Stack overflow recently released a survey of its users, and while it had a lot of insights into the current world of software development, two charts stood out to me as exceptional.

If you are not familiar with stackoverflow.com, it is in most developers opinion the best place to find solutions for technical questions. When coding a program, and you run across an error message that doesn’t make sense, or confusion on how to do something in your language of choice, stackoverflow is the place for answers.

Anyway, in this survey, here are the two charts that stood out to me.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019/

This is the best display of the different galaxies in the computer universe. Most developers live in one, maybe two of the galaxies, and this maps all the related languages and tools nicely. If you are a developer looking to expand your skills, this gives a great idea of the technologies and tools that might be the most helpful to you in your collection of skills.

The second chart gave interesting insight to the problem of lack of women in software development:

In the decades of my software development experience, I have noticed how the ratio of female developers has dropped off. In the early part of my career, my bosses were mostly women, and the ratio of programmers was pretty evenly split. Looking at the above chart, you can see how that has changed. But this chart shows change might be coming. The areas with the best concentration of women in tech is in the researcher and data science area. The world of programming will look a lot different in 10 years as the focus moves more to data science and less on algorithmic programming. Give machines the data, and they can write the program will be the new mantra (for better or for worse). So assuming this prediction comes true, its it appears that the gender gap in software development will start to close. As a side note, in the world of data science, it will be important to get a wide variety of skilled workers, as data bias could be a real threat in the future. Heaven help us if we leave to the bubble of silicon valley to determine how the world should be defined in the future.

If the world of software development interests you, take some time to go though this stack overflow survey. It gives interesting insight into the minds that are creating the technology that will be changing our world.