Published on 29 December 2022 by Andrew Owen
(3 minutes)
I like to think that I have a fairly good track record of predicting the future, although usually in fairly vague terms. I’d been waiting for another pandemic ever since I read Michael Crichton’s “The Andromeda Strain” in the 1990s. Indeed, I correctly predicted the outcomes of most of the recent political votes that were on my radar. But in these polarized times, to invoke Dylan, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. So I’ll skip over the ongoing pandemic, war in Europe and climate crisis, and focus on technology. And if we’re both still here next year, we can see how well I did.
The easiest thing to predict is what I’m going to write about, because I’ve got at least a dozen blog ideas in draft form. That’s not to say that I’ll get to all of them next year, but they include a lot of topics that require more time to research than I’m usually able to allocate to a weekly article. So, here we go:
The learning curve for Kubernetes won’t improve. People will continue to look for alternatives to Kubernetes. Most of these alternatives will still have Kubernetes as a dependency of some kind.
Data will continue its migration from on-premises and at-home storage to remote servers. I’ll still be uncomfortable referring to remote servers as “the cloud”.
Despite storing vast amounts of their personal identifiable information online with social networks and computer retailers, people will continue to suck at picking good passwords. And IT department password policy will continue to be at odds with best practices.
More and more outlandish claims will be made for artificial intelligence. The perception of what it can do will massively outstrip the reality. Vast data sets of human created data will remain a requirement.
Lua will remain an obscure language outside of video games development. Parents will continue to introduce their kids to programming with Python. People will write even more desktop apps in JavaScript using Electron.
There will be a lot more talk about Web 3.0 without anyone really understanding what it is or why they would want it.
Virtual reality will remain a niche product.
Technical writing will begin to catch up with trends in software development from a decade ago. Docs as code will become more widely adopted.
The tech crunch will end. “TechCrunch”, the online magazine, will continue.
Twitter will remain the “free-for-all hellscape” that it has always been, but will stay in business.
Afterthought
One of the problems with Kubernetes is having to managing Systemd. A promising in-development alternative is Auræ. The auraed daemon can be run as a PID 1 on a Linux kernel and manages containers, virtual machines, and spawning short-lived nested virtual instances of itself for an additional layer of isolation.
