2021 Tech Trends & Predictions for Developers

not very much happened in 2020 bootstrap 5 was released a star disappeared angular added a new date picker a bunch of stuff caught on fire view 3 was finally released beirut exploded react suspense left us in suspense murder hornets r.i.p kobe eddie and kim spacex used web components while elon got hacked ufos are real ufos are real lambda supports containers while kubernetes drops docker slack sold out ai learned how to write code and when donald trump starts his second term in january i think 2021 will be an even better year 2020 has been a defining year for tech they've been big winners and big losers today we'll look at seven predictions about tech going into 2021 along with a bunch of events and trends from 2020 that provide a roadmap for developers relating to the web backend mobile ai and more if you're new here like and subscribe then let's get right into it the office is dead and that's a great thing both for companies and their employees no commute better work life balance live where you want and the list goes on 2020 forced virtually every company to embrace and implement remote work big companies like microsoft and facebook are now permanently allowing many of their employees to work from home this has led to an exodus of people from silicon valley to more affordable cities throughout the united states i happen to be a california refugee myself and while it's a great place to visit living there kind of sucks but the great thing about a global pandemic is that now you can live wherever you want and still bring in a six-figure tech salary the bad news here though is that i predict this will make the job market more competitive with jobs moving out of the valley you now have to compete with everyone in the united states or potentially everyone in the world for a role regardless it is still a great time to learn to code and there's more options than ever before if you're self-motivated you can get a better education here on youtube than you could sitting through four years of college and many big companies like apple and google no longer require college degrees for software engineers overall when you take a step back the tech industry has fared much better than virtually every other industry in this new dystopian normal that we live in javascript frameworks are dead well maybe dead's not the right word they're done reinventing the wheel or innovating i should say at least in ways that will change the current status quo react has been the dominant framework or library with the majority of the market share as long as we pretend jquery doesn't exist followed by angular and view fighting for a distant second place and a bunch of other good frameworks like svelt ember and lit element in a distant third place i don't expect things to change much in the future when react released hooks back in 2019 people acted like it was going to end world hunger while hooks are great and they inspired things like views composition api i think it signaled the beginning of the end for the javascript framework wars there's been a constant push in the javascript world to create new releases that do things differently year after year that's led to the awesome javascript frameworks we enjoy today but it does feel like the constant churn is really slowing down and that's probably a good thing on a similar note the javascript language itself or ecmascript is pretty much done getting better at this point javascript and especially when used with typescript is an awesome language to work with by any standard over the last five years or so it's experienced a renaissance with a whole bunch of powerful new features being added to it but in 2021 things look pretty quiet for javascript there are a couple of new features finalized like logical assignment operators that allow you to assign a variable if it's not already defined also called the mallet operator overall nothing too game changing and if you use typescript you can already use the syntax today speaking of which and i've been predicting this for years typescript will continue to dominate it's already used by almost everybody for big complex projects but i think there will be even more adoption now that we have deno which is a brand new javascript runtime that came out in 2020 that runs typescript natively it's an alternative to node.js and i think we'll see a lot of growth in deno over the next few years and another thing i'm excited about is a new build tool called snowpack it makes it really fast and easy to start a project with typescript and your preferred framework the most exciting thing for the web though has nothing to do with javascript which brings me to my next prediction web apps and native apps will become more indistinguishable than ever and there are two main reasons for this web assembly and the web platform itself or a collection of features that we call progressive web apps webassembly is a common target that multiple languages can compile to which means that you can now build high performance web applications with languages other than javascript on top of that the web platform or browsers now have most of the features that used to only be available for native apps things like push notifications offline mode background sync bluetooth and many more and what this means as a developer is that you can deliver a full native app experience entirely through the free and open platform known as the web and that really begs the question of why are we giving apple or google 30 of our revenue just to use a closed off marketplace that supports censorship unfair distribution and bans on third-party payment systems everybody knows it's unfair and epic games went to court with apple in 2020. it's a long way off but hopefully developers see the opportunity of developing progressive web apps with webassembly and get consumers comfortable with using apps outside of the app store the technology is here today but i think it'll take multiple years to see any meaningful change in that direction so we might as well just move on artificial intelligence will not take your job or maybe it will they took our job by now you've likely heard of gpt-3 which of course is a generative pre-trained auto aggressive transformer language model it can do all kinds of scary things including write code this guy on twitter built an app where you can describe the layout of a website and it will generate the actual html css and react code and now it looks like he's building a whole startup around this concept i don't think you have to worry about ai taking your job and here's why once ai starts to write code it'll be able to create its own ai and that'll be the true inflection point propelling us to the technological singularity at which point we'll all fuse together as one bio digital organism or our new digital overlords might enslave or exterminate us in either case you don't have to worry about ai taking your job what you do have to worry about right now is something entirely different and that's the no code low code revolution which might take your job there are a variety of tools out there now that make it easier for people without engineering skills to develop apps there are tools like webflow for building websites then amazon has honeycode and google has app sheet for building mobile apps over the last couple years there's been a ton of venture capital flowing into low code no code apps it's a great area to be in if you're a startup but you might be wondering if these tools will take your job my prediction is that they will not if anything i think they'll make developers more valuable because they abstract away some of the most annoying parts of being a developer for example you might use a no-code tool to scaffold out a ui very quickly instead of taking a week to build a baseline prototype you now have one in a few minutes and you can move on to the more exciting features that low code tools can't handle in fact if you're a developer working on something repetitive that could be represented with a drag and drop ui you probably have a great idea for a startup in your hands and vcs will throw money at it without batting an eye the server is dead long live serverless which are actually just servers but ones that you never have to think about or maintain the growth of serverless computing has been accelerating for the last few years with tools like aws lambda azure functions and google cloud functions leading the way but in the past there are a few reasons you may have not wanted to use functions one of which is high latency when they initially start known as a cold start but in 2020 we got a new feature from aws lambda called provisioned concurrency which ensures you always have a hot function available to give you predictable latency but another big drawback of serverless is that you can't control the runtime with a dock or container but just a few days ago aws announced that lambda supports containers and you also have tools like google cloud run that have supported serverless containers for a while the bottom line is that serverless functions are becoming suitable for more and more use cases on top of that we're now starting to see more serverless databases like firestore for example or faunadb in the not so distant future i think it'll be rare for a developer to have to think about how they scale or maintain their backend infrastructure everything will just magically work in the cloud similar to how your electricity works when you plug something into the wall it just works unless there's a massive outage and then you pay your bill based on what the meter says at the end of the month it's incredibly simple and the industry has been trending this way for a long time now i wanted to save my worst prediction for last i believe it's possible we might see a black swan type event in 2021 just like we did in 2020 with the rona when the market crashed back in march it rapidly recovered back to all-time highs in less than a year the recovery was led by the tech industry and driven by stimulus from the government and money printing from the federal reserve tons and tons of tech companies went public during this period using s-pacs or special purpose acquisition companies meanwhile everybody that's locked up at home has learned how to become a day trader which turns out to be pretty easy when the stock market does nothing but go up and up and up all this has contributed to companies with insane valuations just look at companies like snowflake that went public this year 100 billion dollar market cap on only 400 million in revenue and a loss of 350 million and there are many other stocks just like it that don't make any money have modest growth yet their stock prices have doubled or tripled over the last few months this can't go on forever and eventually there will be some kind of catalyst to bring everything crashing down companies that don't make a profit can only survive with a high stock price or an infusion of cash from somewhere else if the market does crash again there's a very high potential for job loss in the tech industry and potentially lost opportunities for entrepreneurs now don't get me wrong i hope the party keeps rolling in 2021 my youtube channel depends on it but i'm just anticipating the eventual hangover i'm gonna go ahead and wrap things up there you can support the channel by becoming a pro member at fireship io or by sponsoring me personally on github i just wanted to say thank you to everybody for making 2020 an awesome year despite all the craziness thanks for watching and i will see you in the next one

Channel: Fireship

Views: 248,538

Rating: 4.9365239 out of 5

Keywords: webdev, app development, predictions, top 7, tech trends, tech predictions, 2021, 2020 highlights, 2020 tech trends, 2021 tech trends, ai, web, mobile

Id: oHtR5YSPLjo

Length: 9min 29sec (569 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2020