You may recall that a few months ago, I announced that, in cooperation with Forrester Research, we were launching a survey to better understand how evolving tools and technologies are affecting the software developer community. Upon my asking you for your participation, more than 1,000 of you responded. Thanks very much for taking the time.

You may also recall that I said that I'd send Dr. Dobb's DVD Release 5 to the the first 100 readers to complete to the survey. You did so, and so did I. But I have to say that my tongue is still sore from licking all the stamps needed to mail 100 DVDs.

To close the loop, Forrester Research analyst Jeffrey Hammond has written an article entitled What Developers Think that focuses on several key trends that emerged from the study — trends that buttressed other surveys that Forrester has conducted. In particular, what Jeffrey found was the growing trend among developers to make their own decisions about what technologies to use, mostly flying under management radar. I'd appreciate hearing your take on these trends (and others) once you read the article.

As for the other survey, Dr. Dobb's senior contributing editor Scott Ambler has launched the January 2010 edition of Dr. Dobb's State of the IT Union survey. The goal of this ongoing survey series is to find out what IT professionals are actually doing in practice. The survey should take you about 5-7 minutes to complete, and your privacy will be completely protected.

At the end of the survey, you will be given the chance to be entered into a draw for one of ten copies of The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise by Martin Abbott and Michael Fisher, published in December 2009 by Addison Wesley. (Let me add that scalability is an increasingly important topic, so whether you get one of Scott's copies or not, you should bone up on the subject.)

The results of this survey will be summarized by Scott in a forthcoming article. Furthermore, this is an open survey, so the source data (without identifying information to protect your privacy), a summary slide deck, and the original source questions will be posted at www.ambysoft.com/surveys/ so that others may analyze the data for their own purposes. Data from previous surveys have been used by university students and professors for their research papers, and hopefully, the same will be true of the data from this survey. The results from several other surveys are already posted there, so please feel free to take advantage of this resource.

Please take a few minutes to participate in this study. Your take on the issues Scott addresses is relevant and important — and greatly appreciated.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com