State.of.dev

Today I released State.of.dev, a project that visualizes the current state of development split by key topics. It’s great, amazing, you will love it…

I love visualisations of data. It provides a quick overview at first glance, but also a deeper meaning between relations when zoomed in. One of my favourite visualisations is the Gartner Hype Cycle:

Gartner, a IT consultancy, has been creating them for decades now. They try to capture the state of emerging technologies, by separating hype from productivity.

It places topics from VR, AR, Machine Learning, IoT and Quantum Computing in one visual representation. A chart. Its horizontal axis indicate the techs’ phase, while the vertical axis indicates expectations.

What makes this visualisation so attractive, is that it provides you with a starting point for understanding and exploring a certain market and it’s key technologies.

That information can help you decide whether to either invest your time and money into an emerging technology, or wait for the hype to pass.

Another example is Forrester, another consultancy, who made the following graph to capture the state of Big Data Hadoop cloud players:

Cloud players and their big data offering.

Personally it holds a bit too much information (strategy quality, product offering depth, and market presence) but provides an interesting overview of the positioning of the players in the market.

From that foundation the idea behind stateofdev.com evolved. It provides a broad range of expert topics, specific market chart types, and identifies relevant (emerging) technologies by positioning them in the phases they are in.

Programming languages ‘17

State.of.dev has interactive graphs representing the current state of development in the topics: technology, javascript frameworks, web standards, design trends, SEO and over 15 more, grouped by specific expertises like frontend, startups or mobile.

What it solves

• Helicopter overview of what’s happening (innovation, adoption, trends) within a market without having to extract that individually from news sites, newsletters, forums, et al.
• Learn about the latest emerging technologies, paradigms, trends and tools.
• Foundation to make actionable decisions on the maturity and adoption lifecycle of key trends.

What it should evolve into

• Resource for the latest on technology innovation.
• Visualisation of the state of an (expert) topic, identifying the current relevant trends and their state.
• Starting point for more in-depth research.
• Expert and/or community input on every release.
• Timeline of how trends evolve within a technology.
• Broad range op topics (beyond web dev).

What it is now

• A very early beta release, with a first version of the charts and background information.
• State of web development, based on my own expertise (no external contributions yet).

Check it out.

The live homepage, as a screenshot

PS: If you want to contribute ping me Yvo Schaap.