Web Development in 2023
What the data says
RenderATL 2023
Who is this guy?
Laurie Voss
- web developer
- co-founder, npm Inc.
- data scientist
- pretty nice guy
@seldo@alpaca.gold on mastodon
twistcmyk.tumblr.com
What are we
talking about?
- The state of web developmnet
- How we got here
- Where we're going next
“History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.”
Alexis de Tocqueville
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
1. Web servers
2. Web applications
3. Server hardware
1+2+3 = LAMP
Linux Apache MySQL PHP
4. Blogs
Rails
as a framework
jQuery
as a framework
GitHub
as a framework
EC2
as a framework
...but there are still people who rack servers for a living
in fact more of them than ever
Other frameworks
- npm (you knew I'd find a way to mention it)
- Kubernetes
- TypeScript
- AWS Lambda
We're caught up
What's in mass adoption right now?
Serverless adoption hit 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
74% of developers report using React in 2023
Will React become part of the platform?
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
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
Imagine a new kind of web developer
doing a new kind of web development
AI can build back-ends
AI can build front-ends
AI might eat whole layers of the stack
BUT THE FUNDAMENTALS
Prediction:
a new generation of engineers will create HTML without writing it
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
This is scary!
Great migrations always are
Surviving the next great migration
- Use the new tools
- Build the new tools
I could be wrong
I'm wrong all the time
...but what if I'm not?
Thank you.
@seldo@alpaca.gold
See you on mastodon!
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Web development in 2023
By seldo
