When I started out as a grad, I was super into whitepapers. I couldn’t get enough of reading them. I always dreaded the day that I would inevitably succumb to a more senior career where many people had told me that I wouldn’t have time for such things. Today I can proudly and relatively say that they were wrong. That time never came, and to this day, I cherish the time I set aside in my day to pour through a good research paper. With that context, I’ve decided to start a yearly tradition where I mention things that I am looking forward to in the new year. In this particular article, it would be things in my software engineering career that I hope to be enjoying with glee in the coming 12 months - baring any radical changes to world order that force me to follow my Plan B - becoming a coffee barrista at a mountain lodge somewhere.

There are 2 research companies that I keep in the front of my digital library - Gartner and Thoughtworks. There are quite a few podcasts that I listen to as well, which, if anyone is interested, I could recommend, but for now, these will stay off this post so I don’t get distracted. I bring this up because I’m not going to be able to directly quote Gartner articles that the general public would have free access to since it’s a company membership that allows me that privilege - and I shall shamelessly use that as an excuse to not give references to anything I call out (whereas in reality, I’m just really lazy to find all these links). Just Google it, or as the kids say these days, “just ask Chat” or whatever.

Onwards!

I’m looking forward to

Platform Engineering Trends (or the re-emergence of) and Developer Experience as a First Class Citizen

While there are some skeptics of Gartner’s approach to platform engineering (see Dave Farley’s YouTube video) that I take seriously, almost everyone agrees that the tenets of a platform engineer are useful enough to be good engineering qualities to aspire to. Even the nay-sayers. Platform engineering principles are a good way to improve developer experience, among other things, and the data shows that improved DevEx correlates to improved lead times and overall better quality software.

This is a biased article that speaks to my opinions, so I have no shame in saying that I adore the concept. I personally try to embody the principles of a platform engineer despite being part of a delivery team. I believe that pioneering concepts like “shifting left”, CI/CD, good design, and good software delivery practices are complemented really nicely by these trends, and I look forward to seeing how historically resistant organisations embody these shapes of teams.

Stream-aligned thinking in tech (the continuation of)

Books like Team Topologies have been gaining tons of momentum year-on-year in my opinion. These speak very favourably to the concept of “Stream Aligned Teams”. Team Topologies was released in 2019 and was probably the most consolidated version of that type of content at the time. I’ve been in development since 2017, when I first started freelancing as a web developer, and an engineer since 2021, since my first corporate job. I admittedly don’t have a lot of history to go on here - but from my limited perspective - there has been a steady transformation of how engineering teams are being structured and, more importantly, what a good engineering team shape and place looks like. Whether this is sustainable is yet to be seen, but I am ever an optimist. I believe that the type of ownership that engineering teams are getting from aligning work more closely with product feels different to me.

I think the reason is because it’s more practical and easier to achieve than, say, the customer teammate, as described in XP principles and makes the Product Owner’s archetypal role a lot more effective IMO since they can be more of a superhighway than a rickety bridge between single-minded business and priority-juggling engineering teams of old.

AI as an Accelerator Tool Set

I deliberately avoid using the term “Agentic AI” here and am speaking to AI in a broad sense. I believe that while many companies have tried to use AI as a replacement over the last year, I am of the opinion that the current best use of AI is in addition to existing practices. I know that I’m not alone in this and in some really good company opinion wise. I speak more about “AI as a Replacement” later.

I realised the other day that I have come to rely on Gemini when I Google search. I obviously try to be discerning, but the way Google has baked it into the search makes it easy to be. I find myself clicking on links through the Gemini summary more often than on the search page below. It was a bit scary for me when I realised it, but more so because of how subtle it was rather than the AI of it all.

I think being mindful in the use of AI is super important. Using it intentionally has allowed me to avoid the hype train to an acceptable degree and instead has given me tools to more effectively deliver in a happier mindset by taking care of things that I find mundane, tedious, or repetitive in a job that I still love dearly. It has made my job a lot more exciting because of this (after I got over the fear of it replacing me, that is).

Small tools like effective searching and summarising of content, more nuanced auto-complete, writing friendlier emails, etc., make me look forward to this specific aspect of AI.

I’m weary of

Software Estates Suffering due to Potentially Isolated Roles/Teams

I hate throwing things over the fence to another team. I like accountability. It feels nice. I fear that over-defining roles and hyper-emphasising team shapes might lead to the end of “software engineering chivalry”. I hope that creating Stream Aligned Teams or a Platform Team doesn’t lead to “this needs to be assigned to them, I’m not even looking at it” mentality. We already have enough of that. I’ll be annoyed if we get more bad behaviour just because team managers or stubborn seniors take “Team Topologies” at face value and become pains-in-asses just to stick it to a management team that, to be fair, has probably done a poor job of transitioning these teams to the theoretically best shape.

Lack of accountability is bad, but so is the death of collective ownership. In a software estate, things should not be so easily thrown over the line. A Payment system can’t fail and then create/assign the ADO/Jira ticket to a Config Server because someone didn’t put in a correct config value, but a Payment Team can throw the ticket to a Platform Team and wash their hands of the issue. In this scenario, the Payment System and the Config Server are both suffering, and thus, the user/client feels the brunt.

Let’s be real, this has probably happened in 2025 and is going to happen quite a lot in 2026 and beyond. For the sake of my peace, I hope this anti-pattern gives me a miss in my immediate vicinity.

AI as a Replacement for Good Engineering

As I said before - over the last year or so, we’ve seen many companies do radical things with their engineering teams. Many of those have created a lot of anxiety for me and many a colleague, but on the upside, I appreciate the steady heads my current employer has in Technology a lot more than before. I’m not sure that AI in its current form can replace good engineering. I think it could maybe replace mediocre development - but then that’s not that hard nor that impressive to do in my opinion.

I’ve been saying this for a while - the biggest threat is not what AI can do - but rather what management thinks it can.

I’m not looking forward to the inevitable layoffs of engineering teams due to some morally shaky senior management team thinking they won the lottery and can get something for next to nothing whenever they want (like a petulant child). I honestly think we’re still in the hypecycle for AI, but I think we’re nearing the beginning of the downwards gradient in that wave function. I could very well be wrong, but I think that’s part of the anxiety with AI - the use cases for the technology and the packaging and marketing of what it can do lead to unpredictable consequences.

Summary

I am looking forward to the rising DevEx and the acceleration that AI will give me as I embark on a new role, and I’m mostly weary of some (what I consider) morally grey trends in senior management around the world and how they see and perceive AI to be, along with people passing the buck back and forth because they’re scared of change or they haven’t been guided correctly through it.

All-in-all, I have a net positive outlook on Software Engineering in 2026, but then I am a closet optimist about these things. I blame the wonder of being in a field that you actually enjoy, sue me.