In a general sense what are the best, or still good, opportunities for a developer or otherwise technically skilled person in 2013?<p>Are accelerators like YC getting more saturated? Will mobile still be good when there's less of a first-mover advantage? Are rents getting to expensive in Berlin? Will there a demand for developers in high paying industries like the mining, oil and financial industries? Etc.<p>I guess I'm asking not so much for predictions, as what people have seen happen during 2012.
My mind is inclined to think that with the activity between ICE and the NYSE you're going to see either an uptick, or an outright explosion of developers writing software for trading commodities. Foreign Exchange trading is still the reigning king of developer friendly trading environments because of the nearly limitless platforms and systems for traders; stocks and commodities will soon join them (though there are already highly technical systems in place).<p>This last bit is based on second-hand experience: Forex traders pay good money for data in the form of dashboards and widgets. You don't have to write anything that allows the trader to actually make trades/open/close positions, but a personal friend took a few days off from his sys admin job to write a dashboard for the EUR/USD pair with technical analysis that can be published with one line of javascript.<p>It was licensed to a private client within a week for demoing purposes. He quit his job a few days after that and had sold 8 more licenses.<p>Great thread, actually. I'm curious myself, now that I chew on the question a bit.
I'm excited about the "reshoring" (or whatever you want to call it) trend. There may not be a lot of money in it yet, and it's still small in absolute numbers, but what I like is the opportunity for people with a background in software to work on physical products. It's a lot of fun to build something you can pick up, turn around, throw, turn on, or wear.<p>These opportunities seem to be increasing, at least in the U.S. James Fallows of The Atlantic has been following this trend for a while: <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/mr-china-comes-to-america/309160/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/mr-china...</a>
Build your own micro product. Then you can determine your own future, yearly trends be damned.<p><a href="http://lifestylebusinesspodcast.com" rel="nofollow">http://lifestylebusinesspodcast.com</a><p><a href="http://fourhourworkweek.com" rel="nofollow">http://fourhourworkweek.com</a>