5 Key Areas for Tech Leaders to Watch in 2020

O’Reilly online learning contains information about the trends, topics, and issues tech leaders need to watch and explore. It’s also the data source for our annual usage study, which examines the most-used topics and the top search terms.¹

This combination of usage and search affords a contextual view that encompasses not only the tools, techniques, and technologies that members are actively using, but also the areas they’re gathering information about.

Current signals from usage on the O’Reilly online learning platform reveal:

• Python is preeminent. It’s the single most popular programming language on O’Reilly, and it accounts for 10% of all usage. This year’s growth in Python usage was buoyed by its increasing popularity among data scientists and machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) engineers.

• Software architecture, infrastructure, and operations are each changing rapidly. The shift to cloud native design is transforming both software architecture and infrastructure and operations. Also: infrastructure and operations is trending up, while DevOps is trending down. Coincidence? Probably not, but only time will tell.

• ML + AI are up, but passions have cooled. Up until 2017, the ML+AI topic had been amongst the fastest growing topics on the platform. Growth is still strong for such a large topic, but usage slowed in 2018 (+13%) and cooled significantly in 2019, growing by just 7%. Within the data topic, however, ML+AI ...