Ask HS: What will programming and architecture look like in 2020?

This topic has been ripped directly from Lambda the Ultimate's What will programming look like in 2020? post. They are having a lively discussion and if you are interested in flexing your holiday thought muscles we might have a good discussion too.

Eight years is a difficult prediction horizon. It's too short to simply project out current trends and it's too long to discount potential technological breakthroughs coming to market. There's the challenge.

Some of my lousy predictions: 

• Programmers Will Form Guilds Around New Gamified Training Hubs
• The Web Will Become More Closed Before it Becomes More Open
• Not Everyone Will Become a Programmer
• Focus Will Shift to Creating Bigger People Instead of Chasing Big Ideas

Programmers Will Form Guilds Around New Gamified Training Hubs

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Performance - When do I start worrying?

A common problem of the application designers is to predict when they need to start worrying about the Architectural/System improvements on their application. Do I need to add more resources? If yes, then how long before I am compelled to do so? The question is not only when but also what. Should I plan to implement a true caching layer on top of my application or do I need to shard my database. Do I need to move to a distributed search infrastructure and if yes when ! Essentially we try to find out the functionalities of the application that will become critical over time.

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