If you’re a small- or medium-sized business considering your technology strategy, here’s what you should and should not care about in May, 2024:

Care: AI

Yes, yes, yes, the hype has started to die off. Early AI startups are starting to fail. The landscape is changing day-to-day. Don’t jump into AI just because you’re feeling FOMO. Use it to make your user’s experience better. Use it to automate things that you couldn’t automate before. Be smart about it.

Don’t Care: Kubernetes

You’re not Google. You don’t need infrastructure designed to handle hundreds of millions of concurrent requests. When it comes to platform engineering, KEEP IT SIMPLE. Do the things that give you ROI right now, like Docker, a CDN, and CI/CD scripts. Even Terraform is probably too much for most systems.

Care: Next.js

The idea of Next.js has always been cool to me, but the last few years have really turned it into a legitimate choice for production systems. So many of the headaches of software in the last decade have been around the hard disconnect between the frontend and the backend. There’s a comforting practicality to writing the frontend and backend together in Next.js.

Don’t Care, Yet: Flutter

Flutter has some good things going for it. It’s fast, both to build and to run. It’s a write-once-run-twice framework (like React Native). And, you write it in Dart, which is a nice language. But right now, in 2024, it’s just not ready. The ecosystem of libraries is still small. The framework is still delicate and buggy. Today, you should use React Native. I do imagine Flutter will catch up, and that can only be a good thing for the industry. Hopefully Google doesn’t abandon it like so many other promising projects.

Care: Python

I spent a couple days writing Python recently, and I really enjoyed it. It’s wildly popular, and becoming more so. We haven’t had a lot of interest in it from clients, but I think it’s worth thinking about for future projects.