance, how best to use them, and so on.
All this makes up our technology watch.
How does it work?
I do a daily and a weekly technology watch.
For the day-to-day, I'll be basing myself on GitHub Trending.
GitHub is a collaborative online platform that allows developers to to host their code repositories, but also to contribute to the development of open source projects. Repositories meet two needs:
- Store code in the cloud on remote servers so that it's not dependent on our hard drives. This makes it possible to back up the code.
- Enable collaborative work between developers. Indeed, when a developer adds code, he wants to be sure that the base he is working on is up to date in relation to that of others: this makes it possible to manage additions without conflicts or inconsistencies between different developers.
In this way, all developers have access to libraries, tools, project overviews and more.
GitHub Trending
On this page you can find the best-rated repositories.
For example, today (05/19/2017) the project with the most stars (1480)
: Kotlin.
Why Kotlin?
Google recently announced (at an Android development conference) the native integration of Kotlin for Android development.
Kotlin is a language developed in Russia by the JetBrains team (Jetbrains is well known for its IDEs, notably android studio, which has been massively adopted by the android community.)
One repercussion: Kotlin finds itself in a strong position.
I sometimes follow another page for my daily watch: Hacker News (on ycombinator.com). Hacker News is also a participatory platform.
I noticed that this site also talked a lot about Kotlin.
Tips: There are extensions for saving articles. I personally use Pocket which is an extension bought by Mozilla that lets you save an article or a link directly to your account, allowing you to re-read the content of the link even offline.
In parallel, I sometimes visit blogs (eg: The blog of David Walsh)
For my weekly watch, all I need is open my mailbox to read weekly newsletters on subjects that interest me (e.g. on Node, React..).
Finally, the last way in which we keep up to date with the latest technology is through the exchanges we have with other developers, be they debates or simple conversations.
What would currently rank as the best tools for developing mobile applications?
Based on my technology watch and my own experience, the best current tools seem to be:
- React Native is still a good tool with potential for mobile application development. This tool certainly doesn't offer the same performance as native development, but it still has a good growth curve. It also offers the possibility of developing web and cross-platform applications.
- I will then quote Xamarin. This tool developed by Microsoft appears to be effective for cross-platform development.
- Kotlin for Android development.
- Swift for the development of a application on iOS.
