Summing up the technological results of 2023: checking what trends we have properly recognized at the beginning of the year, revealing some of the projects we have been working on, and taking a look into 2024!

The absolute champion of 2023 is artificial intelligence. This field will remain the most relevant in IT for at least the next five years, increasingly permeating all areas of our lives. AI will help optimize data, perform complex tasks, and make decisions with unprecedented accuracy.

Quite in line with our predictions, Big Data and AI are being used in a wide range of fields; thanks to these technologies, some areas, particularly medicine, have undergone significant transformations, with projects reaching a new level. For example, one of Noveo teams implemented a project at the intersection of preventive and predictive medicine, transplantology, and artificial intelligence: thanks to the client's solutions, healthcare specialists can now determine the most suitable donor for a each  patient, assess the probability and possible causes of transplant rejection, and come up with an appropriate treatment plan to optimize post-surgery recovery and rehabilitation. On top of that, the customer has also developed a telemonitoring platform, enabling medical staff to quickly identify and respond to any kind of changes in the condition of their patients.

AI and machine learning are also actively used in the IT sphere, assisting software developers in designing, coding, and testing applications. In the future, programmers will be able to spend less time writing code and pay more attention to strategic tasks. Of course, we are not talking about replacing people with computers completely; at least not yet. Moreover, these technologies pose new concerns, such as copyright issues. Who owns the code generated by Copilot? Or a book written by a machine? Or a digital image generated by a simulated neural network from your photograph? These questions present a big challenge for lawyers.

Blockchain, which was so hyped at the beginning of the year, remained in fact mostly within the realm of cryptocurrencies, but expanded widely and firmly there; it also comfortably settled in the NFT space for images, essentially finding its application in fields offering quick income or the possibility of preserving it. No new or alternative uses for it have been found for the mass consumer yet; let's see what happens next.

The long-standing trend of moving to cloud storage remains relevant: greater stability compared to local servers attracts both long-established market giants and brand-new startup companies. Besides, cloud infrastructure is well-suited for scaling and optimization, making it a strategically sound decision.

When we say “cloud computing,” we mean Amazon Web Services or AWS: despite a growing range of alternative solutions, the platform continues to hold a leading position in the market. Over the past year, the Noveo team has completed a series of projects with this service. One of them involved design and development of AWS infrastructure for a greenfield IoT cloud platform, where Python AWS Cloud Development Kit, or CDK, is used for the “infrastructure as code” approach which allowed for the definition of even the deepest parts of the AWS ecosystem. Another great example is development and maintenance of AWS applications for an IoT device manufacturer: automated IoT workflows in the cloud ensure that end users get the best possible experience from their devices. The entire project is built on TypeScript, AWS CDK, and AWS's native deployment tools like CloudFormation, CodeBuild, and CodePipeline.

In the next few years, the trend of moving to large cloud storages with additional services will be supported by data engineering tasks: collecting and systematizing (normalizing) data, merging various data formats collected from multiple sources and analyzing them, optimizing data storage, reducing data storage costs to optimize the company's budget, and more. This area is actively developing, and the speciality of Data Engineer is one of the most demanded on the market today. Our specialists are spearheading , a project for one of the leading European companies that specializes in private investments and asset management. The client's portfolio was quite impressive already as it includes small, medium, and large enterprises aiming to transform and strengthen their business, as well as investors and shareholders interested in developing promising and innovative teams. Experts provide comprehensive support in financing, legal assistance, communications, resource, and risk management, while a user-friendly online portal offers clients complete information about their assets, shares, capital investments, and investment strategies underway.

Within this project, we are working on such tasks as:

1. Design and construction of architecture and data flows;
2. Integration with third-party ETL solutions;
3. Development of guidelines for data models.

We are lucky to have a high-tech tool called “Snowflake” which is an elastic data storage service, greatly simplifying data structuring, analysis, and report preparation.

The next stage in the development of competencies in data analysis and structuring is Data Science. A Data Scientist is a specialist who works with data to solve business problems, operating at the intersection of programming, machine learning, and mathematics. The main responsibilities of a Data Scientist include collecting and analyzing data, building models, training, and testing them to meet the needs of a particular business they understand well. For example, at Noveo, such specialists are involved in a project for a major taxi service provider: they analyze data about taxi customers' behavior in different weather conditions, adjust pricing algorithms, and thereby increase the average bill. The competences of these specialists are also used to select algorithms for music or video content recommendations based on what the user has already watched or listened to.

Around summer, another trend became apparent - a significant interest from clients in finding external Product Owners. They need professionals who know how to create excellent products: Product Owners can understand the users’ pains and needs, figure out how to solve problems, and select methods and approaches for this. Business owners realize that they would do this work less effectively themselves, spending more effort and money than hired specialists with special education and a fresh perspective on the product.

When it comes to choosing technology, we can also see certain trends and make some assumptions about what will be in demand in the coming year. For instance, this is how we envision web development in 2024:

• Frontend: primarily React (we expect the most requests on this framework), followed by Vue and Angular at approximately equal positions. New frameworks do appear but don't bring anything revolutionary, and alternatives still have small communities.
• Backend: PHP (more Symfony, less Laravel), followed by Node.js (mainly the Nest.js framework), and to a lesser extent Python.
• QA will keep focusing on automation - mainly with Java/Kotlin, and in second place Python or Cypress.

As for mobile solution development, we expect clients to lean more towards well-proven hybrid technologies, such as React Native and Flutter.

Apparently, in 2024, we will see a further evolution of already existing trends. Will the new year bring us something unexpected or radically new? We'll find out soon :)