The technologists’ handbook

How can anybody keep track of what’s happening in tech? Things move at a dizzying pace, and with so much change it can be easy to lose track. It’s a question we had pondered and one that helped us come up with the idea of a Technology Radar —?a snapshot of tools, platforms, techniques, and languages and frameworks, using a visual metaphor that as things of interest —?or blips, if you will — come towards the center, our confidence in using them increase.

We publish our Technology Radar twice a year. You can think of it as the collective advice from thousands of experts, from across the globe and based on their experience of working with clients. Even so, we make no claims that our Radar is comprehensive. It’s just our opinion on what we’ve seen.

As CTO of Thoughtworks, participating in the Radar discussions is one of my favorite times of the year: I get to talk tech with a bunch of passionate experts. And I know the legion of Radar readers find it a useful tool to aid their decision making or for kickstarting technology discussions.?

So whether you want to get up to speed on the latest genAI tooling or just want to explore the most interesting happenings in tech today, I think you’ll find something in this edition that sparks your imagination.

Rachel Laycock

CTO, Thoughtworks

?? Thoughtworks Technology Radar Vol.31

Each edition of the Radar encapsulates the most interesting things our teams have learned over the past six months. You can use our interactive Radar to explore the blips in each quadrant, or you can download the PDF to read the report in full.

Either way, we’re convinced you’ll learn about something that will help your dev teams. Explore it here.

?? Macro trends in the technology industry

To ensure each Technology Radar is packed with the most useful advice, we take inputs from our teams from around the world. As a result, we get a lot of suggestions about an incredible array of tech topics. To make sense of that, we get our senior technologists to look at any common themes that emerge from the Radar discussions.?

You can check out a write up of those trends in detail here.

Or if you prefer, you can listen to the latest Thoughtworks Technology Podcasts, where our crew discuss the Radar themes in depth. Listen to the episode here.

?? Reckoning with generative AI’s uncanny valley

“Existing mental models and conceptions of generative AI are a fundamental design problem, not a marginal issue we can choose to ignore while we plow forward.”?- Ken Mugrage and Srinivasan Raguraman

Few people would be surprised to see the number of Radar blips that relate to generative AI. But we also had a bunch of suggested ones that didn’t make the final cut. In this case, it was a suggestion that was too complex and nuanced to cover in the few lines of text we allocate for blips —?so we’ve fleshed it out in to a full article. The topic? Generative AI’s uncanny valley —?what it is and why it matters. Read it here.

?? Build your own Radar

The Radar started out as an internal experiment to find ways to map out which technologies were most important for us to know about. Over the years, we’ve learned how useful a process this can be for every organization, which is why we created our Build Your Own Radar tool. You can learn more about how to do this and the benefits you’ll get in this podcast.

?? Inside the Technology Radar

Still want to find out more about the Technology Radar, its history and how we go about creating it? Why not check out this explainer video: it’s packed with everything you need to know.

We hope you enjoyed this special edition of Tech to Know. Click here to read all the issues so far and subscribe for more.