Tech Trends 2024: Highlights on the Current Tech Industry From a Developer

I have attended several events this year, and I’m constantly keeping my ear to the ground for the latest topics and trends in technology. As a developer focused mostly on data and database industries, I feel that this year has seen a massive expansion of data and efficiency use cases and interest.

In this post, I’ll highlight some of the trends I’ve seen throughout 2024, especially in the data, graph, and analytics technology spaces. Whether you are simply curious about what is happening in technology industries or looking to put together interesting topics for papers or presentations, this post will include the greatest hits.

Graph and Knowledge Graph

There has been an explosion of knowledge graph discussions and content this year, many of which are related to AI (the next topic on our list). However, knowledge graphs are useful in solving many broader technical problems and have been applied in business long before AI took the world by storm.

“A knowledge graph is an organized representation of real-world entities and their relationships.”
- What is a Knowledge Graph

While connected data is often stored in a graph database, it is not limited to that storage medium. The value of a knowledge graph is the connections between the data that make understanding context and how objects are actually relevant to each other.

In AI, knowledge graphs help support reasoning/logic, fact-checking, and gathering relevant information for answers provided by an LLM. There has been content introducing knowledge graphs and how to build the data and architecture into existing systems. Many sessions also highlight how they can provide visibility into the “black box” of machine learning or how network-based results improve data analytics.

AI and GenAI

Much of this year’s content has focused on artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) topics. 2024 has been a fast-paced year of exploration of how technology can take advantage of the latest innovations with language models, using them as chatbots, personal assistants, and much more.

Earlier in the year, content applied large language models to everything, searching for the use cases with maximum value. As time has progressed, the space has adapted with specialized models (trained in certain areas), new varieties of tools (for coding, accessibility, content generation, etc.), as well as integration with existing, high-quality data stores used in retrieval augmented generation (RAG).

Themes of productivity, efficiency, and human capital disruption have been woven among the technical details of building, implementing, evaluating, and maintaining AI solutions over time. I have also felt the emergence of what I call the “data scientist developer,” overlapping typically the data science or development topics. As an added bonus, changes in the field are occurring so quickly that the learning curve can seem insurmountable and there is always a need for higher-level content amidst deep-dives.

GraphRAG

Combining the last two topics together has sparked lots of discussion around GraphRAG. This is where graph data (usually knowledge graphs) are used in combination with an LLM to provide relevant and high-quality results in an AI application.

Microsoft released a GraphRAG solution a few weeks ago, and many others have produced similar offerings/solutions to AI’s shortcomings. In the content realm, much of the story revolves around GenAI limitations, what GraphRAG is, and how it solves specific problems in the AI technology industry. I will be interested to see how this area evolves in 2025 and how businesses harness GraphRAG to improve their systems.

Query Language Standardization

Leaving the whirlwind of AI behind for a moment, 2024 was also the announcement of the ISO graph query language standard! This has been in the works for many years and involved many graph database vendors discussing and outlining a query language standard for graph databases. The most recent before this was the SQL standard in 1986 (the latest revision in 2023), so this made quite a splash in the database and graph database communities this spring.

While there may not be a lot of interruption to workflow from the release, we can expect convergence of graph query syntax, making it easier for new developers to learn. Existing impacted languages (Cypher, Gremlin, SPARQL, and others) will adopt any necessary changes to align with the standards.

Applications and Operations

Topics in constructing better systems and improving response to issues continue to be critical to development. While we see some disruption from AI, many systems still need non-AI solutions and approaches (or at least need to start there). Content around system architecture, DevOps, tools/frameworks, testing and logging, cybersecurity, authentication, and many other core technologies are still prevalent, helping developers run the backbone of businesses across industries.

Whether you are working with the latest tech stack or trying to improve error response, you can find high-level and deep-dive content available alongside the shinier topics.

Community and Larger Themes

I have noticed an increase in joint projects, events, and content this year. While there are probably a variety of different factors, two that immediately come to mind are that the technology industry is focusing on efficiency and also tackling larger problems.

We can do more with less by combining energy across teams, companies, and industries to produce unified results with overall less effort. Whether that’s bringing together separate audiences for an event to showcase multiple technologies or integrating two technologies for optimized solutions, collaboration among differing communities offers broader learning opportunities through a combined source. I have also seen an increase in larger technical concerns for sustainability, ethics/privacy, and tech regulations. Issues of this magnitude cannot be solved by a single entity, so joint efforts are needed to affect awareness and change in these areas.

Wrapping Up!

This list is not exhaustive but highlights many of the topics where I have seen throughout 2024's technical content in places like newsfeeds, technical blogs/videos, and conferences, such as Neo4j’s free, 24-hour virtual NODES conference. With 170+ speakers lined up from all parts of the world and industries, there are sample sessions for each of the trends covered above and many more.

Happy coding!