(2020-01-28) Ten Technologies To Know In 2020 - Postlight Digital Product Studio

Gina Trapani of Postlight: Ten Technologies to Know in 2020. Here are 10 of the technologies, terms, and tools to know about in 2020.

1. Jobs To Be Done

2. GraphQL

That trend is only going to continue in 2020, especially as a new generation of GraphQL tooling emerges, including Hasura, PostGraphile, and our very own Glide.

3. Elixir and Rust

4. Yap

5. Firefox

With speed equal to or better than Chrome in most cases (and without turning your Mac’s fans into a jet engine), clever resource efficiency improvements, and a renewed focus on privacy

6. JAMStack

Typically JAMStack projects use static site generators like Gatsby or Jekyll to pre-render static files that use JavaScript for API requests and interactivity. These files get deployed on static site hosts like one of our favorites, Netlify. The resulting site is cost-efficient, performant, and easy to scale.

7. Codeless Platforms

or no-code

We see apps like Notion and Airtable and Zapier used for everything from note-taking and scheduling to creating a lightweight CRM or CMS.

8. Glitch

9. Product-Led Growth

How do you turn your users into your sales team? By offering a product that’s so good for free that users become its evangelists. Product-led growth built companies like Slack and Dropbox and Jira, and in 2020, the trend will continue–especially in collaboration-ware tools that spread as one person introduces it, and invites their team to work with them on it.

10. Serverless

Here at Postlight, we reduced the cost of our biggest-traffic tool by several orders of magnitude by migrating to a serverless architecture.

Paul Ford and Rich Ziade did a podcast episode from this list: Top Trends of 2020. (I didn't re-link things below)

this time we have a gift in our hands, Paul.

PF Oh my goodness.*

RZ Gina Trapani, Managing Partner at Postlight, former founder of Lifehacker.**

She’s like, “I was on the bus and I wrote 20 things to look out for in 2020.”

the Jobs to be Done tipping point might be coming in 2020

Jobs to be Done.

Jobs to be Done is a theory of consumer action

GraphQL

There’s another technology called Post Graphile

people have gone, “Why the hell do we need all this stuff in the middle? Why don’t I write one little program that turns the database into a REST API? Cuz that—we’ll do it better if we do it exactly once by the rules, and then you define your SQL schema.

Hasura is a framework for doing that. There’s another one called PostGraphile.

The next one is Elixir

But the syntax for Erlang was based on Prolog

I played with Gatsby over the holiday. The more I played with it, the less I have an answer. Let me give you an answer though that I think serves which is that you know how Javascript is made out of zillions of little pieces now and they all kinda glue together and make a new Javascript program? Like this is what people do all day. Gatsby’s that but a content management system. So, you’ve got React components on the front-end, markdown files for writing your blog or website content, a lot of CSS and CSS expanders sort of built in the middle.

There’s a thing going on because it’s hard to deploy it all. AWS is big, right? Like you go to AWS and there’s eight million different services. Gatsby—the idea—there’s these things like ZEIT and Netlify where you’re kinda one command away from deploying.

Codeless platforms: Notion, Airtable.

I feel like this is just FileMaker

Don’t try to glue things together that aren’t designed to be glued.

Glitch is a client

You can drop a SQLite database into Glitch, put a little code in front of it, and have an API running in like a minute.

Product-Led Growth.

really, I think, Product-Led Growth is just design in a trojan horse

It’s like meeting a friend in a crowd! And you’re like, “Oh my God! Look at that! They [stammers] didn’t put drop shadows!”

RZ Yeah, you know, and we’ve implemented Salesforce.com and we understand its value but my God!

RZ Ok, if you pull up Salesforce and just open that interface [Paul sighs] for the first time and there’s none of your data’s in there yet, right? And there’s just dropdowns inside of dropdowns that have dropdowns within them and what you see is the antithesis of Product-Led Growth. To me, what Salesforce is is Data-Led Growth, right? They are about, “Give me the thing and I will put it in the box for you. Don’t sweat it. Once it’s in there, it’s never coming out.”

The core reality though is that the experience of Salesforce onboarding is like a high pitched dental drill.

most people don’t get that experience. What they do is they get corporate login and they go in and they see their cards and they say, “Oh my God, I need to make 48 calls today.”

5G.

the tech rollout isn’t going that great. Like, nobody’s lining up to buy 5G phones

I’m watching Netflix no problem on my phone on the bus home.