

Ask HN: Opportunities for 2013? - subsystem

In a general sense what are the best, or still good, opportunities for a developer or otherwise technically skilled person in 2013?<p>Are accelerators like YC getting more saturated? Will mobile still be good when there's less of a first-mover advantage? Are rents getting to expensive in Berlin? Will there a demand for developers in high paying industries like the mining, oil and financial industries? Etc.<p>I guess I'm asking not so much for predictions, as what people have seen happen during 2012.
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iamdave
My mind is inclined to think that with the activity between ICE and the NYSE
you're going to see either an uptick, or an outright explosion of developers
writing software for trading commodities. Foreign Exchange trading is still
the reigning king of developer friendly trading environments because of the
nearly limitless platforms and systems for traders; stocks and commodities
will soon join them (though there are already highly technical systems in
place).

This last bit is based on second-hand experience: Forex traders pay good money
for data in the form of dashboards and widgets. You don't have to write
anything that allows the trader to actually make trades/open/close positions,
but a personal friend took a few days off from his sys admin job to write a
dashboard for the EUR/USD pair with technical analysis that can be published
with one line of javascript.

It was licensed to a private client within a week for demoing purposes. He
quit his job a few days after that and had sold 8 more licenses.

Great thread, actually. I'm curious myself, now that I chew on the question a
bit.

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subsystem
Thanks for sharing. It's actually similar to what I've been doing the last
couple of years. Replacing internal desktop software with websites in
industries where you sell hardware, data access or separate services.

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mrbird
I'm excited about the "reshoring" (or whatever you want to call it) trend.
There may not be a lot of money in it yet, and it's still small in absolute
numbers, but what I like is the opportunity for people with a background in
software to work on physical products. It's a lot of fun to build something
you can pick up, turn around, throw, turn on, or wear.

These opportunities seem to be increasing, at least in the U.S. James Fallows
of The Atlantic has been following this trend for a while:
[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/mr-
china...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/mr-china-comes-
to-america/309160/)

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dylanhassinger
Build your own micro product. Then you can determine your own future, yearly
trends be damned.

<http://lifestylebusinesspodcast.com>

<http://fourhourworkweek.com>

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ig1
I think Kickstarter will go mainstream and you'll see a rise of niche-focused
Kickstarters (similar to what happened with the growth of dailydeals).

