Technology Trends for 2024

Chapter 1. Technology Trends for 2024

This has been a strange year. While we like to talk about how fast technology moves, internet time, and all that, in reality the last major new idea in software architecture was microservices, which dates to roughly 2015. Before that, cloud computing itself took off in roughly 2010 (AWS was founded in 2006); and Agile goes back to 2000 (the Agile Manifesto dates back to 2001, Extreme Programming to 1999). The web is over 30 years old; the Netscape browser appeared in 1994, and it wasn’t the first. We think the industry has been in constant upheaval, but there have been relatively few disruptions: one every five years, if that.

2023 was one of those rare disruptive years. ChatGPT changed the industry, if not the world. We’re skeptical about things like job displacement, at least in technology. But AI is going to bring changes to almost every aspect of the software industry. What will those changes be? We don’t know yet; we’re still at the beginning of the story. In this report about how people are using O’Reilly’s learning platform, we’ll see how patterns are beginning to shift.

Just a few notes on methodology: This report is based on O’Reilly’s internal “Units Viewed” metric. Units Viewed measures the actual usage of content on our platform. The data used in this report covers January through November in 2022 and 2023. Each graph is scaled so that the topic with the greatest usage is 1. Therefore, the graphs can’t be compared directly to ...