Navigating the Future: Hatch’s Tech Radar

The technology landscape is ever changing and as a software development company Hatch realises how important it is to stay aware of new technology trends and to evolve along with them. At Hatch, we build software to help our clients optimise their businesses. Similarly, if new technologies can help us build software better and faster, we want to be able to take advantage of them as quickly as possible.

I’ve only joined Hatch recently so to me it seemed like an important first step to understand our current technology stack and to identify which new technologies we were already using and keeping an eye on as a company. To do so, I dove into our GitHub repositories and talked to my coworkers at Hatch about past, current and future projects in order to put together a visual representation of all technologies relevant to Hatch.

 

Technology Radar

This resulted in a Tech Radar, an idea first introduced by ThoughtWorks, on which we’re able to see which technologies (programming languages, frameworks, tools, platforms and techniques) are in which stage of integration (adopt, trial, assess or hold) at Hatch.

Adopt

In the inner circle of our radar, we find the technologies Hatch is actively using or has adopted during past projects and would use again. The technologies in this section form the core of our company, they are the ones we currently believe in most and we are confident in our expertise in them.

Trial

The second ring contains technologies which are in the early stages of adoption. We think they are worth investing in and plan to keep them as part of our tech stack if we are convinced of their benefits.

Assess

Technologies in this section are believed to be promising and worth keeping an eye on. We think they have the potential to improve our software products or development processes - but not just yet. We might already experiment with them until we decide to go ahead and formally introduce them into our development process.

Hold

If any technologies don’t make it past the trial stage or if previously adopted ones are replaced, they move to the Hold section. For these, we’ve decided there are either too many drawbacks or issues, support is lacking, the cost is too high or we simply believe that there are better alternatives out there.

 

What Does It Tell Us?

As we are a software development company you’ll obviously recognise many technologies related to the technical aspect of creating software (writing, testing, deploying and maintaining code). Interestingly however, our radar also includes many tools and techniques that have to do with software design, prototyping, process, planning, collaboration and communication.

These are very important concepts to us as we know that creating good software is about way more than just technical aspects. The questions of why and what we are building are at least as important as the how. This to make sure that we deliver software that solves the exact problem it is created for.

A few interesting new dots appeared on our radar in 2023, those related to Artificial Intelligence. One of the biggest game changers of the year so far is undoubtedly the growing capability of generative AI. At Hatch the topic comes up regularly, as we realise the impact it will have on our industry. There is a huge potential to speed up the software development and design processes, although we certainly notice it still has many limitations (it looks like our jobs won’t be replaced just yet).

 

Why Do We Care?

At Hatch we believe in doing things the best possible way. We also believe that ‘the best possible way’ is not necessarily what we’ve been doing in the past or even what we are doing today. Every day we are critical about how we develop software. This means investing time into researching new developments without blindly following the newest trends.

Among the list of Hatch’s company values we find: ‘Stay Hungry’, ‘Embrace Change’ and ‘Dive In’. We are encouraged to look further than what the job requires from us. During regular show and tells we share new tech findings and experiments with our colleagues to spark curiosity and push for improvement.

I believe I can speak for everyone at Hatch when I say that we actively enjoy discovering new technologies so I’m curious to see what our Tech Radar will look like in the coming years.