Online resources are increasingly becoming the way that new developers learn. Stack Overflow’s 2021 Developer Survey indicated that for coders under the age of 18, videos and blogs are more popular than books and school combined.
The development profession is full of new developers. Over 50% of respondents indicated that they have been coding for less than 10 years and more than 35% have been coding for less than five years.
Coders are also starting out younger. The most popular age range for a person to write their first line of code was 11 to 17, with 53% of responses. Fourteen percent of respondents wrote their first line of code between the ages of 5 and 10, and 24% wrote their first line between 18 and 24 years old.
The survey also indicated that the pandemic has influenced work status for many developers, and a greater percentage of respondents now work part-time or are in school. The percentage of full-time developers has decreased in the past year.
“This may reflect the effects of the pandemic, which saw workers from all industries stepping back and reevaluating their relationship to a five day work week and in-person employment,” Stack Overflow wrote in a blog post explaining the results of the report.
JavaScript remained the most commonly used programming language for the ninth year in a row. This year Python surpassed SQL to become the third most popular language.
React surpassed jQuery as the most commonly used web framework, with 40% of developers using it. JQuery was used by 34%, Express by 23%, Angular by 22%, Vue.js by 18%, and ASP.NET Core by 18%.
AWS was the dominant platform among Stack Overflow users, with 54% of respondents using it. Following AWS was Google Cloud Platform at 31.05% and Microsoft Azure at 30.77% — nearly tied.
Other popular tools developers used include Git (used by 93%), Docker (48%), Yarn (17%), and Kubernetes (16%).
Stack Overflow surveyed over 80,000 respondents for the survey. More information is available here.
