I work in this field so I'm incredibly biased: automated business solutions that cut entry-level data employees out of the equation. You save TONS on the bottom line, and cut out human-driven process that is error prone and difficult to manage. I'm talking about things beyond "API-driven dev", more in the realms of Puppeteer, Microsoft Office automation, screen-scraping (mouse/keyboard), etc. I make API's out of things that other devs balk at - and trust me, it has a lot of market value.

This isn't as "up and coming" as all of the other items people are mentioning, but I'd put it on a "always increasing in popularity" trajectory due to an ever-increasing need. It's not really sexy or interesting, but there will always be a HUGE market for the things that I can do =)

I will warn people that "up and coming" tech is often fad-based and has boom and bust cycles, and personally I'd rather be working for a paycheck then waiting to win the lottery in this regard.

We've been working on migrating from Oracle to Postgres for a few years now. We are about 2 weeks from being finished. It is not for the faint of heart, but it is totally worth it. The documentation is much much better, performance is equivalent or better, the sql dialect is saner, etc. Other than moving the data itself (ora2pg was invaluable for this), rewriting the queries is what has taken the most amount of time. Some of our tips on differences between oracle and postgres sql:

replace nvl with coalesce

replace rownum <= 1 with LIMIT 1

replace listagg with string_agg

replace recursive hierarchy (start with/connect by/prior) with recursive

replace minus with except

replace SYSDATE with CURRENT_TIMESTAMP

replace trunc(sysdate) with CURRENT_DATE

replace trunc(datelastupdated) with DATE(datelastupduted) or datelastupdated::date

replace artificial date sentinels/fenceposts like to_date(’01 Jan 1900’) with '-infinity'::date

remove dual table references (not needed in postgres)

replace decode with case statements

replace unique with distinct

replace to_number with ::integer

replace mod with % operator

replace merge into with INSERT ... ON CONFLICT… DO UPDATE/NOTHING

change the default of any table using sys_guid() as a default to gen_random_uuid()

oracle pivot and unpivot do not work in postgres - use unnest

ORDER BY NLSSORT(english, 'NLS_SORT=generic_m') becomes ORDER BY gin(insensitive_query(english) gin_trgm_ops)

Oracle: uses IS NULL to check for empty string; in postgres, empty string and null are different

If a varchar/text column has a unique index a check needs to be made to make sure empty strings are changed to nulls before adding or updating the column.

PostgreSQL requires a sub-SELECT surrounded by parentheses, and an alias must be provided for it. - SELECT * FROM ( ) A

any functions in the order by clause must be moved to the select statement (e.g. order by lower(column_name))

Any sort of numeric/integer/bigint/etc. inside of a IN statement must not be a string (including 'null' - don't bother trying to use null="" it won't work). Concatenating a NULL with a NOT NULL will result in a NULL.

Pay attention to any left joins. If a column from a left join is used in a where or select clause it might be null.

For sequences, instead of .nextval use nextval('')

I’m personally not a huge fan of driving everywhere. But I wonder whether HN’s view on this isn’t out of touch with the average middle class American’s. The average American commute is 48 minutes round trip, significantly shorter than France (71 minutes), Italy (65 minutes), or Spain (61 minutes): https://www.oecd.org/els/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travelling...

That’s mainly because Europe has higher public transit use, and public transit is slow. Parisians who work and commute by public transit spend an average of 116 minutes a day on public transit: https://www.thelocal.fr/20160418/parisians-spend-23-days-a-y....

Viewed from a different perspective, a country where most people can spend 48 minutes a day commuting, because it’s rich enough for everyone to afford a car,[1] might be considered better than one where many people have to endure two-hour public transit commutes. Maybe utopia isn’t Paris, with rich people living in beautiful walkable downtowns, but rather Houston, where middle class people can afford big houses with a pool and a short, direct commute.

[1] The median disposable income per US household is a staggering 50% higher than for a French household.