As 2015 is drawing to a close and we thought it may be a good idea to dig around in our project data to see if there are any trends that may help us gear up for 2016.

Here is a super quick snapshot of 2015 in tech and what it may mean for 2016.

Frontend vs backend
The eternal struggle that is Front-End Development vs Back-End Development. Well, for us it’s 60/40 in favour of the former. This surely can be attributed to the renaissance in recent years of Front-End Development, with the “Death of Flash”™, Responsive Design and Javascript leaps like Node, Angular and React that Front-End Development is no longer consigned to the “just make it pretty’ category.
stack

JS Frameworks
Over the last year Angular has become the firm favourite amongst our clients. With over an estimated 1 million developers using Angular (1), it’s obviously a favourite with the development community. That success has been at the expense of Backbone.js whilst React continues a steady but not meteoritic rise, and of course there’s old faithful, jQuery. Yes, we all know the advantage of writing ‘vanilla’ JS but to deny the ubiquity of jQuery would be a disservice.
js framework

Preprocessors
Sass is the winner by a country mile when it comes to CSS preprocessors, Less just doesn’t have the traction. At Cohaesus we’ve been experimenting with PostCSS and so far we’ve really enjoyed it; its use by clients has been low-level but we’re excited about the new year.

Now that LibSass has reached parity with Ruby Sass, is it the end of the Sass vs Less question?


PHP
Laravel, Laravel, Laravel. It’s all we hear at the moment. And to be honest, we are more than happy to listen. Laravel takes care of so much of the overheads that keep developers from getting on with the task at hand, but unlike other frameworks the developers still feel in control. The documentation is solid and the community is strong, we expect to see many more Laravel based projects in 2016.
php frameworks

Content Management Systems

C#
Sitecore has a reputation for being a bit of a behemoth as such it accounts for 50% of our C# CMS work. It is of course the de rigeur choice for Enterprise clients who want a .Net based solution, but for the smaller projects it’s definitely the Open Source Umbraco which has a 40% share of our C# projects: its newest incarnation is proving really popular with developers as well as content creators. Kentico is another choice for this category, but with our clients it has just 10%.

c-sharp CMS

Java
Adobe continues to push its flagship CMS, Adobe Experience Manager; so far though it’s sitting at 20% of requests but we are pretty sure it’s going to get much more popular in 2016 and at the expense of Teamsite which is hogging 60% of all our Java CMS projects. 60% !

Alterian Content Manager or SDL Web as it’s now known has the remaining 20% of Java CMS projects.
java-cms

PHP
Good old WordPress, the platform that supposedly powers almost a quarter of all websites takes second place in our chart (30%), with ever maturing Drupal at the top with 40% of our PHP CMS work with a further 10% of the Acquia variety. Concrete 5 and Expression Engine take up the rest.
php-cms

Junior Developers
A development (pun intended) over the last 12 months has been the substantial increase in assignments for Junior Developers. It seems our clients are taking advantage of being able to hire Developers at this level, where in the past it’s been really difficult to find anyone available who considers themselves less than a mid-weight. That’s not to underestimate the pool of talent Cohaesus has at Junior or the sterling work they do, but so often our clients have found themselves paying senior level money to a freelancer to do junior level work.

Developers

 

Read more about CMSs, JS and PHP