In this ever- changing world of system development its extremely important to keep up with current technologies, methodologies and

trends. There is no time to learn all new stuff so being selective is the key. Based on the information at the Gartner report Predict 2014: Application Development and search through IT websites I created this small list of things I feel we all should pay attention to and practice. 1. Study agile methods and concepts: Agile methodology is not only for managers. There is a need for the whole team to have a good understanding about their own development and management process. It helps to standardize management and daily programmer work, enforcing a small, controllable (develop/release/testing) cycle and also encourage good communication all across the team. Some important parts of Agile methods are : Test Driven Development (TDD), Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Extreme Programming (XP) and Continuous Integration (CI). 2. Learn and use modern scripting language such JAVA: Make JavaScript expertise a priority. Leaders should be careful to qualify Web programmer candidates who claim JavaScript expertise. It means the candidate has extensive "experience" cutting and pasting code found in a Web search. Indeed, it should be the basic requirement for any developers. JavaScript will embrace these wow, look how elegant and simple that is! solutions also become expectations with time because we will get used to the ease and convenience. As a result, this will help improving all of our further designs and codes. 3. Learn and embrace the philosophy of modern version control system: Like Mercurial. We should embrace the paradigm shift that gave birth to these tools. These tools fit better to a natural cycle of development than old tools such Apache Subversion (SVN) or Concurrent Versions System (CVS). These modern tools encourage the concept of local branching, keeping us safe by being able to revert any time. 4. Be familiar with NoSQL solutions like MongoDB or CouchDB These solutions can be a real life-saver when traditional relational DBs reach their limits at scaling and performance. These are called document-oriented database which means that instead of rigid schemas the structure of each row is take into account-they dont even have to have the same fields. The concept of row becomes the concept of document. Dynamic queries, efficient storage of binary data (like videos, images), mapreduce support account for their robust and easy use-case. 5. Adopt Cloud Computing: Of all other trends on the list, cloud computing is one of more interesting and in my opinion, now least controversial. There are far more reasons to adopt cloud technologies than just cost reduction and lack of visibility into the stack remain one of the top issues for large companies. Such a technology will help these large enterprises to downsize their data centers. Moreover, it helps in business agility, vendor choice, and access to next-generation architectures. However, there are some challenges to this trend. One is that many CIOs and heads of IT just feel they cant yet trust the cloud, despite many cloud providers being more reliable than internal infrastructure. Other, fast in performance since large amount of data will go into and out the cloud. Will this happen quickly enough without any drawbacks?!