Top-rated technology stacks of 2015

Stackshare is the site developers use to share what technologies they are using to create new web and mobile applications. This year's top list is a great read and give some insight into what developers at the top web sites trust for their technology. As a Ruby/Rails shop, we were particularly interested to see how our favorite tools fared. Some things we saw:

• The number one stack voted by developers was Airbnb, including Ruby, Rails, nginx, Sass and EC2.
• Rails was #10 on the list of Top 10 Open Source Tools of 2015, and #13 on the Top 50 Developer Tools & Services of 2015.
• Slack was #3, and Trello was #4 on the Top 10 Hosted Services - showing that collaborative tools to work with developers and customers are really ingrained now. I will assume that a great deal of that is supporting Agile development processes.
• Bootstrap was #1 on several list of the Top tools of 2015, proving that no one wants to reinvent the UX wheel if they don't have to.

A few things we are really looking forward to in 2016:

• Rails 5 and API-only applications. This will mean easier development of native mobile apps and web apps with a single common back end.
• NoSQL databases. NoSQL isn't new, but we are seeing it really evolve and thanks to the great work on Guacamole and Mongoid we can now write apps with the same development speed we are used to from SQL.
• React - Here at Shiny Creek we don't really love working natively in Javascript, but the frameworks like React have us excited to really dig into new UI work on top of our robust server side tools.
• Collaboration. We feel like 2016 will be the year collaborative development really takes off. Developers have had tools for working with each other for years. Github, Trello, Slack and a host of other tools mean we can work remotely but also as a team. We think even better tools will be coming to allow us to bring our customers and partners into that collaboration even more effectively this year.