As a passionate software craftsman, I’m keeping a keen eye on trends in the IT world. To help me evaluate the changes we are likely to face in 2025 and understand where I fit in the picture, I created an app in PartyRock. This article documents my motivation to do so, the data sources I used and an introduction to PartyRock and my app “Developer Career Check 2025”. Additionally, I reflect on my individual evaluation and my plans to act on these insights.

Motivation

At the end of 2023, a complex crisis in IT manifested itself and led to mass layoffs and a feeling of uncertainty I never thought possible. As a developer, your job was safe. Period. Because of political uncertainty, the aftermath effects of Corona and technological changes, this is not necessarily the case anymore. Personally, I was very surprised by all that. As a family father, a homeowner and someone enjoying the lifestyle associated with being a seasoned developer, I began working harder to care for my professional future and widened my view of the situation. My goal is to understand changes and my value in the market to not be swept away by changes I don’t even understand. So, I need objective data and a way to understand how I fit into this data.

Data Sources

Luckily, several companies and groups create insightful statistics that are the foundation of my evaluation. For this article, I use the Pluralsight Tech Forecast 2025 and the Jetbrains State of Developer Ecosystem 2024. To download the Pluralsight report, you have to leave some information about yourself. The JetBrains report is publicly available as a website, but you should export this website as a pdf to use my app later on as these two reports have to be uploaded as pdf.

Here are some key takeaways from both reports:

• Not surprisingly, AI is the main hot topic.
• AWS is the leading public cloud provider.
• Hence, services such as Amazon Bedrock will be in high demand.
• JavaScript is the most used language.
• Browser-based applications became a de facto standard platform.

These are just some of many important facts that I now wish to compare to my experience and skill set. Luckily, I already created an anonymised, publicly available CV which is also available as a neatly formatted pdf. If you as a developer don’t have something similar, I strongly suggest you create it! You never know when and how it will be important, but chances are high that if you need it, you need it immediately and will not have the time to create it first. As a bare minimum, you could just create a nice LinkedIn profile and use it as a pseudo-CV. As a data source for myself, I used the pdf version of my CV and an exported pdf of my LinkedIn profile.

Platform PartyRock

While preparing for the AWS AI Practitioner exam, the great Stephane Maarek mentioned PartyRock in his splendid Udemy course for AWS AI Practitioner AIF-C01 exam. PartyRock is a free-to-use experimentation tool provided by AWS that lets you create applications with the help of AI. You simply describe the input of your app and what it should do, and the platform generates a simple web user interface that features one or several large language models that implement your functionality. After creating your app, you may share it publicly.

Developer Career Check 2025 App

You can find and use my app in PartyRock here. It only uses a handful of “widgets”:

The upper two areas are used to upload any data source that reflects the market you want to compare yourself against. To be honest, this is necessary because PartyRock doesn’t support fixed data sources (yet?), but it’s also a nice feature: When the user uploads their own data sources, the app can be used for other branches like banking and public sector and for coming years. Just upload the newest statistics and you’re ready to go!

The upper right widget is used to upload any information about yourself, for example, the mentioned CV.

After uploading these two data sources, click on the green play button to start the comparison.

After creating an account at PartyRock, you can also create your own version of the app by clicking the “Remix” button at the top. Another neat feature of PartyRock is creating a snapshot of an evaluation. This allows you to share and save your results, although I don’t know how long-lived these are. Here’s a snapshot of my evaluation.

Stevens Skill Evaluation

I created this app mainly for myself, so of course I tried it out right away, and it gave me some nice results that I want to share here.

On the plus side, my “strong Java and AWS experience” is a huge asset for me. Looking at the continued high popularity of Java and the growing service landscape of AWS, this seems to be a valid evaluation. Evergreen-skills like architecture, legacy system experience and technical writing are also mentioned and I agree that these will be useful in the future. I also like the mentioning of my “leadership and team-building skills”, “continuous learning mindset” and “community involvement” as positive soft factors. Especially over the last two years, I somewhat neglected hard skills and concentrated on soft skills. As an architect / team lead with multiple projects, this is to be expected.

However, my focus away from hard skills may become a weak spot, as the analysis confirms. AI and machine learning skills can be expected from someone with >15 years of experience, so I really have to make up leeway in these topics. Although I’ve been working in teams that developed cloud applications, I got little hands-on experience, as the analysis also shows. “While Steven has experience with Docker, adding Kubernetes skills would make him more competitive as it’s predicted to remain very popular.” - not much more to add to this conclusion, it’s valid. Until now, I deliberately left out Kubernetes because I wanted to focus on cloud-native AWS, but in the future I have to get my hands on K8 as well.

The last part of the evaluation is a positive motivator to remind the developer to see how they are valuable right now. It makes little sense to just focus on what’s missing and feeling bad all the time. So I instructed the model to use a positive and motivating tone and focus on the skills already present. Hence, it is not surprising that this widget produces a very sweet-tempered eulogy.

I was surprised by how the model focused on the skills that I think make me unique: “ideal candidate for forward-thinking organizations”, “diverse background” and “commitment to continuous learning, as evidenced by his side projects and community involvement”. This shows a capability for abstraction that is very useful when creating CVs and profiles.

To summarise, use the “Developer Career Check 2025 App” to keep up to date!

(Image Public Domain, https://pxhere.com/en/photo/644366)