Tools

Yarn, developed by Facebook is an alternative package manager for Node.js. Being an upgrade over the npm command line tool, it allows faster installs, better security and deterministic builds. As its backend, npm package registry is still used, so you have access to the same incredible ecosystem of JavaScript modules. Yarn is compatible with the package.json format used by npm, and can be installed quickly. 

The other two most prominent open source code editors – Visual Studio Code and Atom have been developed innovatively in the past 12 months. Both of these projects are built using web technologies and have attracted huge communities of fans. The plugins are available to editors which allows syntax checking, linting and refactoring tools for a large number of languages. 

Git is the most popular source code version control system out there. It does not have server and you can convert into a repository from any folder on your computer. You have many options to share code on like GitLab, Bitbucket and Github, to name a few. We suggest that you familiarize yourself with the git command line, as it will come in handy more times than you think. 

Desktop applications are not out of order yet. Even though web apps are becoming more and more capable, sometimes you need powerful capabilities and APIs that are simply not available to the web platform. You can write desktop applications with tools like Electron and NW.js by using web technologies. You get full access to the OS and the breadth of modules available to npm.

The developers now are in charge of their own software deployment, is a recent trend in software team organization. They are also called DevOps, this enables to faster releases and quicker fixes of bug issues in production. Developers with operations experience are highly valued by organizations, so familiarity with the technologies that enable it is going to be a huge plus from now on. We recommend some of the tools, Ansible and Docker. It will be a plus for you, if you have expertise in the Linux command line and basic system administration skills. 

You can try out one or more of these: Yarn, Git, Visual Studio Code, Electron, Ansible, Docker. 

Also Read: Databases To Learn In 2017

Tech

The cloud is becoming a leader in the entire software industry, with tech giants closing down their datacenters and moving their entire infrastructure over the cloud. The three main platforms are AWS, Google Cloud and MS Azure. All among the three are powerful to use, and have ever expanding feature sets, including virtual machines, hosted databases, machine learning services and much more. Prices are reducing gradually, and the cloud is becoming available to small companies and individual developers too. It would be a good learning experience for 2017, to deploy a side project to one of these providers. 

The buzzword of 2016 was Artificial Intelligence. Image classification and Speech recognition are only two of the user facing applications of the technology, with machines touching and even getting ahead of human level performance. A good number of startups are applying AI and Machine Learning to new domains. And a lot of open source projects were released like Google’s Tensor Flow and Microsoft’s Cognitive Toolkit. Machine Learning is a very math-heavy topic, there are comprehensive online courses available for the new ones to start. 

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) have been around for some time, but finally the technology is developed enough to offer a compelling experience. Google (Daydream), Facebook (Oculus Rift), and Microsoft (Windows Holographic) all have virtual reality platforms that welcome third party developers. VR headsets still face challenges like eliminating nausea and offering compelling use cases outside of gaming, but they are getting there. 

You can opt to learn one of these: Cloud deployment, a Machine Learning library, VR Development. 

Read Also: Languages To Learn in 2017