Why another Tech Radar?

Software technology is a lot like fashion. That's nice if you're into following trendwatchers. If tech is your business however, it makes sense to look for something more fact based. Look no further: this is the Data Driven Tech Radar. The problem with most other tech radar publications, is that it's impossible for a small group of experts to predict the future of the world wide tech scene based purely on their personal experience (experts are often wrong; 2008 financial crisis anyone?). We use data and the wisdom of the crowd instead. Did you know that in Amsterdam alone, there are over 320 active tech meetup groups which held 1,310 events in 2015 that attracted 51,446 attendances from a crowd of almost 15,000 unique technologists? That's a lot of wisdom.

Also, we don't believe there is much value in predicting the next big individual technology. Instead we focus on communities and movements. In this radar you will not find us foretelling that perhaps Docker is the next big thing. Instead we will tell you that the DevOps, Programmable Infrastructure and Cloud community is trending. We'll leave it up to you to join that community and learn which individual technologies are being explored. This radar is here to help you make informed decisions; not follow the latest trend per se.

How does it work?

It's always been our observation that real technology decisions are driven by the practicioners (in spite of even the most aggressive upper management push for whatever it is they accidentally bought on the golf course). So, we went to the source: what do the practicioners spend their evenings and weekends on. We went for the meetups.

Meetup.com is in essence an event based social network. There are groups that organise real life events which people attend in order to learn about new technologies. As with all (social) networks, a lot can be learned from looking at network structure. We look at communities, activity and content. That is: Which sub-groups exist in the network? How often do they get together? What do they talk about? Fact based.

To answer the above questions, we sourced a data set from Meetup.com's API and used algorithms for network community detection and natural language processing. Here, we take a more in-depth look at the communities that were most active last year. We've named these communities for convenience.