The Top 20 Software Development & Programming Trends of 2025

Serverless architecture and computing on the rise

Serverless architecture is gaining traction as it allows developers to focus on coding without managing servers, boosting scalability and efficiency. This growth is driven in part by increased cloud adoption and demands for quicker deployment and scalable applications.

Generative AI increasingly integrated into customer-facing products and internal processes

Since ChatGPT’s launch in 2023, millions of businesses have integrated generative AI into their customer-facing products as well as internal processes.

Tournament-style job boards are emerging as a way to match skilled candidates with employers

Information security professionals have learned that some people just love breaking into secured systems, and they’ll be better-off gamifying that than fighting it. HackTheBox is a virtual penetration-testing tournament: users are challenged to break into simulated systems as quickly as possible. When the site launched, it “required” an invite code—but savvy users were expected to hack their way around this limitation.

Sites like this increasingly became popular after Youtube started banning content showcasing how to bypass websites’ security measures and new entrants into the space looked for other ways to learn.

The pace of change in software makes it hard to hire purely based on credentials. Schools can still filter for raw ability, and can give students a thorough grounding in theory, but practice evolves faster than curricula. That’s especially true in security, where there’s an arms-race between hackers and IT teams—security holes get patched, new exploits get discovered, and software updates constantly introduce complex new vulnerabilities. A tournament-style approach with a constant variety of new challenges is the best way to identify people with the combination of skills and adaptability necessary to thrive.

The site has a job board, with different jobs locked based on user rankings. One source of word-of-mouth advertising: security professionals suggest tournaments like HackTheBox as practice for people who have just joined the industry or are interviewing for a new role.

This approach even works in other fields: every designer has a portfolio page, stock-pickers tout their ideas on SumZero and ValueInvestorsClub, and media companies spot talent in indie newsletters and blogs. The closer a job is to a fun hobby, the more likely it is that a tournament-based job board will work.

AI as a programming assistant

Using increasingly-popular AI tools like Cursor and GitHub Copilot, software developers are speeding up their development time significantly.

A growing number of for-profit companies are switching their business model to open source, and successfully monetizing deployment, support, and training

Open-sourcing software is typically a strategy that is pursued when the developer wants to get public help building something, a move rarely made by enterprise security software companies. Wazuh - an enterprise security platform - open-sourced their software, but not for the reason open-source was around. Instead, Wazuh realized that open-source means more transparency and more transparency is a proxy for trust among clients making purchasing decisions. Making the code available and transparent is a way to signal that it's high quality.

Security is a big ticket item and part of what's being sold is trust. Enterprise security companies are paid both so that their clients don't get hacked and so that, if they do, they can deflect the blame: "even brand-name-enterprise-security-company couldn't stop this one."

Given that the software is open-source and Wazuh consequently cannot charge for it, their business model is instead to monetize through deployment, support, and training.

An open-source product is basically subjected to a continuous security audit, but the more complex the product, the harder it is to correctly deploy. An outside observer can review the code and see that it works if used correctly, but the correct use can be a challenge - hence why Wazuh chose to monetize there.

Security has been a growing industry for years, but that growth accelerated due to Covid-19. Now, companies have to deal with remote work, which has both meant that more devices and behaviors could lead to breaches and that IT teams are busy configuring employees' VPN access and setting up video conferencing.

Rise of low code / no-code platforms that allow non-technical users to build applications with minimal or even no coding

The low-code/no-code movement has exploded – empowering non-technical users to develop applications themselves using user-friendly interfaces and pre-built templates. This shortens time to market and reduces the need to rely on scarce programming talent.