Neo Vision’s Weekly Rant #48

Welcome to your weekly tech digest! We're diving headfirst into an intriguing phenomenon permeating the digital landscape – the "Ennui Engine," a term coined by Max Patrick Schlienger.

Imagine if your actions, despite being meaningless or ineffective, could mystically summon your desired outcomes. This was the belief of cargo cults in Melanesia post-World War II. Now, fast forward to our current digital age. Are we, too, caught in similar patterns but in the realm of online content?

As we navigate through endless streams of tweets, memes, and TikToks, we're favouring bite-sized, low-effort content, almost mimicking the behaviours of those cargo cults. This preference for ease over quality has spun a complex web, encouraging the production of more low-effort content. The result? A self-perpetuating "Ennui Engine."

As tech enthusiasts, we're in the front row, witnessing this self-perpetuating cycle of low-effort content creation and consumption, which paradoxically both fuels and is fueled by our insatiable hunger for novelty. How does this affect the quality of the content we consume and produce? And more importantly, how can we navigate this "Ennui Engine" effectively?

The Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2023 offers valuable insights into the current trends and preferences in the developer community. Key findings touch upon learning resources, popular tools, language preferences, work modalities, and more, based on responses from over 90,000 developers.

Some key insights

• Online learning for coding increased from 70% to 80% since 2022​​.

• Docker is now the top-used tool among all respondents​.

• Jira, Confluence, and markdown files are the top async tools among developers​​.

• Rust is the most admired programming language​​.

• Phoenix is the most admired web framework and technology​​.

• More respondents want to continue using Cargo and Docker next year​​.

• 42% of ChatGPT users are interested in Google Bard or Bing AI next year​​.

• Zig is the highest-paid language to know this year​​.

• There's an increase in independent contractors and freelancers compared to last year​​.

• Hybrid work is most prevalent in larger organizations​.

• 63% of respondents spend more than 30 minutes a day searching for answers or solutions​​.

• Most developers (84%) have a post-secondary education​​.

• The survey delved deeply into AI/ML, revealing how developers are incorporating it into their workflows. Stack Overflow is notably investing in AI to enhance the developer experience across its products​.

• 70% of all respondents are using or planning to use AI tools in their development process this year. Notably, those learning to code are more likely to be using or planning to use AI tools compared to professional developers​.