New businesses with software at their core are being created every day. Developers are the lifeblood of so much of what is being built and of technological innovation, and they are ever more vital to operations across the entire business. So why wouldn't we empower them? Machine learning and IoT in particular offer huge opportunities for developers, especially those facing the crowded markets of other platforms, to engage with a sizeable untapped audience.

This year was a big one for companies like Canonical and Slack. It also was a big year for technologies that Canonical created to enable third-party application support—specifically, the snap package. I'm sure most, if not all, of you have heard about this package manager. In fact, it's been around since at least 2014, but it initially was developed around Canonical's Ubuntu phone operating system. Now, although the phone operating system has since been canceled, snaps continue to dominate the operating system, in both the server and desktop space.