Artificial intelligence (AI) is now well and truly mainstream. Once the preserve of futurists and doom-mongers muttering about job losses, it has become a global watercooler topic thanks to the rise of ChatGPT, which promises to transform the way the entire world goes to work. But AI has been a vital tool in the developer’s armoury for a while. It has given us new ways to optimize workflow and focus on those high-level tasks that will be forever human.

The flood of software innovation over the past 20 years would not have been possible without Agile working. The concept of releasing fast, taking feedback and building back better has birthed the iPhone, social networks and the Cloud. The world would be a slower, duller place without it. But we can’t do Agile unless we can get real insights from our user’s screens, and here, the developer tools published by Safari, Chrome and other browsers are crucial.

Once, your users may have forgiven a bug in your app. Today, they likely won’t. Today’s consumers, many of them Gen-Zers who’ve been using gadgets since they learned their hands, expect a mobile experience that’s swift, seamless and secure. And with page speeds increasing all the time, lags and snags are no longer acceptable. Which means our apps need to glitch-free right out of the gate.

We all remember Snake, right? That game you played on your flip-phone to while away those hours on the train or tube, attempting to stop a digital serpent from eating its own tail. Well Snake is actually part of digital history. It was the first mobile app ever released way back in 1997, the founding fathers of today’s web3 marvels with their AI, VR and machine learning.

Software developers tend to work in packs. We pool our creativity (and our code) to build software and our strength in numbers helps reduce the risk of errors. The more people who check code and scan for bugs, the cleaner our final product will be. However, this places a premium on effective communication. We will end up accessing, reading, writing and changing the same files over and over again, and it’s vital we keep duplication of work to a minimum.

The internet was written in JavaScript. This versatile programming language is supported by all major web browsers and has been used to create over 1.8 billion websites, which amounts to 98% of the world’s total (that figure will probably have jumped a few thousand by the time you finish this article). Developers love JavaScript for the dynamic web pages it empowers them to build, with a whole bunch of interactive elements and user interfaces available on a drag-and-drop basis.

This is the most fertile time for app development since the launch of the App Store 15 years ago. Our industry is in the grip of several simultaneous revolutions, each of them bending, flexing and moulding to the others. 5G promises to make our apps 10 times faster; wearable technology lets them wrap themselves around our bodies; artificial intelligence enables them to learn from us and get smarter every day. But this torrent of innovation brings challenges, too.

As developers, it’s easy to get fixated on the mobile sphere. We’re now spending 4-5 hours a day browsing apps on our phone (that’s over 1,800 hours a year), which means a huge volume of demand is channelling into Android and iOS projects. But desktop apps are booming too.

Software engineering is an exciting field that offers various roles and responsibilities to individuals. Some prominent roles are developer, quality assurance engineer, project manager, product manager, DevOps, and many more. Each of these roles also has sub-roles. For example, we have front-end, back-end, and full-stack developers in development. In testing, we have manual testing, automation, unit testing, and end-to-end testing.

UI is nothing without UX. While user interface development is essential, it means nothing if it doesn’t lead to a good user experience. So whenever us devs add a new feature, or modifies the existing one, we must ensure the UX flows seamlessly. And that means thorough testing. Generally, the development process should involve tests at both the module and unit level to ensure both work as expected through the changes.