Top 10: The ten most read developer articles in 2025

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The year 2025 is gradually coming to an end. Therefore, it is time for us as editors to summarize the most popular articles of the year on heise developer in one post. This year, the Top 10 features a colorful mix of Angular Signals, AI agents, tools, and design patterns.

The list deliberately excludes news. The top topics of the year in the news on heise Developer will appear in a separate post in the coming days.

We have also not included the regular blog posts in the list. For blogs, topics related to the use of specific programming languages, software development, and the everyday life of a software architect have particularly sparked interest. Above all, “How cute: You seriously program in this programming language?”; “A Day in the Life of a Software Architect: Surviving the Corporate Jungle”; and “Why objective estimations don't work in software development.”

Rank 10: Angular Signals: Elegant Reactivity as an Architectural Trap

At number 10 on the most read heise-Developer articles of 2025 is Nicolai Wolko's analysis of angular signals. He states that while signals, introduced with Angular 17, enable elegant reactivity in the UI, they can become an architectural trap in application logic. The reason is that effect() reacts uncoordinatedly to every mutation, creates implicit couplings, and makes asynchronous operations difficult to control. Wolko therefore recommends limiting signals to UI-close states and side-effect-free derivations and modeling complex business logic clearly separated and architecturally sound.

Rank 9: CodeCharta: Making Software Quality Visible Through City Visualization

Andreas Blunk explains how the open-source tool CodeCharta makes software quality visible by visualizing codebases as cityscapes. Files become buildings, their footprint representing lines of code, their height complexity, and their color test coverage. Using the example of a renovation project at Deutsche Bahn, it becomes clear how a few tall, red blocks gradually transform into a finely granulated, predominantly green city with lower complexity, including marked “skyscrapers” representing remaining technical debt.

Rank 8: Why Many Teams Fare Better with Monoliths Than with Micro-Frontends

Nicolai Wolko also holds position 8 in the ranking and makes it clear why the hype around micro-frontends is fading and many smaller teams fare better with modular monoliths. Using survey data, practical reports, and code audits, he advocates for simplicity and warns against introducing micro-architectures everywhere without real reasons, as this only leads to a “distributed monolith” with high infrastructure overhead. As a pragmatic standard, he recommends the Modulith with clearly separated modules, joint deployment, good performance, and lower operating expenses.

Rank 7: GPT-5 Comparison: Software Development Very Good, Creativity Only Sufficient

Christian Winkler describes GPT‑5 as a powerful but largely opaque routing model that switches to a reasoning model depending on the request, usually solving knowledge and programming tasks with confidence but still producing logical and calculation errors in individual cases. He contextualizes initial practical experience and community opinions. Many praise the significantly improved capabilities in software development and suspect specialized coding models in the background, but at the same time criticize a noticeably lower creativity compared to GPT‑4, which may partly be due to routing to simpler sub-models.

Rank 6: AI Agents, Part 1: Revolution in Digital Product Development

Position 6 is taken by the first part of the article series on AI agents by Thomas Immich. He sketches AI agents as the next evolutionary stage of software development: instead of humans generating and integrating code via prompts, autonomous agents with memory and goals plan and program independently and commit like developers.

Against this background, fueled by statements from tech CEOs predicting the end of the mid-level engineer, the article calls for rethinking traditional processes and roles in digital product development. Furthermore, it shows with multi-agent frameworks how entire virtual product teams of specialized AI roles can jointly conceive and implement software.

• Part 1: Revolution in Digital Product Development
• Part 2: From Product Development to Process Optimization
• Part 3: Adaptive Designs Optimize Development and User Experience