RedMonk April 2024 Update
A small, sharp research firm focusing on developer-led technology adoption and developer culture. We help folks understand the industry by understanding you.
Hello and welcome to our new newsletter.
You might be asking - why now? Who launches a newsletter in 2024, anyway? Well apparently - RedMonk. Hey - you’re lucky we didn’t launch it earlier this week, on April 1st. Naturally we discussed that possibility. It’s pretty wild that Google Mail was launched on April Fools Day 20 years ago this week. Talk about a harbinger of the cloud revolution, a tool that ushered in new ways of working.
So yeah - change and revolution. We’re facing tumultuous times in tech, which is nothing new. But in 2024 it feels like the work RedMonk does is more important than ever - we help folks get a handle on the industry and quite frankly there is a lot to get our collective heads around. The rise of generative AI. The end of zero interest rates, with all its financial and strategic implications. Ongoing layoffs. Questions about the future of open source. The return of purchasing-led IT. The emergence of second and third generation developer experience-led companies.
So that’s a lot to put into context, and for us context has always been based on community. Analysis for and by the people. At its heart RedMonk is, and always has been, about community - which is one reason we’ve always leaned into social media. But of course social media is changing too. The end of twitter, with its long, often happy, sometimes angry, run of meme-led sharing amongst like minds, replaced by X, with its strategic bias towards crypto, grift and friends of Elon. Twitter was frankly very good to RedMonk, and while we’re still using it, there is no doubt it has lost a lot of its power as a tool for engagement in tech and developer communities. Of course Mastodon has its adherents, and BlueSky too, even Threads deserves a mention. Me? I am enjoying Linkedin for the engagement, yo. But with social media fragmentation, traffic just ain’t what it used to be.
One of the great beauties of social media, like RSS before it, was that it was opt-in. RedMonk has never been about push, and pushy, growth marketing. We’re about sustaining a community and learning from it. So a free newsletter felt like a great place to focus our attention, and do what we always have done. Email is the great survivor. There are plenty of great think pieces about the rise of newsletters. This intro was never intended as one, however. So let’s move on, now, shall we?
What will you get in our newsletter? Some interesting links that the team wants to share - because the best ideas are always found elsewhere. My linkroll used to be a popular feature back when blogs were in their pomp. So this is kind of back to the future (isn’t everything in tech?). You’ll get the research our team has written. We have great writers and want to make sure you don’t miss anything. We’ll share some great videos here. You’ll get some additional analysis and context tying everything together. We’ll highlight some talented friends that might be looking for a new role. Stuff like that. The good stuff.
So about this edition.
The rise and rise of frontend engineering is definitely worth paying attention to - if you want to understand it then we got you. Dr. Kate Holterhoff leads our coverage there, and she’s doing a frankly bang up job of putting frontend into context - as a career, as a buying center, as as a set of communities and associated technologies.
Then there are our regular Programming Language Rankings, which recently dropped. If you’re interested in the choices developers are making then this study continues to be a goldmine. If you’re interested in why developers are making these choices then that’s exactly what RedMonk is here for. Y’all know about C++, Go, and TypeScript of course - but what’s up with up and coming languages like Dart, Bicep, and Zig? And no - I didn’t make that last one up. OK- How about Grain and Moonbit? Ok maybe I made those ones up. Or did I? Read on, to find out.
As I alluded to above, the entire practice of open source is currently under challenge in a way that it simply hasn’t been in more than two decades of inexorable rise. So of course you want to turn to our resident open source licensing expert Stephen O’Grady to help explain things - his piece on AI - the difference between Open and Open Source is essential reading (see more below.)
Open source may be under challenge but there is certainly life in it yet. Most of The team traveled to Kubecon Europe in Paris earlier and and we had a great time - lime bikes and natural wine for the win. The Cloud Native ecosystem in Europe is in very rude health. It was the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s biggest event yet, and it was a vibe - the engagement of practitioners with the people building the tools they use every day was just a tonic. Hats off to the CNCF.
Finally, and personally speaking, I was super pleased that the European trip also included my own conference Monki Gras, which returned after a looooooooong hiatus. We are so back. Talking of being back - Monki Gras 2025 will be in London the week before Kubecon Europe, on the 27th and 28th March 2025. You literally heard it here first - see, that’s why you need our newsletter in your life.
We’d love your feedback - let us know what you’d like more of from this newsletter, but also please share it widely, subscribe!!!, get your friends on board, you know the drill. Developers, architects, product managers, community folks, VCs, strategists - come one and all. I guess people don't really say smash the like any more, but smash the like anyway.
James Governor, RedMonk co-founder
Recent RedMonk Research
While we will have more coming about how the event went, Rachel Stephens summed up day one of the epic return of Monki Gras, including thanks to our sponsors AWS, Civo, Deepset, the CNCF, Neo4j, MongoDB, Akamai, Griptape, Screenly, Pagerduty, and the amazing Betty Junod (who personally sponsored a round of delicious beer)
Cisco DevNet is running Build for Better, an AI & Sustainability code challenge (and ICYMI, happy 10th anniversary, DevNet!) RM clients mentioned: Cisco
Some thoughts on open source, AI and Gemma from Steve O'Grady: AI: The Difference Between Open and Open Source. RM clients mentioned: Google
Steve O'Grady and Rachel Stephens examine trends in programming language use and trends over time, with commentary on both established languages like C++, Go, and TypeScript alongside thoughts on up and coming languages like Dart, Bicep, Zig, and others.
The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2024. RM Clients mentioned: GitHub, AWS, Google
RedMonk Top 20 Languages Over Time: January 2024. RM Clients mentioned: AWS, GitHub
Kate Holterhoff's series on the growing importance of front end developers.
Why the Frontend Kingmaker isn’t Full-Stack: A History RM Clients mentioned: Google, Docker
Featured Article
The Future of Frontend is Already Here RM clients mentioned: Cloudflare, Oracle (Java), MongoDB, Microsoft (GitHub), Google, and AWS
Engineers focused on the top of the stack are the Newest New Kingmakers because the software industry as a whole is trending toward packaged, managed, and abstracted solutions intended to minimize the pain of backend and infra—precisely the type of development that frontend engineers have little interest in doing themselves. [read more]
Recent Videos and Media Appearances
Senior Analyst KellyAnn Fitzpatrick sat down with Chetan Kapoor (Director of Product Management for the Amazon EC2 Accelerated Computing Portfolio) to discuss how the custom silicon developed at Annapurna Labs is a differentiator for AWS: AI and Custom Silicon at Annapurna Labs (with AWS)
The Monks traveled to Austin, TX, to report on AWS technology in action at Formula 1™ events. The analysts discuss their initial impressions, the technology they saw in play, and their overall takeaways from the events: A Quick(ish) Take On Fast Cars: RedMonk Talks AWS Technology in F1™
A RedMonk Conversation with Kate Holterhoff and Carl Sverre, creator of SQLSync and founder of orbitinghail (Realtime, collaborative SQLlite) on "A Frontend Optimized Database Stack"
A RedMonk Conversation with Kate Holterhoff and Simon Willison, founder of Datasette, co-creator of Django, and expert in AI technologies, on "Industry’s Tardy Response to the AI Prompt Injection Vulnerability"
RedMonk explores the ways that GitLab Duo can bring AI abilities to all aspects of the app dev lifecyle in "What is GitLab Duo and How To Use AI to Improve the Development Lifecycle"
Links Roundup
Write the Docs Portland--a conference about software documentation and community--kicks off later this month (and a shoutout to RedMonk clients MongoDB and Google for sponsoring this event)
Valkey, a project forked after Redis Labs changed their license terms, now has a home in the Linux Foundation and major industry players vowing to support it: Big money lines up behind a Redis fork
The article is mid, but this last sentence is a doozy. "In a presentation earlier this month, the venture-capital firm Sequoia estimated that the AI industry spent $50 billion on the Nvidia chips used to train advanced AI models last year, but brought in only $3 billion in revenue."
An excellent take from Tidelift on the xz hack and why we need to pay open source maintainers.
RedMonk Recommends
One of the things we wanted to do with this newsletter is use it as an opportunity to introduce those of you looking for talented people to individuals we know who are in the market for a new role.
This month, that individual is Taylor Barnett-Torabi, most recently a developer advocate with PlanetScale. We’ve known Taylor for years, and besides being an excellent human to interact with, she’s the kind of developer advocate that deeply understands product. To that end, she’s currently looking for either a product role or a DevRel role with a strong focus and influence on product. She talks more about what she’s looking for here, but if you’re in the market for someone with excellent skills that RedMonk has enjoyed interacting with, give Taylor a call.
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Meet the Monks
Events we'll be attending:
Intel Vision: 4/8 - 4/9/2024, Phoenix, AZ
QCon London: 4/8 - 4/10/2024, London, UK
Google Cloud Next 2024: 4/9 - 4/11/2024, Las Vegas, NV
Devnexus 2024: 4/9 - 4/11/2024, Atlanta, GA
Open Source Summit North America: 4/16 - 4/18/2024, Seattle, WA
Atlassian Team’24: 4/29 - 5/2/2024, Las Vegas, Virtual
Events we'll be hosting:
RedMonk Beers Denver Area: 5/13/2024, Broomfield, CO
Our mailing address is:
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