Top 7 skills developers learned: Educative's January Look Back

This is part 1 of our 3-part January Look Back series, where we look back on some of the exciting developments at Educative in 2022. In this installment, we’ll discuss the top 7 skills developers learned with us in 2022.

From ChatGPT to the metaverse, 2022 was a busy year full of ups and downs for tech. With a recession on the horizon, many tech employees — including developers — were affected by layoffs.

Despite that, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) predicts a 25% increase in employment of software developers by 2031. Software development is still an in-demand skill that’s worth the learning investment. Our active learning community here at Educative would agree as well.

In 2022, we were honored to serve over 1.6 million developers, developer teams, and engineering managers with high-quality learning resources. Throughout the year, our team and authors worked diligently to add 300+ new courses, Skill Paths, and Projects to continue giving developers a hands-on learning experience with in-demand skills.

Today, we’ll be highlighting the top 7 skills developers learned with us, and some of the most popular of our new courses, Skill Paths, and Projects in 2022.

We’ll cover:

• Top 7 skills developers learned
  • System Design
  • Interview prep
  • Data Science & Machine Learning
  • Web development
  • APIs
  • Languages: Python, Go, & more
  • Web security
  • Other top picks
• Keeping the learning going in 2023

Top 7 skills developers learned in 2022#

1. System Design#

Acing the System Design Interview is crucial for developers looking to advance in their careers. With the growing prevalence of distributed systems, all developers, including junior developers, need to learn System Design. Similarly, companies can’t afford to cut corners on System Design, or else they might end up in trouble (e.g., think back to how Ticketmaster’s servers crashed during Taylor Swift’s concert sales).

If you’re unfamiliar with System Design, check out the The complete guide to System Design in 2023.

If learning System Design isn’t on your radar, it should be. A lack of System Design skills can unfortunately disqualify even the most competent developers from their desired roles. In some cases, underperforming in the System Design Interview might still result in a job offer, but for a more junior role than the role to which you applied (an unfortunate occurrence referred to as “down leveling”).

With stakes being higher for the System Design Interview, we’ve been thrilled that tens of thousands of developers and engineering managers strengthened their System Design skills in 2022. These developers gained a foundational knowledge of System Design building blocks, got hands-on practice designing 13 real-world systems, and learned an 8-step approach for solving System Design Interview problems — all through our new comprehensive course: Grokking Modern System Design Interview for Engineers & Managers.

Grokking Modern System Design Interview for Engineers & Managers was the collective effort of a team of System Design experts, PhDs, and industry leaders. For a sneak peek at what it offers, check out the following sections:

• RESHADED: An 8-step approach to help solve any System Design problem
• Design TinyURL: A detailed walkthrough of solving a common System Design problem, Design a URL Shortener

With limited time in the day, it’s always important to be strategic about your learning. In 2022, thousands of our learners used these new resources to plan their learning efficiently:

• System Design Assessment to gauge their System Design proficiency
• Personalized Paths to generate a tailored System Design curriculum, based on current knowledge, time commitment per week, etc.

As you level up in your System Design skills, stay tuned for more System Design courses in 2023 — including an advanced one!

2. Interview prep#

Investing in more comprehensive interview prep is more important than ever before. There are plenty of developer jobs on the market, but competition is high amid layoffs and the looming recession—you have to ensure you can stand out against the competition.

While we can’t necessarily add more time to the day, we can be smarter about interview prep. That’s exactly what thousands of developers did this year at Educative.

In addition to learning strong frameworks and foundations to ace System Design Interviews, our community has been learning a smarter approach to ace coding interviews (and no, it’s not using ChatGPT).

Instead of drilling endless coding problems, it’s far more efficient to learn to identify the underlying patterns and appropriate tools to solve a wide array of real-world problems. Our learners have been doing exactly that through our newest interview prep series: Grokking Coding Interview Patterns.

Grokking Coding Interview Patterns trains you on 24 patterns that will allow you to solve thousands of coding problems. It’s available in the following languages:

• Grokking Coding Interview Patterns in Python
• Grokking Coding Interview Patterns in C++
• Grokking Coding Interview Patterns in Java
• Grokking Coding Interview Patterns in Go
• Grokking Coding Interview Patterns in JavaScript

Beyond the coding interview, many developers have been preparing for object-oriented design (OOD) interviews with our new course, Grokking the Low Level Design Interview Using OOD Principles. Through this course, developers have learned to efficiently break down design problems and apply OOD principles by designing 15 real-world problems.

Interviewing itself is a crucial skill that even the most experienced developers have to learn (and re-learn). Interview skills deserve training even if you’re not on the job market — after all, you never know when the next opportunity will come along.

And the technologies for web development are growing perhaps even more rapidly than job opportunities!

Nearly all developers will eventually make an application that has to interact with APIs. So learning about them is a worthwhile investment.

Not surprisingly, some of our most popular new courses and Skill Paths in 2022 were focused on these top picks: