What’s on Your Tech Radar?

At Aviture we are nearing the point of going live with an internal Technology Radar, inspired by the ThoughtWorks Tech Radar.

This is a great step in becoming more self aware of where we are at in the industry and where we want to go. However, tech radars can be useful not only for companies but they can be also useful for individuals too.

I decided to put together my own personal tech radar for the same reasons that Aviture did. A personal tech radar will put on paper what was previously only in my head and it becomes an artifact for tracking my thoughts and recommendations for the projects I work on.

With the ThoughtWorks tech radar there are four quadrants (Tools, Techniques, Platforms, and Libraries & Frameworks) and four “rings” for each quadrant (Hold, Assess, Trial, Adopt). You can find their definitions on the ThoughtWorks website.

For my personal radar I decided to use the same quadrant and ring names, though I chose to reinterpret the rings in the following way:

• Hold - I’ve looked at it and I don’t think it has a future in this industry.
• Assess - I should read up on this tech to see if it’s worth using.
• Trial - There’s enough convincing reasons that I should go beyond a “Hello, World” understanding of this tech.
• Adopt - I’ve used this tech enough to confidently recommend it for the appropriate use case.

At a glance my personal radar looks like this:

Being primarily a developer it’s not surprising to see I spent most of my time in the Tools and Languages & Frameworks quadrants.

Those who work closely with me will probably not be too surprised in particular by my Languages & Frameworks quadrant specifically.

Putting these ideas down on paper really helps me understand why I like certain technologies and not others. It also helps me and my co-workers identify patterns that can be used to steer my career into opportunities that align with what interests me the most.

I encourage you to do the same and put together your own tech radar so that you and those around you can identify what technology interests you. The build-your-own-radar repo from ThoughtWorks is useful and it’s as simple as creating a Google spreadsheet.

What’s on your tech radar?