If you're entranced in reading the full report, the DZone Community Survey, Vol. I is live and available here!

As part of our initiative to get to know our community better, we regularly conduct surveys on various topics. From the surveys, we get all kinds of interesting data on trends in the developer community, such as most popular languages, favorite and/or interesting tools, and the like. In recent surveys, we've noticed that two of the fastest growing subfields in development are Big Data and Cloud. 

Over the course of 2017, our Big Data Zone saw a significant uptick in activity. From January through December of last year, the total pageviews of the Big Data Zone grew by 83% (the second largest Zone growth we witnessed last year). And, thus far in 2018 (at the time of writing this article), we've seen an 85% increase in readership of our Big Data Zone. So, the people have spoken and they love their data, and the bigger the data the better! As a nice corollary to this increased interest in big data, our community reported an intense interest in learning more about and/or honing their skills with the Python language. When we asked our community, "What programming languages would you like to learn more about?", in a survey that saw 1,918 responses, Python garnered the most interest of any programming language, with 41% of respondents telling us that they were interested in learning more about this language. 

As part of our Community Survey, we also asked developers if their organization was considering adopting a new development tool within the next 12 months. Of the 1,918 respondents, 48% said yes. Any guess as to the most popular tool under consideration? Cloud computing technology! Cloud tech received 649 selections, meaning 70% of those whose organizations are considering adopting a new tool are looking at cloud computing. The fifth most popular tool from this question was container management systems. Container management received 504 selections, meaning 55% of those looking to adopt a new tool are considering containers. And, as containers and cloud technology are closely aligned, this only adds to the emphasis our developer community has placed on the growing importance of cloud. 

So, to quickly recap before signing off, big data and the Python language are quickly gaining popularity and prominence among the developer community, and cloud/container solutions have never been more important in the development of software. 

If you want to learn more, you can read the DZone Community Survey, Vol. I here!