What Skills Will Developers Need?
If I could answer that question with utmost confidence I could be rich. There are a lot of different platforms working hard to become the industry standard.
There are those who like to build systems around big hardware that can scale up easily. Systems based on platforms like the AS400 or Unix allow a great variety of scalability. In contrast, clustering and grid based systems compete for scalability by scaling out.
So now the battle grounds have been pretty well defined. Many modern systems demonstrate the benefits of distributed and redundant work and the huge scale it can accommodate for web scale. I find it interesting that these companies who are front runners in using distributed processing also have a large investment in traditional large scale systems as well.
What are the differences and similarities of skills for these two different environments? With distributed systems, parallel programming is a must. You hear terms such as Map/Reduce as cornerstones for scalability.
With centralized environments pre-processing is often a key component. It focuses on questions already determined to be of value and optimized processes to gather data, pre-process it, index or optimize storage for rapid retrieval. In this environment ETL is a highly sought after skill set along with data mining.
Let’s open up the question and get your input. What are the skills you find most helpful in current and emerging technologies? Are there skills you find work in both worlds? What are the skills you have been using that transcend new software as it hits the mainstream? Send your thoughts to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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