Programming trend No. 6: Bandwidth is no longer free
Web programmers have grown up believing bandwidth is free and getting ever faster. No need to worry about slow download times -- in a year, everyone's connection will be zippier, and the problem will disappear. Unfortunately, those days are over, thanks to more and more ISPs adding bandwidth caps and metering.
Regardless of whether you see this as a need to crack down on bandwidth hogs destroying the commonwealth or as a power grab by those who own the pipes and, by coincidence, want to sell pay-per-view video feeds, bandwidth is something programmers need to worry about consuming.
This will change many of the gimmicks built around the cloud because traffic from your home machine to the cloud will be metered. Will radio stations be able to stream every bit that we hear and still make enough money on the pennies from ads? Will online backup be viable?
Optimizing bandwidth consumption when designing apps is becoming imperative. Minimizing JavaScript files and CSS files isn't just for speed; it also saves bandwidth. If programmers don't heed this trend, users of their code could be driven away by higher bandwidth charges in the near future.
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