After a long stint of personal (and private) conversations, let us move to something more generic and informative. This post is about those things that are (usually) found in job ads in most of the start-ups, small and big companies and the news sites all over.

Imagine you've a hardware instrument that is constantly supplying information. Now, there comes a point where in, you want to track this. Well, that is now possible via the Internet-of-Things. All it requires is sensible and reliable data collection. Stage-1. Be a good programmer in Embedded systems, C and interfacing to a software entity and this can be a huge field to play with.

But what if you want to digitize this information and keep it so that you could delve more information out of it? What if you, at a later stage find out that this same old data is now able to give you valuable inputs and can cut down/zoom your productivity? What if you find that a simple interpretation can ease things in the later stages, determining the device's future itself? Internet-of-Things Stage-2, for the answer. The data collected can now be pushed to central repositories on a remotely hosted Cloud that can then be used to do whatever data-analysis you wanted to achieve.

Now that you understood how data is important, can you now visualize this interpreted data into an user interface? Can you show this data into useful pictorial representation which can then make users see the ongoing patterns based on their data inputs? Will you go beyond the usual thinking of viewing data and now, compose data out of data? Well, Internet-of-Things Stage-3 A.K.A UI/UX is the field for you. A good programming exposure in node.js, JavaScript and some frameworks like backbone.js, ember.js and angular.js can lead you to a lot of companies that are currently dealing with this concept.

Internet-of-Things has various technologies for you. Becoming a full-stack developer is in high demand as most companies require people with exposure to various technologies and can solve the whole problem in one go. Various Hardware start-ups are now into the foreplay to provide more customer productivity and saving most of the undesired tasks. They are now cutting down on precious resources which otherwise laid a huge bill on customers' wallets. Also, this is the latest fad among VCs in the Silicon Valley too (as per a Quora answer).

Okay, you don't seem to be interested in either. But what about that little device in your pocket which you play games, keep reminders, talk/chat people, read articles and what not? Smart-phone application development hasn't (surprisingly) lowered in demand. With more technological achievements in the mobile domain and the advent of building user-specific phones, developers in such fields are challenged to all of the concepts - UI/UX, APIs, data feed and ideas. Be a good developer in Android/Java, iOS/Obj-C with some additional web frameworks like PhoneGap, Sencha and Appcelerator, and you don't get out of work.

Embedded Systems, Back-end Infrastructure, Front-End Data Analytics and Mobile Programming. That's the thing going on this year. As far as I'm seeing it.