William Cameron | Beyond the Keyboard

5 general trends should be paid attention to in 2015. The world will be a Mobile-First World In the big smartphone times, more and more people are put more time on mobile. In the U.S., carriers' shelf-space for devices with 4.7-inch or larger screen displays increased from 4 percent to about a third in 2014 alone, matching a sales growth - larger-screen phones now account for more than one-quarter of all sales, according to NPD Group. Facebook's recent earnings report showed that while overall daily active users grew 8 percent in 2014, mobile daily active users grew 15 percent and mobile-only daily active users grew 34 percent. A Pay-to-Play Social World is coming Forrester recently reported that brand interaction on organic Facebook posts is now squeezed to 0.073 percent. Social advertising spend continues to rise, though as a whole it still doesn't match time spent overall on social. Only on Facebook has spending outstripped time spent - 6 percent of U.S. adults'

In the debate between developers and their employers, fixing technical debt is often seen as a cost centre, a time suck that takes away from feature work. After all, when there are features to ship and clients to satisfy, taking the team off such projects so that they can rewrite what already works is seen as silly, costly or foolish. But smart employers recognise that technical debt is more than an annoyance or a cost centre. They recognise that technical debt has a chance of costing them good developers. Developers hate technical debt. It's annoying, it's frustrating, and the struggle to find time to fix it is constant. Developers hate technical debt because it makes their jobs harder. It makes solving other problems harder. Technical debt, from a developer perspective, really sucks. The problem here is that frustrated developers are unhappy developers. Unhappy developers have a tendency to quit. And given the fact that hiring developers is tough under the best of circu