@expede and I recently met Tyler and his team. Lots of interesting things in this article.
The source is available in Github: https://github.com/TylerJewell/DevLandscape/
Starting in 2009, I began tracking each company whose products were sold to, purchase-influenced by, or consumed by software developers.
I call this the Developer-Led Landscape.
While there is a significant overlap with DevOps, many DevOps landscapes exclude developer tooling (like design IDEs) while including IT Operations not part of a developer’s workflow (like network monitoring).
We are on a path where every form of digital asset is going to become an Application Programming Interface (API). Many of these APIs are network accessible, becoming programmable endpoints. I’ve speculated that we’ll have more than 1 trillion programmable endpoints by 2035. The growth in programmers and the trend of disaggregating architecture to design systems of scale are the largest accelerants.
It Takes a Mega Vendor to Straddle Pre-Production and Production
You can be a very large vendor (billions in revenue) that spans Dev Tooling and Dev Infrastructure. You can also be a very large vendor that is a Dev Platform.
However, to span all three you need to be a Mega Vendor.
Every so often, seemingly on a 5–10 year cycle, a developer abstraction on top of programming languages, frameworks, infrastructure or platforms materializes. These abstractions introduce >10x productivity enhancements that (generally) attract significant (and fervent) developer adoption.
Programming Languages. Increasingly we are seeing old and new languages that incorporate distributed systems concepts into their syntax. Why think of the network as a bolt-on module which is conceptually hard to program when it can be embedded into the language itself? Error handling and scaffolding coding can be eliminated. There is interesting work being done by Darklang, XTC, Julia, Web Assembly, Elm, Rust, and Ballerina. Will any of these hit mainstream?
In the next 10-20 years, I believe we will see a massive disruption in the Developer-Led Landscape driven by the emergence of Autonomous Software Development.
I call this the Third Wave of Software Supply Chain Industrialization. We are currently in the second wave: “Agile + DevOps + Developers”.
I think to get to this third wave, which goes from Events to Bots, the industry is going to have to adopt OCAP at a massive scale. Right @expede?
Tyler also has his investing thesis published: Developer-Led Investing
As developers have come into their own as a market, vendors are creating more developer tools. The workload on developers has increased as they sort through the best options for each project. This creates a virtuous circle driven by the ever-increasing need to improve developer productivity. The net is where will see investments and opportunities around new language abstractions, IDEs, tools, SDKs, and frameworks that drive the productivity curve.