idealpeople blog

You may have already read our previous blogs on hot Technical Skills in 2008. These reflected the demand we experienced for core skills in 2007. What they didn’t reflect of course are the “emerging” technical stuffs - the stuff that is hot, but isn’t necessarily measurably hot (yet). Cool skills are kind of more bleeding edge than leading edge.

So, accordingly we thought we’d release a list of cool skills: these are technical skills which will probably be hot in a year or two, but which are currently too niche to hit the hot scale in terms of demand. Still with us?

Cool skills are for the Technorati Glitterati, the trendsetters, the folks ahead of the curve. These folks are in it not just for the “£” but because it’s their passion. They get a kick out of being ‘ahead of the curve’ and are the true “Early Adopters”.
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We aren’t saying that these are the most in demand technical skills, the most sought after programming skills or the best technical skill set mix you can possibly have. Neither are we saying these are the hot skills you need to be employable as a true tecchie.

So, without further ado, here’s our top 20 cool skills. These aren’t ranked, and the qualifying criteria was far less clear than it was for the hot skills..

AJAX
Ruby / Ruby on Rails (More OO than PHP, and applicable outside of web programming)
Oracle APEX 3.1
Oracle TopLink (Persistently good in Persistence Layer)
Python (Ok so it’s old but it’s still cool, and have you checked Zope & Plone?)
JBOSS (Esp Drools, Richfaces, SEAM)
Microsoft XNA (Creating some major buzz in the Games Sector)
Maya 8
JSF (Great to have skill for J2EE Engineers)
ADOMD.NET (Because business isn’t intelligent without ‘business intelligence’)
Jprofiler (Great tool for large scale performance test initiatives)
Autodesk Motionbuilder
Agile/XP (Still improving chaotic development processes worldwide)
EJB3 (Goodbye, procedural redundant EJB2 code, hello extensible software and simplified development)
Network Programming (just look at what’s happening these days in web 2.0 or games development for consoles/PC’s)
Nurbs (We just like the name)
REST Architectures (A great architectural foundation for the Web)
Java FX Mobile (some are hedging on Android and Silverlight, but lets not forget the huge community behind Java, and Sun have Java!)
Android OS (Developers with direct experience developing for Android will soon be sought by Mobile 2.0 Startups)
Microsoft Silverlight (Adobe clone or genuine MS contender for Mobile? Frankly we don’t care, but we do expect for this to be a demand skill in future)
Hibernate (Likely to continue it’s advance in the Java multi-verse)
Spring 2.0 (Boing! – see above)
Server Virtualisation (we just deployed some neat Virtualisation tech and it’s made our lives infinitely easier so long live Virtualisation)
Flash Lite (Like Flash, but lite)

We will of course be doing demand profiling on the above… as time goes by ……

Watch this space. Well, not this one literally – just subscribe here for regular updates.