Technology Trends for 2023

What O’Reilly Learning Platform Usage

Tells Us About Where the Industry
Is Headed

Mike Loukides

Beijing Boston Farnham Sebastopol Tokyo

Technology Trends for 2023
by Mike Loukides
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Editor: Mike Loukides Cover Designer: Randy Comer

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March 2023: First Edition

Revision History for the First Edition

2023-03-01: First Release

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978-1-098-14873-7
[LSI]
 Table of Contents

Technology Trends for 2023. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Methodology 2
The Biggest Picture 3
What Our Users Are Doing (in Detail) 7
Software Development 7
Security 16
Data 20
Infrastructure and Operations 25
Professional Skills 36
Web Development 38
Design 40
The Future 42

iii
 Technology Trends for 2023

This year’s report on the O’Reilly learning platform takes a detailed

look at how our customers used the platform. Our goal is to find
out what they’re interested in now and how that changed from
2021—and to make some predictions about what 2023 will bring.
A lot has happened in the past year. In 2021, we saw that GPT-3
could write stories and even help people write software; in 2022,
ChatGPT showed that you can have conversations with an AI.
Now developers are using AI to write software. Late in 2021, Mark
Zuckerberg started talking about “the metaverse,” and fairly soon,
everyone was talking about it. But the conversation cooled almost
as quickly as it started. Back then, cryptocurrency prices were
approaching a high, and NFTs were “a thing”...then they crashed.
What’s real, and what isn’t? Our data shows us what O’Reilly’s 2.8
million users are actually working on and what they’re learning
day-to-day. That’s a better measure of technology trends than any‐
thing that happens among the Twitterati. The answers usually aren’t
found in big impressive changes; they’re found in smaller shifts
that reflect how people are turning the big ideas into real-world
products. The signals are often confusing: for example, interest in
content about the “big three” cloud providers is slightly down, while
interest in content about cloud migration is significantly up. What
does that mean? Companies are still “moving into the cloud”—that
trend hasn’t changed—but as some move forward, others are pulling
back (“repatriation”) or postponing projects. It’s gratifying when we
see an important topic come alive: zero trust, which reflects an
important rethinking of how security works, showed tremendous

1
growth. But other technology topics (including some favorites) are
hitting plateaus or even declining.
While we don’t discuss the economy as such, it’s always in the
background. Whether or not we’re actually in a recession, many
in our industry perceive us to be so, and that perception can be
self-fulfilling. Companies that went on a hiring spree over the past
few years are now realizing that they made a mistake—and that
includes both giants that do layoffs in the tens of thousands and
startups that thought they had access to an endless stream of VC
cash. In turn, that reality influences the actions individuals take to
safeguard their jobs or increase their value should they need to find
a new one.

Methodology
This report is based on our internal “units viewed” metric, which is
a single metric across all the media types included in our platform:
ebooks, of course, but also videos and live training courses. We use
units viewed because it measures what people actually do on our
platform. But it’s important to recognize the metric’s shortcomings;
as George Box (almost)1 said, “All metrics are wrong, but some are
useful.” Units viewed tends to discount the usage of new topics:
if a topic is new, there isn’t much content, and users can’t view
content that doesn’t exist. As a counter to our focus on units viewed,
we’ll take a brief look at searches, which aren’t constrained by the
availability of content. For the purposes of this report, units viewed
is always normalized to 1, where 1 is assigned to the greatest number
of units in any group of topics.
It’s also important to remember that these “units” are “viewed” by
our users. Whether they access the platform through individual or
corporate accounts, O’Reilly members are typically using the plat‐
form for work. Despite talk of “internet time,” our industry doesn’t
change radically from day to day, month to month, or even year to
year. We don’t want to discount or undervalue those who are picking
up new ideas and skills—that’s an extremely important use of the
platform. But if a company’s IT department were working on its
ecommerce site in 2021, they were still working on that site in 2022,
they won’t stop working on it in 2023, and they’ll be working on it in

1 Box said “models”; a metric is a kind of model, isn’t it?

2 | Technology Trends for 2023

2024. They might be adding AI-driven features or moving it to the
cloud and orchestrating it with Kubernetes, but they’re not likely to
drop React (or even PHP) to move to the latest cool framework.
However, when the latest cool thing demonstrates a few years of
solid growth, it can easily become one of the well-established tech‐
nologies. That’s happening now with Rust. Rust isn’t going to take
over from Java and Python tomorrow, let alone in 2024 or 2025,
but that’s a movement that’s real. Finally, it’s wise to be skeptical
about “noise.” Changes of one or two percentage points often mean
little. But when a mature technology that’s leading its category stops
growing, it’s fair to wonder whether it’s hit a plateau and is en route
to becoming a legacy technology.

The Biggest Picture

We can get a high-level view of platform usage by looking at usage
for our top-level topics. Content about software development was
the most widely used (31% of all usage in 2022), which includes
software architecture and programming languages. Software devel‐
opment is followed by IT operations (18%), which includes cloud,
and by data (17%), which includes machine learning and artificial
intelligence. Business (13%), security (8%), and web and mobile
(6%) come next. That’s a fairly good picture of our core audience’s
interests: solidly technical, focused on software rather than hard‐
ware, but with a significant stake in business topics.
Total platform usage grew by 14.1% year over year, more than dou‐
bling the 6.2% gain we saw from 2020 to 2021. The topics that saw
the greatest growth were business (30%), design (23%), data (20%),
security (20%), and hardware (19%)—all in the neighborhood of
20% growth. Software development grew by 12%, which sounds
disappointing, although in any study like this, the largest categories
tend to show the least change. Usage of resources about IT opera‐
tions only increased by 6.9%. That’s a surprise, particularly since the
operations world is still coming to terms with cloud computing.

The Biggest Picture | 3

Figure 1. O’Reilly learning platform usage by topic year over year

4 | Technology Trends for 2023

While this report focuses on content usage, a quick look at search
data gives a feel for the most popular topics, in addition to the
fastest growing (and fastest declining) categories. Python, Kuber‐
netes, and Java were the most popular search terms. Searches for
Python showed a 29% year-over-year gain, while searches for Java
and Kubernetes are almost unchanged: Java gained 3% and Kuber‐
netes declined 4%. But it’s also important to note what searches
don’t show: when we look at programming languages, we’ll see that
content about Java is more heavily used than content about Python
(although Python is growing faster).
Similarly, the actual use of content about Kubernetes showed a slight
year-over-year gain (4.4%), despite the decline in the number of
searches. And despite being the second-most-popular search term,
units viewed for Kubernetes were only 41% of those for Java and
47% of those for Python. This difference between search data and
usage data may mean that developers “live” in their programming
languages, not in their container tools. They need to know about
Kubernetes and frequently need to ask specific questions—and those
needs generate a lot of searches. But they’re working with Java or
Python constantly, and that generates more units viewed.
The Go programming language is another interesting case. “Go”
and “Golang” are distinct search strings, but they’re clearly the same
topic. When you add searches for Go and Golang, the Go language
moves from 15th and 16th place up to 5th, just behind machine
learning. However, change in use of the search term was relatively
small: a 1% decline for Go, a 8% increase for Golang. Looking at
Go as a topic category, we see something different: usage of content
about Go is significantly behind the leaders, Java and Python, but
still the third highest on our list, and with a 20% gain from 2021 to
2022.
Looking at searches is worthwhile, but it’s important to realize that
search data and usage data often tell different stories.

The Biggest Picture | 5

Figure 2. Top searches on the O’Reilly learning platform year over year

6 | Technology Trends for 2023

Searches can also give a quick picture of which topics are growing.
The top three year-over-year gains were for the CompTIA Linux+
certification, the CompTIA A+ certification, and transformers (the
AI model that’s led to tremendous progress in natural language
processing). However, none of these are what we might call “top
tier” search terms: they had ranks ranging from 186 to 405. (That
said, keep in mind that the number of unique search terms we see
is well over 1,000,000. It’s a lot easier for a search term with a few
thousand queries to grow than it is for a search term with 100,000
queries.)
The sharpest declines in search frequency were for cryptocurrency,
Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Java 11. There are no real surprises here.
This has been a tough year for cryptocurrency, with multiple scan‐
dals and crashes. As of late 2021, Java 11 was no longer the current
long-term support (LTS) release of Java; that’s moved on to Java 17.

What Our Users Are Doing (in Detail)

That’s a high-level picture. But where are our users actually spend‐
ing their time? To understand that, we’ll need to take a more
detailed look at our topic hierarchy—not just at the topics at the
top level but at those in the inner (and innermost) layers.

Software Development
The biggest change we’ve seen is the growth in interest in coding
practices; 35% year-over-year growth can’t be ignored, and indicates
that software developers are highly motivated to improve their
practice of programming. Coding practices is a broad topic that
encompasses a lot—software maintenance, test-driven development,
maintaining legacy software, and pair programming are all subca‐
tegories. Two smaller categories that are closely related to coding
practices also showed substantial increases: usage of content about
Git (a distributed version control system and source code reposi‐
tory) was up 21%, and QA and testing was up 78%. Practices like the
use of code repositories and continuous testing are still spreading to
both new developers and older IT departments. These practices are
rarely taught in computer science programs, and many companies
are just beginning to put them to use. Developers, both new and
experienced, are learning them on the job.

What Our Users Are Doing (in Detail) | 7

Going by units viewed, design patterns is the second-largest cate‐
gory, with a year-over-year increase of 13%. Object-oriented pro‐
gramming showed a healthy 24% increase. The two are closely
related, of course; while the concept of design patterns is applicable
to any programming paradigm, object-oriented programming (par‐
ticularly Java, C#, and C++) is where they’ve taken hold.
It’s worth taking a closer look at design patterns. Design patterns
are solutions to common problems—they help programmers work
without “reinventing wheels.” Above all, design patterns are a way of
sharing wisdom. They’ve been abused in the past by programmers
who thought software was “good” if it used “design patterns,” and
jammed as many into their code as possible, whether or not it was
appropriate. Luckily, we’ve gotten beyond that now.
What about functional programming? The “object versus func‐
tional” debates of a few years ago are over for the most part. The
major ideas behind functional programming can be implemented
in any language, and functional programming features have been
added to Java, C#, C++, and most other major programming lan‐
guages. We’re now in an age of “multiparadigm” programming.
It feels strange to conclude that object-oriented programming has
established itself, because in many ways that was never in doubt; it
has long been the paradigm of choice for building large software
systems. As our systems are growing ever larger, object-oriented
programming’s importance seems secure.
Leadership and management also showed very strong growth (38%).
Software developers know that product development isn’t just about
code; it relies heavily on communication, collaboration, and critical
thinking. They also realize that management or team leadership may
well be the next step in their career.
Finally, we’d be remiss not to mention quantum computing. It’s the
smallest topic category in this group but showed a 24% year-over-
year gain. The first quantum computers are now available through
cloud providers like IBM and Amazon Web Services (AWS). While
these computers aren’t yet powerful enough to do any real work,
they make it possible to get a head start on quantum program‐
ming. Nobody knows when quantum computers will be substantial
enough to solve real-world problems: maybe two years, maybe 20.
But programmers are clearly interested in getting started.

8 | Technology Trends for 2023

Figure 3. Year-over-year growth for software development topics

What Our Users Are Doing (in Detail) | 9

Software architecture
Software architecture is a very broad category that encompasses
everything from design patterns (which we also saw under software
development) to relatively trendy topics like serverless and event-
driven architecture. The largest topic in this group was, unsurpris‐
ingly, software architecture itself: a category that includes books on
the fundamentals of software architecture, systems thinking, com‐
munication skills, and much more—almost anything to do with the
design, implementation, and management of software. Not only was
this a large category, but it also grew significantly: 26% from 2021
to 2022. Software architect has clearly become an important role, the
next step for programming staff who want to level up their skills.
For several years, microservices has been one of the most popular
topics in software architecture, and this year is no exception. It
was the second-largest topic and showed 3.6% growth over 2021.
Domain-driven design (DDD) was the third-most-commonly-used
topic, although smaller; it also showed growth (19%). Although
DDD has been around for a long time, it came into prominence
with the rise of microservices as a way to think about partitioning an
application into independent services.
Is the relatively low growth of microservices a sign of change? Have
microservices reached a peak? We don’t think so, but it’s important
to understand the complex relationship between microservices and
monolithic architectures. Monoliths inevitably become more com‐
plex over time, as bug fixes, new business requirements, the need to
scale, and other issues need to be addressed. Decomposing a com‐
plex monolith into a complex set of microservices is a challenging
task and certainly one that can’t be underestimated: developers are
trading one kind of complexity for another in the hope of achieving
increased flexibility and scalability long-term. Microservices are no
longer a “cool new idea,” and developers have recognized that they’re
not the solution to every problem. However, they are a good fit for
cloud deployments, and they leave a company well-positioned to
offer its services via APIs and become an “as a service” company.
Microservices are unlikely to decline, though they may have reached
a plateau. They’ve become part of the IT landscape. But companies
need to digest the complexity trade-off.

10 | Technology Trends for 2023

Web APIs, which companies use to provide services to remote cli‐
ent software via the web’s HTTP protocol, showed a very healthy
increase (76%). This increase shows that we’re moving even more
strongly to an “API economy,” where the most successful companies
are built not around products but around services accessed through
web APIs. That, after all, is the basis for all “software as a service”
companies; it’s the basis on which all the cloud providers are built;
it’s what ties Amazon’s business empire together. RESTful APIs saw
a smaller increase (6%); the momentum has clearly moved from the
simplicity of REST to more complex APIs that use JSON, GraphQL,
and other technologies to move information.
The 29% increase in the usage of content about distributed systems
is important. Several factors drive the increase in distributed sys‐
tems: the move to microservices, the need to serve astronomical
numbers of online clients, the end of Moore’s law, and more. The
time when a successful application could run on a single main‐
frame—or even on a small cluster of servers in a rack—is long
gone. Modern applications run across hundreds or thousands of
computers, virtual machines, and cloud instances, all connected
by high-speed networks and data buses. That includes software run‐
ning on single laptops equipped with multicore CPUs and GPUs.
Distributed systems require designing software that can run effec‐
tively in these environments: software that’s reliable, that stays up
even when some servers or networks go down, and where there are
as few performance bottlenecks as possible. While this category is
still relatively small, its growth shows that software developers have
realized that all systems are distributed systems; there is no such
thing as an application that runs on a single computer.

What Our Users Are Doing (in Detail) | 11

Figure 4. Year-over-year growth for software architecture and design
topics

12 | Technology Trends for 2023

What about serverless? Serverless looks like an excellent technology
for implementing microservices, but it’s been giving us mixed sig‐
nals for several years now. Some years it’s up slightly; some years
it’s down slightly. This year, it’s down 14%, and while that’s not a
collapse, we have to see that drop as significant. Like microservices,
serverless is no longer a “cool new thing” in software architecture,
but the decrease in usage raises questions: Are software developers
nervous about the degree of control serverless puts in the hands
of cloud providers, spinning up and shutting down instances as
needed? That could be a big issue. Cloud customers want to get their
accounts payable down, cloud providers want to get their accounts
receivable up, and if the provider tweaks a few parameters that
the customer never sees, that balance could change a lot. Or has
serverless just plunged into the “trough of disillusionment” from
which it will eventually emerge into the “plane of productivity”? Or
maybe it’s just an idea whose time came and went? Whatever the
reason, serverless has never established itself convincingly. Next year
may give us a better idea...or just more ambiguity.

Programming languages
The stories we can tell about programming languages are little
changed from last year. Java is the leader (with 1.7% year-over-year
growth), followed by Python (3.4% growth). But as we look down
the chart, we see some interesting challengers to the status quo.
Go’s usage is only 20% of Java’s, but it’s seen 20% growth. That’s
substantial. C++ is hardly a new language—and we typically expect
older languages to be more stable—but it had 19% year-over-year
growth. And Rust, with usage that’s only 9% of Java, had 22% growth
from 2021 to 2022. Those numbers don’t foreshadow a revolution—
as we said at the outset, very few companies are going to take infra‐
structure written in Java and rewrite it in Go or Rust just so they can
be trend compliant. As we all know, a lot of infrastructure is written
in COBOL, and that isn’t going anywhere. But both Rust and Go
have established themselves in key areas of infrastructure: Docker
and Kubernetes are both written in Go, and Rust is establishing
itself in the security community (and possibly also the data and AI
communities). Go and Rust are already pushing older languages like
C++ and Java to evolve. With a few more years of 20% growth, Go
and Rust will be challenging Java and Python directly, if they aren’t
challenging them already for greenfield projects.

What Our Users Are Doing (in Detail) | 13

JavaScript is an anomaly on our charts: total usage is 19% of
Java’s, with a 4.6% year-over-year decline. JavaScript shows up at,
or near, the top on most programming language surveys, such as
RedMonk’s rankings (usually in a virtual tie with Java and Python).
However, the TIOBE Index shows more space between Python (first
place), Java (fourth), and JavaScript (seventh)—more in line with
our observations of platform usage. We attribute JavaScript’s decline
partly to the increased influence of TypeScript, a statically typed
variant of JavaScript that compiles to JavaScript (12% year-over-year
increase). One thing we’ve noticed over the past few years: while
programmers had a long dalliance with duck typing and dynamic
languages, as applications (and teams) grew larger, developers real‐
ized the value of strong, statically typed languages (TypeScript cer‐
tainly, but also Go and Rust, though these are less important for web
development). This shift may be cyclical; a decade from now, we
may see a revival of interest in dynamic languages. Another factor
is the use of frameworks like React, Angular, and Node.js, which are
undoubtedly JavaScript but have their own topics in our hierarchy.
However, when you add all four together, you still see a 2% decline
for JavaScript, without accounting for the shift from JavaScript to
TypeScript. Whatever the reason, right now, the pendulum seems to
be swinging away from JavaScript. (For more on frameworks, see the
discussion of web development.)
The other two languages that saw a drop in usage are C# (6.3%) and
Scala (16%). Is this just noise, or is it a more substantial decline? The
change seems too large to be a random fluctuation. Scala has always
been a language for backend programming, as has C# (though to
a lesser extent). While neither language is particularly old, it seems
their shine has worn off. They’re both competing poorly with Go
and Rust for new users. Scala is also competing poorly with the
newer versions of Java, which now have many of the functional
features that initially drove interest in Scala.

14 | Technology Trends for 2023

Figure 5. Year-over-year growth for programming languages

What Our Users Are Doing (in Detail) | 15

Security
Computer security has been in the news frequently over the past
few years. That unwelcome exposure has both revealed cracks in the
security posture of many companies and obscured some important
changes in the field. The cracks are all too obvious: most organiza‐
tions do a bad job of the basics. According to one report, 91% of
all attacks start with a phishing email that tricks a user into giving
up their login credentials. Phishes are becoming more frequent and
harder to detect. Basic security hygiene is as important as ever, but
it’s getting more difficult. And cloud computing generates its own
problems. Companies can no longer protect all of their IT systems
behind a firewall; many of the servers are running in a data center
somewhere, and IT staff has no idea where they are or even if they
exist as physical entities.
Given this shift, it’s not surprising that zero trust, an important
new paradigm for designing security into distributed systems, grew
146% between 2021 and 2022. Zero trust abandons the assumption
that systems can be protected on some kind of secure network;
all attempts to access any system, whether by a person or soft‐
ware, must present proper credentials. Hardening systems, while it
received the least usage, grew 91% year over year. Other topics with
significant growth were secure coding (40%), advanced persistent
threats (55%), and application security (46%). All of these topics are
about building applications that can withstand attacks, regardless of
where they run.
Governance (year-over-year increase of 72%) is a very broad topic
that includes virtually every aspect of compliance and risk man‐
agement. Issues like security hygiene increasingly fall under “gov‐
ernance,” as companies try to comply with the requirements of
insurers and regulators, in addition to making their operations more
secure. Because almost all attacks start with a phish or some other
kind of social engineering, just telling employees not to give their
passwords away won’t help. Companies are increasingly using train‐
ing programs, password managers, multifactor authentication, and
other approaches to maintaining basic hygiene.

16 | Technology Trends for 2023

Figure 6. Year-over-year growth for security topics

What Our Users Are Doing (in Detail) | 17

Network security, which was the most heavily used security topic in
2022, grew by a healthy 32%. What drove this increase? Not the use
of content about firewalls, which only grew 7%. While firewalls are
still useful for protecting the IT infrastructure in a physical office,
they’re of limited help when a substantial part of any organization’s
infrastructure is in the cloud. What happens when an employee
brings their laptop into the office from home or takes it to a coffee
shop where it’s more vulnerable to attack? How do you secure WiFi
networks for people working from home as well as in the office?
The broader problem of network security has only become more
difficult, and these problems can’t be solved by corporate firewalls.
Use of content about penetration testing and ethical hacking actually
decreased by 14%, although it was the second-most-heavily-used
security topic in our taxonomy (and the most heavily used in 2021).

Security certifications
Security professionals love their certifications. Our platform data
shows that the most important certifications were CISSP (Certified
Information Systems Security Professional) and CompTIA Secu‐
rity+. CISSP has long been the most popular security certification.
It’s a very comprehensive certification oriented toward senior secu‐
rity specialists: candidates must have at least five years’ experience in
the field to take the exam. Usage of CISSP-related content dropped
0.23% year over year—in other words, it was essentially flat. A
change this small is almost certainly noise, but the lack of change
may indicate that CISSP has saturated its market.
Compared to CISSP, the CompTIA Security+ certification is aimed
at entry- or mid-level security practitioners; it’s a good complement
to the other CompTIA certifications, such as Network+. Right now,
the demand for security exceeds the supply, and that’s drawing new
people into the field. This fits with the increase in the use of content
to prepare for the CompTIA Security+ exam, which grew 16% in
the past year. The CompTIA CSA+ exam (recently renamed the
CYSA+) is a more advanced certification aimed specifically at secu‐
rity analysts; it showed 37% growth.

18 | Technology Trends for 2023

Figure 7. Year-over-year growth for security certifications

What Our Users Are Doing (in Detail) | 19

Use of content related to the Certified Ethical Hacker certification
dropped 5.9%. The reasons for this decline aren’t clear, given that
demand for penetration testing (one focus of ethical hacking) is
high. However, there are many certifications specifically for pene‐
tration testers. It’s also worth noting that penetration testing is fre‐
quently a service provided by outside consultants. Most companies
don’t have the budget to hire full-time penetration testers, and that
may make the CEH certification less attractive to people planning
their careers.
CBK isn’t an exam; it’s the framework of material around which
the International Information System Security Certification Consor‐
tium, more commonly known as (ISC)², builds its exams. With
a 31% year-over-year increase for CBK content, it’s another clear
sign that interest in security as a profession is growing. And even
though (ISC)²’s marquee certification, CISSP, has likely reached sat‐
uration, other (ISC)² certifications show clear growth: CCSP (Cer‐
tified Cloud Security Professional) grew 52%, and SSCP (Systems
Security Certified Practitioner) grew 67%. Although these certifica‐
tions aren’t as popular, their growth is an important trend.

Data
Data is another very broad category, encompassing everything from
traditional business analytics to artificial intelligence. Data engineer‐
ing was the dominant topic by far, growing 35% year over year.
Data engineering deals with the problem of storing data at scale
and delivering that data to applications. It includes moving data to
the cloud, building pipelines for acquiring data and getting data to
application software (often in near real time), resolving the issues
that are caused by data siloed in different organizations, and more.
Apache Spark, a platform for large-scale data processing, was the
most widely used tool, even though the use of content about Spark
declined slightly in the past year (2.7%). Hadoop, which would have
led this category a decade ago, is still present, though usage of
content about Hadoop dropped 8.3%; Hadoop has become a legacy
data platform.
Microsoft Power BI has established itself as the leading business
analytics platform; content about Power BI was the most heavily
used, and achieved 31% year-over-year growth. NoSQL databases
was second, with 7.6% growth—but keep in mind that NoSQL

20 | Technology Trends for 2023

was a movement that spawned a large number of databases, with
many different properties and designs. Our data shows that NoSQL
certainly isn’t dead, despite some claims to the contrary; it has
clearly established itself. However, the four top relational databases,
if added together into a single “relational database” topic, would be
the most heavily used topic by a large margin. Oracle grew 18.2%
year over year; Microsoft SQL Server grew 9.4%; MySQL grew 4.7%;
and PostgreSQL grew 19%.
Use of content about R, the widely used statistics platform, grew
15% from 2021. Similarly, usage of content about Pandas, the most
widely used Python library for working with R-like data frames,
grew 20%. It’s interesting that Pandas and R had roughly the same
usage. Python and R have been competing (in a friendly way) for
the data science market for nearly 20 years. Based on our usage data,
right now it looks like a tie. R has slightly more market share, but
Pandas has better growth. Both are staples in academic research: R
is more of a “statistician’s workbench” with a comprehensive set of
statistical tools, while Python and Pandas are built for programmers.
The difference has more to do with users’ tastes than substance
though: R is a fully capable programming language, and Python has
excellent statistical and array-processing libraries.
Usage for content about data lakes and about data warehouses
was also just about equal, but data lakes usage had much higher
year-over-year growth (50% as opposed to 3.9%). Data lakes are a
strategy for storing an organization’s data in an unstructured reposi‐
tory; they came into prominence a few years ago as an alternative to
data warehouses. It would be useful to compare data lakes with data
lakehouses and data meshes; those terms aren’t in our taxonomy yet.

What Our Users Are Doing (in Detail) | 21

Figure 8. Year-over-year growth for data analysis and database topics

22 | Technology Trends for 2023

Artificial intelligence
At the beginning of 2022, who would have thought that we would
be asking an AI-driven chat service to explain source code (even if
it occasionally makes up facts)? Or that we’d have AI systems that
enable nonartists to create works that are on a par with professional
designers (even if they can’t match Degas and Renoir)? Yet here we
are, and we don’t have ChatGPT or generative AI in our taxonomy.
The one thing that we can say is that 2023 will almost certainly take
AI even further. How much further nobody knows.
For the past two years, natural language processing (NLP) has been
at the forefront of AI research, with the release of Open AI’s pop‐
ular tools GPT-3 and ChatGPT along with similar projects from
Google, Meta, and others that haven’t been released. NLP has many
industrial applications, ranging from automated chat servers to code
generation (e.g., GitHub Copilot) to writing tools. It’s not surpris‐
ing that NLP content was the most viewed and saw significant
year-over-year growth (42%). All of this progress is based on deep
learning, which was the second-most-heavily-used topic, with 23%
growth. Interest in reinforcement learning seems to be off (14%
decline), though that may turn around as researchers try to develop
AI systems that are more accurate and that can’t be tricked into
hate speech. Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF)
is one new technique that might lead to better-behaved language
models.
There was also relatively little interest in content about chatbots
(a 5.8% year-over-year decline). This reversal seems counterintui‐
tive, but it makes sense in retrospect. The release of GPT-3 was a
watershed event, an “everything you’ve done so far is out-of-date”
moment. We’re excited about what will happen in 2023, though
the results will depend a lot on how ChatGPT and its relatives are
commercialized, as ChatGPT becomes a fee-based service, and both
Microsoft and Google take steps towards chat-based search.

What Our Users Are Doing (in Detail) | 23

Figure 9. Year-over-year growth for artificial intelligence topics

24 | Technology Trends for 2023

Our learning platform gives some insight into the tools developers
and researchers are using to work with AI. Based on units viewed,
scikit-learn was the most popular library. It’s a relatively old tool, but
it’s still actively maintained and obviously appreciated by the com‐
munity: usage increased 4.7% over the year. While usage of content
about PyTorch and TensorFlow is roughly equivalent (PyTorch is
slightly ahead), it’s clear that PyTorch now has momentum. PyTorch
increased 20%, while TensorFlow decreased 4.8%. Keras, a frontend
library that uses TensorFlow, dropped 40%.
It’s disappointing to see so little usage of content on MLOps this
year, along with a slight drop (4.0%) from 2021 to 2022. One of the
biggest problems facing machine learning and artificial intelligence
is deploying applications into production and then maintaining
them. ML and AI applications need to be integrated into the deploy‐
ment processes used for other IT applications. This is the business
of MLOps, which presents a set of problems that are only beginning
to be solved, including versioning for large sets of training data and
automated testing to determine when a model has become stale and
needs retraining. Perhaps it’s still too early, but these problems must
be addressed if ML and AI are to succeed in the enterprise.
No-code and low-code tools for AI don’t appear in our taxonomy,
unfortunately. Our report AI Adoption in the Enterprise 2022 argues
that AutoML in its various incarnations is gradually gaining trac‐
tion. This is a trend worth watching. While there’s very little training
available on Google AutoML, Amazon AutoML, IBM AutoAI, Ama‐
zon SageMaker, and other low-code tools, they’ll almost certainly be
an important force multiplier for experienced AI developers.

Infrastructure and Operations

Containers, Linux, and Kubernetes are the top topics within infra‐
structure and operations. Containers sits at the top of the list (with
2.5% year-over-year growth), with Docker, the most popular con‐
tainer, in fifth place (with a 4.4% decline). Linux, the second most
used topic, grew 4.4% year over year. There’s no surprise here; as
we’ve been saying for some time, Linux is “table stakes” for opera‐
tions. Kubernetes is third, with 4.4% growth.
The containers topic is extremely broad: it includes a lot of content
that’s primarily about Docker but also content about containers in
general, alternatives to Docker (most notably Podman), container

What Our Users Are Doing (in Detail) | 25

deployment, and many other subtopics. It’s clear that containers
have changed the way we deploy software, particularly in the cloud.
It’s also clear that containers are here to stay. Docker’s small drop
is worth noting but isn’t a harbinger of change. Kubernetes depre‐
cated direct Docker support at the end of 2020 in favor of the Con‐
tainer Runtime Interface (CRI). That change eliminated a direct tie
between Kubernetes and Docker but doesn’t mean that containers
built by Docker won’t run on Kubernetes, since Docker supports
the CRI standard. A more convincing reason for the drop in usage
is that Docker is no longer new and developers and other IT staff
are comfortable with it. Docker itself may be a smaller piece of the
operations ecosystem, and it may have plateaued, but it’s still very
much there.
Content about Kubernetes was the third most widely viewed in
this group, and usage grew 4.4% year over year. That relatively
slow growth may mean that Kubernetes is close to a plateau. We
increasingly see complaints that Kubernetes is overly complex, and
we expect that, sooner or later, someone will build a container
orchestration platform that’s simpler, or that developers will move
toward “managed” solutions where a third party (probably a cloud
provider) manages Kubernetes for them. One important part of
the Kubernetes ecosystem, the service mesh, is declining; content
about service mesh showed a 28% decline, while content about Istio
(the service mesh implementation most closely tied to Kubernetes)
declined 42%. Again, service meshes (and specifically Istio) are
widely decried as too complex. It’s indicative (and perhaps alarming)
that IT departments are resorting to “roll your own” for a complex
piece of infrastructure that manages communications between serv‐
ices and microservices (including services for security). Alternatives
are emerging. HashiCorp’s Consul and the open source Linkerd
project are promising service meshes. UC Berkeley’s RISELab, which
developed both Ray and Spark, recently announced SkyPilot, a tool
with goals similar to Kubernetes but that’s specialized for data.
Whatever the outcome, we don’t believe that Kubernetes is the last
word in container orchestration.

26 | Technology Trends for 2023

Figure 10. Year-over-year growth for infrastructure and operations
topics

What Our Users Are Doing (in Detail) | 27

If there’s any tool that defines “infrastructure as code,” it’s Terraform,
which saw 74% year-over-year growth. Terraform’s goals are rela‐
tively simple: You write a simple description of the infrastructure
you want and how you want that infrastructure configured. Terra‐
form gathers the resources and configures them for you. Terraform
can be used with all of the major cloud providers, in addition to
private clouds (via OpenStack), and it’s proven to be an essential
tool for organizations that are migrating to the cloud.
We took a separate look at the “continuous” methodologies (also
known as CI/CD): continuous integration, continuous delivery, and
continuous deployment. Overall, this group showed an 18% year-
over-year increase in units viewed. This growth comes largely from
a huge (40%) increase in the use of content about continuous deliv‐
ery. Continuous integration showed a 22% decline, while continuous
deployment had a 7.1% increase.
What does this tell us? The term continuous integration was first
used by Grady Booch in 1991 and popularized by the Extreme
Programming movement in the late 1990s. It refers to the practice
of merging code changes into a single repository frequently, testing
at each iteration to ensure that the project is always in a coherent
state. Continuous integration is tightly coupled to continuous deliv‐
ery; you almost always see CI/CD together. Continuous delivery
is a practice that was developed at the second-generation web com‐
panies, including Flickr, Facebook, and Amazon, which radically
changed IT practice by staging software updates for deployment
several times daily. With continuous delivery, deployment pipelines
are fully automated, requiring only a final approval to put a release
into production. Continuous deployment is the newest (and small‐
est) of the three, emphasizing completely automated deployment to
production: updates go directly from the developer into production,
without any intervention. These methodologies are closely tied to
each other. CI/CD/CD as a whole (and yes, nobody ever uses CD
twice) is up 18% for the year. That’s a significant gain, and even
though these topics have been around for a while, it’s evidence that
growth is still possible.

28 | Technology Trends for 2023

Figure 11. Year-over-year growth for continuous methodologies

IT and operations certifications

The leading IT certification is clearly CompTIA, which showed a
41% year-over-year increase. The CompTIA family (Network+, A+,
Linux+, and Security+) dominates the certification market. (The
CompTIA Network+ showed a very slight decline (0.32%), which
is probably just random fluctuation.) The Linux+ certification expe‐
rienced tremendous year-over-year growth (47%). That growth is
easy to understand. Linux has long been the dominant server oper‐
ating system. In the cloud, Linux instances are much more widely
used than the alternatives, though Windows is offered on Azure (of
course) along with macOS. In the past few years, Linux’s market
penetration has gone even deeper. We’ve already seen the role that
containers are playing, and containers almost always run Linux as
their operating system. In 1995, Linux might have been a quirky
choice for people devoted to free and open source software. In 2023,
Linux is mandatory for anyone in IT or software development. It’s
hard to imagine getting a job or advancing in a career without
demonstrating competence.

What Our Users Are Doing (in Detail) | 29

Figure 12. Year-over-year growth for IT certifications

30 | Technology Trends for 2023

It’s surprising to see the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA)
certification drop 18% and the Cisco Certified Network Professional
(CCNP) certification drop 12%, as the Cisco certifications have been
among the most meaningful and prestigious in IT for many years.
(The Cisco Certified Internet Expert (CCIE) certification, while rel‐
atively small compared to the others, did show 70% growth.) There
are several causes for this shift. First, as companies move workloads
to the cloud or to colocation providers, maintaining a fleet of rout‐
ers and switches becomes less important. Network certifications are
less valuable than they used to be. But why then the increase in
CCIE? While CCNA is an entry-level certification and CCNP is
middle tier, CCIE is Cisco’s top-tier certification. The exam is very
detailed and rigorous and includes hands-on work with network
hardware. Hence the relatively small number of people who attempt
it and study for it. However, even as companies offload much of
their day-to-day network administration to the cloud, they still need
people who understand networks in depth. They still have to deal
with office networks, and with extending office networks to remote
employees. While they don’t need staff to wrangle racks of data
center routers, they do need network experts who understand what
their cloud and colocation providers are doing. The need for net‐
work staff might be shrinking, but it isn’t going away. In a shrinking
market, attaining the highest level of certification will have the most
long-term value.

Cloud
We haven’t seen any significant shifts among the major cloud pro‐
viders. Amazon Web Services (AWS) still leads, followed by Micro‐
soft Azure, then Google Cloud. Together, this group represents 97%
of cloud platform content usage. The bigger story is that we saw
decreases in year-over-year usage for all three. The decreases are
small and might not be significant: AWS is down 3.8%, Azure 7.5%,
and Google Cloud 2.1%. We don’t know what’s responsible for this
decline. We looked industry by industry; some were up, some were
down, but there were no smoking guns. AWS showed a sharp drop
in computers and electronics (about 27%), which is a relatively
large category, and a smaller drop in finance and banking (15%),
balanced by substantial growth in higher education (35%). There
was a lot of volatility among industries that aren’t big cloud users—
for example, AWS was up about 250% in agriculture—but usage
among industries that aren’t major cloud users isn’t high enough to

What Our Users Are Doing (in Detail) | 31

account for that change. (Agriculture accounts for well under 1%
of total AWS content usage.) The bottom line is, as they say in the
nightly financial news, “Declines outnumbered gains”: 16 out of 28
business categories showed a decline. Azure was similar, with 20
industries showing declines, although Azure saw a slight increase for
finance and banking. The same was true for Google Cloud, though it
benefited from an influx of individual (B2C) users (up 9%).
Over the past year, there’s been some discussion of “cloud repatria‐
tion”: bringing applications that have moved to the cloud back in-
house. Cost is the greatest motivation for repatriation; companies
moving to the cloud have often underestimated the costs, partly
because they haven’t succeeded in using the cloud effectively. While
repatriation is no doubt responsible for some of the decline, it’s at
most a small part of the story. Cloud providers make it difficult to
leave, which ironically might drive more content usage as IT staff
try to figure out how to get their data back. A bigger issue might be
companies that are putting cloud plans on hold because they hear
of repatriation or that are postponing large IT projects because they
fear a recession.
Of the smaller cloud providers, IBM showed a huge year-over-year
increase (135%). Almost all of the change came from a significant
increase in consulting and professional services (200% growth year
over year). Oracle showed a 36% decrease, almost entirely due to
a drop in content usage from the software industry (down 49%).
However, the fact that Oracle is showing up at all demonstrates that
it’s grown significantly over the past few years. Oracle’s high-profile
deal to host all of TikTok’s data on US residents could easily solidify
the company’s position as a significant cloud provider. (Or it could
backfire if TikTok is banned.)
We didn’t include two smaller providers in the graph: Heroku
(now owned by Salesforce) and Cloud Foundry (originally VMware,
handed off to the company’s Pivotal subsidiary and then to the
Cloud Foundry Foundation; now, multiple providers run Cloud
Foundry software). Both saw fairly sharp year-over-year declines:
10% for Heroku, 26% for Cloud Foundry. As far as units viewed,
Cloud Foundry is almost on a par with IBM. But Heroku isn’t even
on the charts; it appears to be a service whose time has passed. We
also omitted Tencent and Alibaba Cloud; they’re not in our subject
taxonomy, and relatively little content is available.

32 | Technology Trends for 2023

Figure 13. Year-over-year growth for cloud providers

Cloud certifications followed a similar pattern. AWS certifications

led, followed by Azure, followed by Google Cloud. We saw the same
puzzling year-over-year decline here: 13% for AWS certification,
10% for Azure, and 6% for Google Cloud. And again, the drop was
smallest for Google Cloud.
While usage of content about specific cloud providers dropped
from 2021 to 2022, usage for content about other cloud computing
topics grew. Cloud migration, a fairly general category for content
about building cloud applications, grew 45%. Cloud service models
also grew 41%. These increases may help us to understand why
usage of content about the “big three” clouds decreased. As cloud

What Our Users Are Doing (in Detail) | 33

usage moves beyond early adopters and becomes mainstream, the
conversation naturally focuses less on individual cloud providers
and more on high-level issues. After a few pilot projects and proofs
of concept, learning about AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud is less
important than planning a full-scale migration. How do you deploy
to the cloud? How do you build services in the cloud? How do
you integrate applications you have moved to the cloud with legacy
applications that are staying in-house? At this point, companies
know the basics and have to go the rest of the way.

Figure 14. Year-over-year growth for cloud certifications

With this in mind, it’s not at all surprising that our customers
are very interested in hybrid clouds, for which content usage grew
28% year over year. Our users realize that every company will
inevitably evolve toward a hybrid cloud. Either there’ll be a wildcat
skunkworks project on some cloud that hasn’t been “blessed” by IT,
or there’ll be an acquisition of a company that’s using a different
provider, or they’ll need to integrate with a business partner using
a different provider, or they don’t have the budget to move their
legacy applications and data, or… The reasons are endless, but the
conclusion is the same: hybrid is inevitable, and in many companies
it’s already the reality.

34 | Technology Trends for 2023

The increase in use of content about private clouds (37%) is part
of the same story. Many companies have applications and data that
have to remain in-house (whether that’s physically on-premises or
hosted at a data center offering colocation). It still makes sense for
those applications to use APIs and deployment toolchains equiva‐
lent to those used in the cloud. “The cloud” isn’t the exception; it has
become the rule.

Figure 15. Year-over-year growth for cloud architecture topics

What Our Users Are Doing (in Detail) | 35

Professional Skills
In the past year, O’Reilly users have been very interested in upgrad‐
ing their professional and management skills. Every category in this
relatively small group is up, and most of them are up significantly.
Project management saw 47% year-over-year growth; professional
development grew 37%. Use of content about the Project Manage‐
ment Professional (PMP) certification grew 36%, and interest in
product management grew similarly (39%). Interest in communica‐
tion skills increased 26% and interest in leadership grew by 28%.
The two remaining categories that we tracked, IT management and
critical thinking, weren’t as large and grew by somewhat smaller
amounts (21% and 20%, respectively).
Several factors drive these increases. For a long time, software devel‐
opment and IT operations were seen as solo pursuits dominated by
“neckbeards” and antisocial nerds, with some “rock stars” and “10x
programmers” thrown in. This stereotype is wrong and harmful—
not just to individuals but to teams and companies. In the past few
years, we’ve heard a lot less about 10x developers and more about
the importance of good communication, leadership, and mentoring.
Our customers have realized that the key to productivity is good
teamwork, not some mythical 10x developer. And there are certainly
many employees who see positions in management, as a “tech lead,”
as a product manager, or as a software architect, as the obvious next
step in their careers. All of these positions stress the so-called “soft
skills.” Finally, talk about a recession has been on the rise for the past
year, and we continue to see large layoffs from big companies. While
software developers and IT operations staff are still in high demand,
and there’s no shortage of jobs, many are certainly trying to acquire
new skills to improve their job security or to give themselves better
options in the event that they’re laid off.

36 | Technology Trends for 2023

Figure 16. Year-over-year growth for professional skills topics

What Our Users Are Doing (in Detail) | 37

Web Development
The React and Angular frameworks continue to dominate web
development. The balance is continuing to shift toward React (10%
year-over-year growth) and away from Angular (a 17% decline).
Many frontend developers feel that React offers better performance
and is more flexible and easier to learn. Many new frameworks
(and frameworks built on frameworks) are in play (Vue, Next.js,
Svelte, and so on), but none are close to becoming competitors. Vue
showed a significant year-over-year decline (17%), and the others
didn’t make it onto the chart.
PHP is still a contender, of course, with almost no change (a decline
of 1%). PHP advocates claim that 80% of the web is built on it:
Facebook is built on PHP, for instance, along with millions of Word‐
Press sites. Still, it’s hard to look at PHP and say that it’s not a legacy
technology. Ruby on Rails grew 6.6%. Content usage for Ruby on
Rails is similar to PHP, but Rails usage has been declining for some
years. Is it poised for a comeback?
The use of content about JavaScript showed a slight decline (4.6%),
but we don’t believe this is significant. In our taxonomy, content can
only be tagged with one topic, and everything that covers React or
Angular is implicitly about JavaScript. In addition, it’s interesting to
see usage of TypeScript increasing (12%); TypeScript is a strongly
typed variant of JavaScript that compiles (the right word is actually
“transpiles”) to JavaScript, and it’s proving to be a better tool for
large complex applications.
One important trend shows up at the bottom of the graph.
WebAssembly is still a small topic, but it saw 74% growth from 2020
to 2021. And Blazor, Microsoft’s implementation of C# and .NET for
WebAssembly, is up 59%. That’s a powerful signal. These topics are
still small, but if they can maintain that kind of growth, they won’t
be small for long. WebAssembly is poised to become an important
part of web development.

38 | Technology Trends for 2023

Figure 17. Year-over-year growth for web development topics

What Our Users Are Doing (in Detail) | 39

Design
The heaviest usage in the design category went to user experience
and related topics. User experience grew 18%, user research grew
5%, interface design grew 92%, and interaction design grew 36%.
For years, we expected software to be difficult and uncomfortable
to use. That’s changed. Apple made user interface design a priority
early in the early 2000s, forcing other companies to follow if they
wanted to remain competitive. The design thinking movement may
no longer be in the news, but it’s had an effect: software teams think
about design from the beginning. Even software developers who
don’t have the word “design” in their job title need to think about
and understand design well enough to build decent user interfaces
and pleasant user experiences.
Usability, the only user-centric topic to show a decline, was only
down 2.6%. It’s also worth noting that use of content about accessi‐
bility has grown 96%. Accessibility is still a relatively small category,
but that kind of growth shows that accessibility is an aspect of user
experience that can no longer be ignored. (The use of alt text for
images is only one example: it’s become common on Twitter and is
almost universal on Mastodon.)
Information architecture was down significantly (a 17% drop). Does
that mean that interest has shifted from designing information flow
to designing experiences, and is that a good thing?
Use of content about virtual and augmented reality is relatively small
but grew 83%. The past year saw a lot of excitement around VR,
Web3, the metaverse, and related topics. Toward the end of the year,
that seemed to cool off. However, an 83% increase is noteworthy.
Will that continue? It may depend on a new generation of VR prod‐
ucts, both hardware and software. If Apple can make VR glasses
that are comfortable and that people can wear without looking like
aliens, 83% growth might seem small.

40 | Technology Trends for 2023

Figure 18. Year-over-year growth for design topics

What Our Users Are Doing (in Detail) | 41

The Future
We started out by saying that this industry doesn’t change as much
from year to year as most people think. That’s true, but that doesn’t
mean there’s no change. There are signals of important new trends
—some completely new, some continuations of trends that started
years ago. So what small changes are harbingers of bigger changes in
the years to come?
The Go and Rust programming languages have shown significant
growth both in the past year and for the last few years. There’s no
sign that this growth will stop. It will take a few more years, but
before long they’ll be on a par with Java and Python.
It’s no surprise that we saw huge gains for natural language process‐
ing and deep learning. GPT-3 and its successor ChatGPT are the
current stars of the show. While there’s been a lot of talk about
another “AI winter,” that isn’t going to happen. The success of
ChatGPT (not to mention Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and many
projects going on at Meta and Google) will keep winter away, at least
for another year. What will people build on top of ChatGPT and its
successors? What new programming tools will we see? How will the
meaning of “computer programming” change if AI assistants take
over the task of writing code? What new research tools will become
available, and will our new AI assistants persist in “making stuff
up”? For several years now, AI has been the most exciting area in
software. There’s lots to imagine, lots to build, and infinite space
for innovation. As long as the AI community provides exciting new
results, no one will be complaining and no one need fear the cold.
We’ve also seen a strong increase in interest in leadership, manage‐
ment, communication, and other “soft skills.” This interest isn’t new,
but it’s certainly growing. Whether the current generation of pro‐
grammers is getting tired of coding or whether they perceive soft
skills as giving them better job security during a recession isn’t for us
to say. It’s certainly true that better communication skills are an asset
for any project.
Our audience is slightly less interested in content about the “big
three” cloud providers (AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud), but they’re
still tremendously interested in migrating to the cloud and taking
advantage of cloud offerings. Despite many reports claiming that
cloud adoption is almost universal (and I confess to writing some of

42 | Technology Trends for 2023

them), I’ve long believed that we’re only in the early stages of cloud
adoption. We’re now past the initial stage, during which a company
might claim that it was “in the cloud” on the basis of a few trial
projects. Cloud migration is serious business. We expect to see a
new wave of cloud adoption. Companies in that wave won’t make
naive assumptions about the costs of using the cloud, and they’ll
have the tools to optimize their cloud usage. This new wave may not
break until fears of a recession end, but it will come.
While the top-level security category grew 20%, we’d hoped to see
more. For a long time, security was an afterthought, not a priority.
That’s changing, but slowly. However, we saw huge gains for zero
trust and governance. It’s unfortunate that these gains are driven by
necessity (and the news cycle), but perhaps the message is getting
through after all.
What about augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), the metaverse,
and other trendy topics that dominated much of the trade press?
Interest in VR/AR content grew significantly, though what that
means for 2023 is anyone’s guess. Long-term, the category probably
depends on whether or not anyone can make AR glasses a fashion
accessory that everyone needs to have. A bigger question is whether
anyone can build a next-generation web that’s decentralized, and
that fosters immediacy and collaboration without requiring exotic
goggles. That’s clearly something that can be done: look no further
than Figma (for collaboration), Mastodon (for decentralization), or
Petals (for a cloud-less cloud).
Will these be the big stories for 2023? February is only just begin‐
ning; we have 11 months to find out.

The Future | 43
About the Author
Mike Loukides is vice president of content strategy for O’Reilly
Media, Inc. He’s edited many highly regarded books on technical
subjects that don’t involve Windows programming. He’s particularly
interested in programming languages, Unix and what passes for
Unix these days, and system and network administration. Mike is
the author of System Performance Tuning and a coauthor of Unix
Power Tools. Most recently, he’s been fooling around with data and
data analysis, exploring languages like R, Mathematica, and Octave,
and thinking about how to make books social. Mike can be reached
on Twitter as @mikeloukides and on LinkedIn.
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