What the Data Says
Emerging Technical Trends in Front-End and How They Affect You
QCon SF 2022
Who is this guy?
Laurie Voss
- web developer
- co-founder, npm Inc.
- pretty nice guy
@seldo
What are we
talking about?
- The state of web developmnet
- How we got here
- Where we're going next
Spoiler alert:
you are probably going to hate
my prediction
The model
Stage 1:
Wild experimentation
Stage 2:
best practices evolve
Stage 3:
design patterns
Stage 4:
commoditization
Stage 5:
intense competition
Stage 6:
consolidation
This process is often not a lot of fun
Custom built is better but still loses because capitalism
Framework
or
product
or
service
Stage 7:
whining about fundamentals
Stage 8:
mass adoption
Each step has far more people than the previous step
Stage 9a:
migration to specialization
Older layers of the stack never die
they just fade away
Stage 9b:
migration to adaptation
There is
no such thing as
"the fundamentals"
The history of web development is full of examples
In the beginning
there was Tim
CGI
Common Gateway Interface
Wild experimentation in servers
PHP
It used to mean Personal Home Pages
"The website is down because I tripped over the power cord"
LAMP
Linux Apache MySQL PHP
Economics often drives who wins
which isn't necessarily a good thing
Everybody was building a blog
1999: 23 blogs
2006: 50 million blogs
WordPress powers 43% of websites
in 2022
This is what the cycle looks like
Rails
as a framework
jQuery
as a framework
GitHub
as a framework
EC2
as a framework
AWS erased hardware as a thing web developers needed to care about
...but there are still people who rack servers for a living
in fact more of them than ever
A handful of winners
npm
as a framework
You knew I had to mention it
Every step
of the cycle increases in scale
SourceForge = 15,000,000 downloads/week
npm = 41,481,000,000 downloads/week
Every step
in the cycle
involves more people
We're caught up
Kubernetes
TypeScript
What's
happening
right now?
AWS Lambda
Serverless adoption is at 70% in 2022
Mass adoption ahoy!
Disclaimer:
I work at Netlify
but this is the reason I chose to do that
Netlify
as a framework
Jamstack is at stage 5
It hasn't won (yet)
React
as a framework
React dominates the modern web
71% of developers report using React in 2022
Will React become part of the platform?
What about
web components?
33% of developers
regularly built with web components in 2022
You know who's going to win the game when people start leaving the stadium
What's next?
The metaverse
Web3
Stealing money is not a new idea
Web5
I wish I were joking
How do you
figure out
what comes next?
Are we bored enough of React
to abstract it away?
Reactbricks:
one potential future
A visual editor
like Webflow on localhost
Live editable React components
Write editable components
Abstract away components from content
Imagine a new kind of web developer
doing a new kind of web development
BUT THE FUNDAMENTALS
This is how the WWW was supposed to work
Sir Tim would approve (probably)
The economics
of web dev in 2022
means something
has to give
We are unsustainably expensive
We need 10x more web developers
than we have
The shortage is making websites terrible
If Copilot can predict your code you shouldn't be writing it
This is scary!
Great migrations always are
Option 0: do nothing
Option 1: specialize
Option 2: adapt
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em
Option 3:
invent the new thing
Wild experimentation is underway
I could be wrong
I'm wrong all the time
...but what if I'm not?
Thank you.
@seldo