The year 2020 was marked by the corona pandemic, which will continue to be with us. But what were the most important trends and the most interesting topics from the point of view of the readers of heise Developer ? In the following, the team takes a look back and presents the top – 10 – list of the most successful articles, which readers not only clicked on most often, but also controversially discussed.

place 10: Well protected: OWASP API Security Top 10 APIs open up a wide range of possibilities for developers to build and network applications and data. The more frequently and more exposed APIs are used, for example via single-page applications (SPA), the greater the attack surface for hackers. The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), which focuses on the most important vulnerabilities in web applications, has now responded to the growing dangers posed by APIs and has issued a top ten list for API security. Martin Burkhard’s contribution Well protected: OWASP API Security Top 10 gives an overview of the ten most important vulnerabilities for APIs, and he describes how developers feel and developers should, for example, adjust to the threat situation through anticipatory Security by Design.

Place 9: Career reboot: Why the restart for developers has never been like this simple was On rank 9 of the most popular posts is the first of three articles from the 2020 the newly started series “Young Professionals write for Young Professionals”, to which heise Developer has explicitly invited young developers – with the aim of being their own, but of course also them to inform interested “older semesters” on a monthly basis about current trends, developments, phenomena and personal experiences. In career reboot: Thomas Limbüchler, Developer Relations Strategist at WeAreDevelopers, reports not only from his own experience, but also presents the observations and trends that WeAreDevelopers was able to collect as a job placement platform for developers and companies, why the restart has never been so easy for developers.

Also because gray offices, dreary everyday life and steep hierarchies are a thing of the past, the majority of the developers surveyed in a study are very satisfied with their job. For those willing to change, a higher salary is an incentive to look for a new job. Many also take personal development seriously and do not hesitate long to face new challenges – while on the other hand, more and more companies are actively recruiting new developers, from beginners to experienced specialists.

Rank 8: Why now is the best time to become a web developer Young Professional Christian Liebel landed with his plea “Why now is the best time to become a web developer” in 8th place in the top – 10 – List for 2020. As a passionate cross-platform application developer, Christian is convinced of the diverse opportunities that the World Wide Web offers developers – and that not only since JavaScript and HTML5 breathed life and dynamism into static websites. In his opinion, web development opens up the same broad spectrum for developers as classic application development and thus offers opportunities for specialists as well as full stack developers. While WebAssembly (wasm) contributes to greater programming language diversity, Progressive Web Apps (PWA) bridge the gap between the desktop and the web. As part of the Web Capabilities Project (Fugu), PWAs are also to become even more “native” through additional web interfaces.

Place 7: 25 years: “Delphi was a child of its time” 1995 the first version of the Delphi programming language was launched. On the occasion of the anniversary last year, David Intersimone (aka David I) shared an interview with heise-Developer – author Tam Hanna 25 Years: “Delphi was a child of its time” is his personal assessment of Delphi. In view of Visual Basic, which relies on an interpreter, and languages ​​such as Turbo Pascal, which are supplemented for GUIs with class libraries, Borland broke new ground with Delphi and, according to David I, created a powerful programming environment with a user-friendly GUI designer (instead of a class library) and an optimizing compiler, a Debugger and a database access API. In contrast to Visual Basic, native applications can be created and databases from third-party providers can be integrated directly. The real strength of Delphi is that you can see the complete picture of the target system with comparatively little effort – from the implementation of a database to cloud functions.

Place 6: What distinguishes readable code? Readability is synonymous with traceability and should therefore always be aimed for when writing code demands Golo Roden and formulates this in his blog post What distinguishes readable code? five basic rules. For most developers, the focus is naturally that the written code works. In the face of the difficult task of understanding a given problem and finding a solution to it, concern about the legibility of the code often fades into the background. But with this, developers only make their work difficult in the long term when it comes to maintenance and further development.