You as a programmer, do you live under constant fear of your job being outsourced, or shipped overseas or you being ousted by another smart coder? If the answer to even one these questions is a yes, then this is a wakeup call for you to specialize.
“There is demand, but no supply of good programmers” complain the tech giants. So how does a developer live up to the industry standards where rote coding and code maintenance are easily classified as nothing more than low-value functions and ones that are easily outsourced.
There is no denying that coding is still a lucrative job. But with most of the code available as library functions and thousands of public code repositories, even cream of the crop in industry do not fall back on copy-pasting the code from the readily available sources or easily outsourcing it to third party companies. So developers who want to maintain an advantage, and prove to be the best of the lot, in today's job market need to specialize.
With IT sector growing at a faster pace than expected, it throws open new genres in technology to explore each day, new possibilities to live up to and challenges to confront. So according to Neil McAllister from Developers World, given below are the five specialized skill areas that are sure to experience rapid growth in the coming years.
1) Cross-Platform Mobile Developers
Tech savvy or not, customers buy their phones based on features, applications, budget and the Smart Phone stands a winner for its convenience and novelty. The Smartphone model chosen by a user actually determines the OS preferred, and with so many players emerging in the market every day, the only trick developers’ need to know is how to access APIs that enable their various features, regardless of platform. This is not possible and easy, because each platform demands a different set of programming, which means a specialized programming language for every app, for every platform, using different set of tools.
Mobile tool makers and vendors can be of great help for cross-platform mobile app development if they build their tools to be compatible on multiple platforms. And developers who are well versed in two or more mobile ecosystems will find themselves in highest demand.
2) Mainframe/Cloud Integration Specialist
Cloud computing is famously called the reincarnation of mainframe and cloud computing platforms are all the rage for Web applications. But some mainframe advocates argue that developing a private cloud would be redundant, as the mainframe provides the flexible, agile and combined with environment promised with cloud computing. The facts rest assured, cloud computing is being adopted at a faster pace by smaller organizations but players in large sectors like retailing, finance, insurance, banking and telecom, mainframe rules the roost.
But now there is a hype to move applications from mainframe to cloud and engineers who speak both COBOL and JAVA with equal ease will be the ones in demand because companies migrating their sensitive –mission -critical transaction -processing applications off their mainframes will look forward for programmers who they can rely on to bridge the two worlds. So Integration is the buzz word here and you can be the winner if you are one among the rare breed of native mainframe programmer learning a lot of virtual cloud.
3) Cloud Migration Engineer
A lot said and done about cloud computing, but now companies investing heavily in the cloud data storage are facing troubles of different kinds. Cloud came with many pros attached but with cons not so far behind. Cloud computing makes IT excessively dependent on the Internet but improved time to application development.
But markets are still experiencing growing pains and cost advantage of public cloud offering is still not clear. Mixed response from company’s who have accepted cloud offerings for their features, security and stability might soon start feeling frustrated over the services providers. Network bandwidth may soon become a bottleneck with some services.
As soon as the hype around cloud computing starts wearing off and with multiple options available, companies will start treating their service providers as vendors and hunt for other others who can grant higher services. When they are not happy with one vendor, they’ll take businesses to others.
Now cloud integration specialists have a major role to play when data is moved from one cloud to another more mature cloud storage service. Knowing ins and outs of various cloud vendors APIs, SLAs, services, and supported technologies will be a boon to companies who plan to switch service providers in a hurry.
4) RIA Portability Specialist
Rich Internet Applications (RIA), a rage with web developers, and they are not moving away from rich content application. But plug-ins to deliver sophisticated graphics and interactivity saw a walk out some time ago.
Flash and Silverlight have been ousted by HTML5 and its related technologies which has a way forward. Steve Jobs banned using Flash in Apple’s iOS platforms and has since been on the verge of death along with Silverlight whose future looks bleak.
But what about Flash and Silverlight videos, high in education content, valuable education, e-commerce applications and data visualization which have already been deployed across the web. These need to be preserved for the future use with a priority.
Now the demand is for RIA portability specialists as conversion from Flash to HTML5 isn't easy. HTML authoring tools for rich applications are emerging, but only slowly. So the demand is growing for web developers who have tasted both waters, who are ahead and have a bend for HTML5 and firmly rooted in yesteryears plugin-based technologies.
5) Parallel Computing Architect
With multi processor CPU’s streaming in, technology phasing out its own inventions each new day, applications scale out, not up. Stark reality is parallel computing is still yet to be realized for its full potential, one of the least understood disciplines in software development.
Major tool development vendors have projects underway to help make build parallel computing applications. Languages such as Google’s Go and IBM’s X10 that make designing concurrent algorithms more intuitive have been developed. But none of these efforts have yet made multiprocessing reachable and accessible to developers as parallel computing requires more than just new tools, an out of the box thinking and developers who can provide the picture perfect effective concurrent application design will be the need of the hour.
The era of QWERTY keypads and touchscreens on phones has made texting without seeing one’s phone inevitable. But what if you could text without ever looking at your phone?
15400, considering this price Lumia 610 is expected to cost around 
The mails that showed up in the accounts’ inboxes from November 14 to December 20 are sorted into HAM (wanted email) and SPAM.
In a response to the result, Hotmail’s group programme manager Dick Craddock wrote in a blog, “Our years of improvements in Hotmail’s SmartScreen technology have led to record low rates of spam in the inbox (SITI), we’ve driven SITI down below 3% for a typical Hotmail inbox, and, more importantly, we’ve kept the number there."
