Rocket Surgery 2023 === [00:00:00] we start the show, we wanted to let you know that the state of JavaScript 2023 survey is live. There is a which programming related podcast. Do you listen to question? So if you love pod rocket, we'd appreciate a vote there. A link to the survey is in the show notes. All right, onto the show., welcome back to PodRocket. My name is Emily, producer for PodRocket, and today we're recording our yearly wrap up episode, Rocket Surgery, to discuss not only the good, the bad, and the ugly of the past year, but also talk about what we think 2024 holds for the world of software development. So we'll be answering your questions about 2023 and what you're wondering about the future of web development. And with me to discuss these topics are our PodRocket hosts, Noel, Paul, Paige, and Chris. I'm excited to hear your thoughts. It's been an incredibly busy year. Welcome back to the show. So happy to have our hosts on Woo! at the party. Party glad to be here. Great way to end the year. So I'm going [00:01:00] to jump right into it. We're going to go over some of the predictions we had last year. Noel was on that episode. So last year we had three predictions. It was a higher focus on runtime performance edge computing tools, hitting production workloads, and a larger focus on standards. Did we see this happen I feel like I shouldn't go first. Somebody else has to review my predictions. I feel like the higher focus on runtime performance, there was a lot of work done there across frameworks, across libraries, and just in general like paradigm shifts about how we think about. Presenting a web application. So I definitely think that one held true. I would agree with you there. One thing that I don't think really got a lot of attention this year was edge computing. I didn't hear a whole lot about it in general. So maybe some of the tools that we've talked about in the past are working on it, but I don't think that there were any big shifts there. But the [00:02:00] focus on standards, I think there's been a lot more emphasis on at least in the last six months. There's so much more. Interoperability discussions happening. There's a lot of new kind of work. It seems across the browsers to make sure that they're all supporting the same things and starting to roll out interoperability. So I would say that those definitely have been a thing, but I don't think that edge computing got as much, emphasis as maybe we thought it was going to have at the beginning of the year. I Yeah, I think with the edge computing stuff, there is some friction with what can run on it. So a lot of people are hitting a lot of pain points with like, Oh, this library or tool used to work before. Now it's not working here. And then in regards to runtime performance, I think, bun was like the the highlight of this year, right? That kind of put that back into, I guess, like mainstream media, quote unquote. Cause the bun release was a really big deal throughout the community. So I'm excited where that goes. So, Noel, did the predictions live up to what you thought? [00:03:00] Yeah, I agree that there was less discussion around edge stuff. I feel like a lot of that was consumed by just the continued fervor around like meta frameworks. And I think a lot of devs are just like choosing to spend time there and then thinking that the abstractions that the meta frameworks make will just make edge happen where it needs to happen and we won't even really need to think about it. mean, that's my ideal Web development world is where I don't have to think about it in the framework or the hosting platform just does it for me VErcell knows this. Who still knows? I'm going to get into one of our listener questions. Jamie asks, what are your key standouts for web development improvements that happened in 2023? For example, like what big changes happened this year that you think are worth mentioning that impacted you? I think the big one, at least in my realm was React server components, like becoming a thing and. Yeah, that kind of just shifted the entire community. I wouldn't say divided it, but There was an [00:04:00] interesting situation where, it was, at least for me, it was hard to tell if it was Vercel or React doing something there. I still think it's an improvement because I feel like At least in the React ecosystem, they've been working on this for such a long time and now it's come to fruition and Vercel's kind of hoping them see that reality. So I'm excited to see, other people adopt RSCs as well but for me that's like the key highlight for me. A big one for me. I think was felt kit. 1. 0 coming out and being generally available and production ready. Because I've only been doing Svelte development for maybe the past, I don't know, year and a half. So when SvelteKit came along, and we had the option to upgrade and start using it, and really take advantage of some of the things that it offered, like routing and pre rendering and server side rendering, that made a huge difference and made a lot of things that had been very either difficult or not very intuitive. A lot more so so that was a huge benefit to [00:05:00] me and to my team personally. And I'm really excited with some of the things that they're talking about coming out in the future. I think it's gonna be a really I think that's a good option when, Next. js is just a little bit too much or you just need a little bit of JavaScript kind of things. So I think that's really cool. And going back to the predictions, like the web standards I feel like this year, everybody's using more, like you're seeing more like actual semantic HTML being used. I've seen videos come out on YouTube this year. It's stop using divs for everything. And. I feel like the frameworks that have started to gain in popularity have urged that shift a little bit where they're like, you should really just embrace HTML, go read the MDN docs and stuff like that. So for me, that was a change and it's definitely cleaned up my code. YEah, the modal HTML element, the popover, those are some really super useful and very much needed elements that we now have access to. Quickly, any lessons or best practices that you learned this [00:06:00] year? Okay. I feel like RSCs make you revisit a lot of questions and like previous muscle memory you have of how you load data. And I feel like just embracing RSCs had a bunch of lessons hidden, underneath them. we're going to move into. AI was obviously this year's, is this a fad or isn't this a fad? We got the most questions from our listeners about the future of AI, which is usually what happens. anD we have covered AI tools and developments throughout the year. So let's get into what our listeners are asking about AI in 2023 and beyond. Before we get into the listener questions, I just want to ask all of you, was there anything about AI that surprised you? And what would you want to see more of AI in 2024? I think the most surprising thing for me was the amount of. Different ways that people came up to use [00:07:00] AI, Vercel came out with V0 that is completely AI generated HTML and CSS and , GitHub Copilot came out and debuted for everybody to start using, and Stack overflow has a so that you can, tailor your stack overflow answers to your particular interests or use cases. So just the amount of creativity. That people had about how they could start incorporating into their workflows or their projects or their products. Has been really interesting to see it. It's like a new and not to mention all the AI image generators and the video generators and the transcripts and voiceovers. It's been amazing how fast it's gone from here is a chat prompt that can tell you some stuff when you ask it a question to. Here is a fully formed 20 minute video that you can generate in five, five prompts and then put up on [00:08:00] YouTube and get hundreds of thousands of views. , that's probably the most amazing thing is how quickly it's evolving and becoming, hard to decipher what is AI generated versus what was human made content. I, Yeah, I don't feel like I was particularly floored by any one use case. I just feel like there's incremental steps that kind of happened over the last, I don't know. 12 months where it was kind of like, it felt like this was a year of integration. Like everyone was like, okay, we can do just like really good predictive text generation. It's let's think of every possible use case for that. And that like someone will have productized it or integrated it into some tool. And I feel like that's what has happened. maybe I'm just like not in like the creative tool space enough. But I haven't seen anywhere I've been like, oh, yeah, this will make just iteration or the way we consume media like vastly different yet. But maybe maybe we'll get there. I still feel like we're a little bit early in this journey, but I can say definitively, I don't feel like there's a lot of hype here, but I think that a lot of these just even the tools we've seen already , there is a lot of utility here and they're not going away. We see even like lots [00:09:00] of search traffic, right? Like people are just prompting for things instead of searching for things. There's like using it to figure out information. So yeah, I feel like we have a lot to uncover still, wE actually did get a question. in the realm of like, how we're going to see a I integrated going forward. David asked, do you think there will be a way to integrate a I in a cohesive way to the web experience of sort of Crud web API revolution. No, The tools we use, like the abstractions of the web, I feel like having one for AI specifically, isn't the problem. Like we've already got like new kinds of paradigms to make this easier. \ I don't feel the way in which we interact with these models right now is really constrained by the like web standards as they exist. I could be wrong, but I just don't, I don't see that as like a pain point. The one interesting thing just to play devil's advocate here, Noel, is the ability to access the GPU with WASM integrations and stuff, which might have an interesting use case later, but yeah, haven't really seen anything yet. I [00:10:00] agree. Like on device models and prompting and stuff. Like maybe there'll be hardware interactions and stuff that matter. And then like how the browsers interact with that hardware. But I'm not sure if that is an AI specific problem. Maybe I'll be the thing that like pushes us into it. We got another question from Samira who asked do you think new JavaScript frameworks might start popping up with what would be geared towards gen AI prompt based code gen? Could that be the new wave of JS frameworks? I feel like this could be also correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like V0 VO is like that. Do you guys see this becoming more larger scale? It's impressive, , but I think it has a long way to go before it's going to be able to create a fully functional website. It's really beneficial when you are maybe generating a static website where you just need to have, some information some text on a screen that looks good. But when you start to get into the [00:11:00] more difficult functionality that comes from either from backend data flowing into it or a lot of interactions happening as a user goes around and interacts with the site. It's definitely not there yet. I'm sure that is what they're working on and trying to make possible. So who knows what's going to be there in six months or a year, but it could be a new framework, but I don't see it being the only thing. I think that there's still going to be a lot of companies who want to build it completely from scratch. A lot of teams that, need more fine grained just the ability to make it as exactly what they need it to be. And I don't think that AI is ready to get that into the weeds yet. One thing that I think will also be cool outside of v0 is TLDraw and XcalyDraw now have AI built into them, so you can actually draw. like a picture with the shapes on these apps and then we'll actually spit out like some code for you. I find myself, I'm pretty bad at prompting in general. So [00:12:00] it's a lot easier if I can just visually show what I want and then have the AI take it from there. So I see tools like that also being like a big competitor versus like just like prompting with text as well. But yeah, I still think it's still so far away. Accessibility being a big thing as well. I'm excited to see how far it goes. Cause I definitely use it as like a productivity tool for sure. I think Chris is bringing up the interesting too, which is like thing as well, which is like AI has shown us as human beings that we're not. necessarily looking for, like, somebody to just do something. We're looking for organization and we're looking for search. And at the end of the day, the real hard part is extracting what's in your brain here and serializing that into steps. And I think the past year has taught us that AI will never really replace that. Maybe that's a hot take. I don't know. But the envelope of what humans are capable of is always going to be pushed because our brains and our collective intellect is always being pushed down the I was also recently listening to an interview with a CTO of GitHub Copilot. And she's [00:13:00] like, will never be a replacement for engineers. So everyone who keeps asking, will this replace my job? No, it will not. So keep using them as tools. All right. Great. I want to move into React as we already discussed React server components came out this year. Again, don't know if that's a Vercel, React, don't know if it's a together thing, still up in the air, who knows. React server components was pretty big deal. But no major versions releasing this year. We did get one question, which we always get is React becoming the Java dinosaur of the front end world? And I just want to build off of that what do you want to see from React in the coming year that might make it, I don't know, come back to life? Or do you think like it's a very settled framework? You, we are probably going to be expecting less big updates. What are your thoughts on that? I don't know. I thought everything, I thought a lot changed for react with the react server component stuff. We'll go into it. Yeah, what I would like to [00:14:00] see is stability because right now it just, they're iterating on their API and what works, what doesn't work. So it'd be nice to see stability there and also just more adoption outside of so React Server Components is. pretty much in Vercel right now. I know Remix is working hard so spoiler for me, like one of my things I'm looking forward to is just seeing how other people are going to adopt React Server Components because right now I feel like it leaves a pretty bitter taste in the community's mouth that like you would have to go use Next. js if you want to use React Server Components Remix is going to be great. I'm hoping something comes from them soon and I know. Daishi who makes Zustan and some other libraries, he, I think he just dropped a minimal RSC framework that I think I saw on Twitter somewhere so it's nice to see not even big organizations trying to work on this as well I wouldn't say that React has become the Java dinosaur yet. One thing that I'm very excited about that the React team talked about earlier this year was a thing called React Forget, which is their memoization engine, which will basically take away the need for users to write in [00:15:00] React's use memo or basically memoize calls themselves. It will know when to do it and do it for you. So that's something that's exciting. And I hope that comes out next year. But Chris was saying, there has been a lot of changes and a lot of churn which I know people don't particularly prefer or care for. But, they're trying to still be backwards compatible, they're trying to support people who want to use the newest things, so it's a hard place to be when you have legacy code that you still want to be able to help those people who are using that code and really don't have any need or any option to update. So it's a tougher place to be. And then when you're a brand new framework and you really don't have anything except the latest and greatest to work with so I think that they're doing what they can, but it is, it's a lot harder once you have a few years or more of experience under your belt and you have to try and keep that working for the people who are, who want to use that version. I don't feel it's a great dichotomy, because I feel the thing that [00:16:00] makes us talk about Java the way that we do is just, it was like a , largely a usability problem there was some updates and stuff that made things hard, but It was just always an unpleasant developer experience, at least anecdotally, like going from a more modern language back to Java. I don't, there's maybe a little bit of that with react, but I don't feel like that's the main developer gripe here. It's more like an ecosystem complaint. And there's these higher level things. at least for me like, Oh, it's a react code basis is going to be unpleasant and difficult. Isn't really the thing that's like. Driving me away or pushing me at all away from react. Whereas that felt like it was more of the case with like angular and Java, you name it. So we'll see. I feel like if the migration happens, the kind of way we talk about it and the way it feels will be slower and. different feeling at the very least. Yeah, off of Noel's comment the community is what makes or breaks a framework or ecosystem. I feel like because that's who's contributing, that's who's raising issues. I feel like just looking at the React popularity or usage graph is a really great heuristic or any framework about like, is it going to become a dinosaur? Are the weeds going to start to [00:17:00] grow? , that's not the case with React. And right now, yeah, there are other competitors that are taking Mindshare. They're taking my Mindshare, they're taking Mindshare. People on this call, because we're curious. But at the end of the day, the ecosystem is still really strong and people are working hard on it. I don't feel like it's going to become a dinosaur, yet. So in the same vein of reacts, we're going to move into Vercel next because they're. Quite close at this point. Vercel and NeXT had a busy year. This year NeXT introduced a stable version of AppRouter, obviously integrated React server components released NeXT 14, which included increased performance for TurboPack server actions, and a preview of partial pre rendering. Did you like what came out of Vercel and NeXT this year? What do you think they're going to look forward to in 2024? And do you think we'll see a continued integration with them in the react team? Yes. To the last question. The rest I'm shakier on. Yeah. They're betting really big on [00:18:00] react as we've seen this past year. I don't think that they're going to ease up on that anytime soon. As far as all the new releases it was hard to keep up at times with everything that was coming out. I probably need to go back and rewatch some of the keynotes or reread some of their release notes because there is so much that they have released. And for me, at least personally, I think there could have been a better job of them explaining or showing how to migrate from the pages folder that they had been using into the new app router, because At least for a project that I was working on, I tried to change it and upgrade it and it went terribly wrong. And so I ended up going back to the pages folder and that's probably where this application is going to stay at least until I'm ready to forget what happened before and try again. BuT that breaking change was it probably needed to happen. I'm sure they had the reasons [00:19:00] why they couldn't use the current folder structure. But for me, it was painful. And unfortunate, you know, I'd like to be able to use react server components, but. Having half of my app break when I tried to upgrade it and move stuff around was a really painful and awful experience. And I don't really want to go through that again. I'm glad that they're working hard and working with the React team, but at the same time it stinks that if you have an existing legacy app, it might not be either possible, or it might be very difficult to go to the new model and framework that they're, supporting and building onto. You know, A lot of libraries and plugins need to play catch up to definitely in commiserate in the experience of oh This worked fine, and it just won't work an app router because that you know this team or this library I'm using just doesn't work the way you expect it to work, which is painful But the migration's happening, gonna see it over time, so I definitely also share in that hope that we can try [00:20:00] again in a few months and it won't be as bad. So Angular 17 came out in November. We had Minko Gechev on to talk about the release. So check that out if you haven't already. But it was a big release for them. It was basically a rebrand. And it came with a lot of new features. What did you all think of this release? Is this the new era of Angular? Do you think this is revitalizing it? Or do you think that Angular is just Angular and it will continue to live in legacy projects? tHeir approach to expanding their ecosystem with what sort of modules you can plug in to Angular this year was a huge step forward. I think you can look at any framework and see the value added by community and just, easy pluggability. You can make a package and you can use it without a lot of prior thought. And the fact that they're moving to better model to allow that to happen naturally, definitely to me feels like a new era for Angular. If rewind five years ago, totally different. yeah, it's hard to say. [00:21:00] I think it is going to be an uphill battle. There's like battling a lot of negative, I don't know, sentiment. I think that just has been built over time. So I'm curious what this will do to like the job market and stuff, like how this will start feeling. Cause I feel like now if you're hunting for an Angular job, or if you are an Angular dev, it's like what Angular. Am I going to be writing because like old versus new are going to feel very different. So there's you're going to have to be vetting a lot of that out. If this is like the framework you want to be writing in, or if you're trying to post jobs, you can be highly incentivized to upgrade. But if you hadn't to this point, like you already hadn't switched and you were on the angular train for this long. Like it doesn't inspire a ton of confidence in like organizational. kind of like flexibility there. So I don't know. We'll see Yeah going off of that, I still suffer from some AngularJS PTSD. I was one of the many teams who built an AngularJS application and then got stuck when we couldn't upgrade to Angular 2 [00:22:00] and ended up going in, going with React and rewriting the entire thing from scratch. So as Noel said, I think Angular has an uphill battle to Regain the trust of everybody who left the framework after that debacle and didn't look back. But I am optimistic that they will rise again. It's always good to have more frameworks to choose from and more different ways of approaching problems. So I hope that this does assure in a new era for them and that people find out that it's actually enjoyable to work in this framework again and that it does bring benefits. And it just helps to keep pushing the web development community as a whole forward. I hope that is the case for them. I particularly am not terribly interested in picking up Angular 17, even after all the hype and the great debut. But that's because I've got my hands full with Next. js and SvelteKit and, plenty of other frameworks, but, if I had the [00:23:00] time or a new application to build, I would definitely give Angular 17 some consideration for it. All right, we're gonna hop into styling. So CSS had a big year this year it released Has, Nesting, Subgrid Pageview popovers, Modals, SO a lot came out this year. The Google team actually released a CSS warped blog post, which was very cute. But what was your favorite CSS feature that came out this year? And what are you hoping to see from CSS next year? I'll go first on that one, because I've done previous interviews with Adam Argyle and Una Kravitz so I've gotten to talk to them a lot about it. But I think my favorite things have been CSS nesting. I love being able to write nested CSS without having to use SAS or LESS or another preprocessing tool for that. HAS Has been a game changer, so has WHERE and so has IS. All of those new features that have [00:24:00] all come to fruition at the same time and really made nesting and some of the other new things possible have got to be like the game changers for me for CSS. It's so much cleaner. It's so much easier to write and understand. I don't have to use import nearly as much as I used to. It's been great. So I'm, CSS has had a really good year and I'm really here for all of it. when we're container queries. Is that this year? When like I feel like container I think that's the super nice. But yeah, I just feel like it there were one that like quickly was so nice that I forgot about the before times or like specific, but you know, when you need them and as soon as you're like, this is perfect, this exactly solves this problem. What are we looking forward to from CSS or any styling in the next year? What do you feel is lacking from the ecosystem that you wish you had access to? I don't know, man. I feel like I'm still catching up. I still feel like I'm like remembering what all the cool new tools are. And I'm seldom like coming up with, Oh man, I wish, I don't know. [00:25:00] Maybe we're a little bit used to having to struggle against CSS a bit. So we're like, we're just not, we're not thinking that laterally, but I don't know. I'm pretty content. It's a banger of a year. Yeah. I've been conditioned to just I just know my workarounds because I've been using these workarounds for like years. So when people are like, Oh, you don't have to do that anymore. I'm like what do you mean? But I'm just like, I'm so used to it. That is just muscle memory. So I never, I often don't complain and I feel like I've just been using the same CSS rules for a decade. So every time there's like a new one, I'm just like. Huh. Okay. Okay. So yeah, it's no, I'm pretty content. It just keeps getting better and better. So I just look forward to seeing what people are doing with them. But I also use tailwind a lot. So I don't know if tailwind is just abstracting a lot of that from me too. I'm just like, use some simple class name and it could be using the new stuff behind the hood. I don't actually know. one cool thing about , whether you use tailwind or not, those, the fact that CSS is taking away JavaScript. Like just that plain baseline. It's like this isn't a javascript thing anymore. It's just built into the browser. That's huge and I feel the same way as Noel. [00:26:00] Like it all feels like candy at this point because we're all just put through the mud with it. And we're used to doing with back to even jQuery like select and then turn things around. So it's just great to see things being built in the browser. You don't have to ship them. It's part of your bundle. Yeah. Oh that's actually, that sparked something that I would like to see next year. Or when you're saying removing JavaScript, I would love for CSS to be able to handle more of the like intersection observer stuff that JavaScript has always had to do itself. Like When has something scrolled into the viewport? Start playing a video then, and as it scrolls away, stop the video, or just things like that where we still have to use JavaScript to handle those kind of things. If CSS could handle more of it for us, that would be awesome. We're going to hop into some of our listener questions about 2024 and what the future of web is going to look like. I know we don't know, but we can always speculate, right? So let's start [00:27:00] off with Farzad asked. Is WebAssembly the future of the web? We recently just had a WebAssembly episode come out, so if you haven't listened to that, definitely listen to it. But is WebAssembly the future of the web? And how do you see it evolving and impacting web development in the coming years? Silence. and no. intrinsically part of the future because it, there's very specific use cases that will leverage it and reap immense benefits from it. But no in the sense that it's not going to be a land sweep and we're all going to be coding in a web assembly container in a year or two. At the end of the day, I think speed and maintainability speed of development, to be specific, and maintainability are at the forefront of a lot of teams minds. So it's going to be one of those things that you reach for if you need it. But also creeping its way into more things. Yeah. I suspect this kind of manifest as there's a lot of tools that end up leveraging it, but they're not things that most devs are writing. It's like, Oh, I'll just like use this plugin or something that's able to leverage web assembly. I don't think this is probably short term at all. [00:28:00] Like this is probably much further up, but maybe there's some kind of future where there is like some kind of intermediary. Transpilation step where like everything starts going to WebAssembly before like we do any rendering or anything and like all of just like the JavaScript, HTML, like all of the current browser experience goes through the same kind of, WebAssembly runtime. But I don't think that's super likely. So we'll see. I think there's quite a bit of time left. I think it'll creep into use cases where like performance is super important. And the usability to performance bar will slowly slide towards performance over time, hopefully. But I don't think it will replace everything in the short midterm. Yeah I agree with you. I think it's more of a, , when you need it, you know you need it, but otherwise, you won't even think about it, thing. Like you said very performance heavy applications or applications that are crunching a lot of data or have to have really fast response times. That might be good use cases for it. But otherwise, I don't think that people are just going to throw it in to have it in their projects. [00:29:00] next up Juan asked, what do you think will change in the JavaScript ecosystem in 2024 that has been common in 2023? Or more generally, what do you think will change in JavaScript in 2024? I think that there's some new features in the TC39 proposals that are really exciting and that are coming, probably going to come to fruition in 2024, new web APIs, new built in methods and functions that were previously relegated to libraries like Lodash and Knockout and us having to just basically use packages for them. So I think that's going to continue to be really exciting, that there's going to be more and more just built into the JavaScript languages. As for the ecosystem, I don't know though, there's been such a strong push this year towards server rendered everything that maybe there's going to be some sort of a swing back towards more, a little bit of JavaScript on the client side and some on the server side, but I [00:30:00] really don't know when that's going to happen again and we're going to go from one end of the spectrum to the other. We actually did get a question around what you're talking about. Do you think the server side direction we are going in will keep developing, or do you think there's something else to come? And I know Paige, you just said it might be a while, but do we think that server side is going to remain the same, or do you think that people might be figuring other options out? I feel like we underestimate the power of clients. And computers just keep getting better and better. Yes, there's Moore's Law. Everybody has a laptop with a sufficient amount of RAM. And there's a lot of push towards like, Going back to the response time thing with WebAssembly, Like, maybe that's not the solution. You just need to store the data locally in local storage, and now you have fast response time. I think there's a lot of magic that we can do by leveraging client, local storage, local connections that we're going to see that intrinsically that's not server rendered. Yeah, I feel like this is a pendulum. I feel like for a long time, we'd swung too far client. [00:31:00] And then now we've swung too far back. We're like the happy mediums in the middle somewhere. We're probably going to swing back to throwing everything to the client again, and then we'll swing back again. And I think the like us. Talking about it, we're probably even more sensitive to this than everybody else, like I'm sure everyone else is spending fewer cycles than most of us thinking about oh, transition back to rendering everything server and meta frameworks supporting this and facilitating this it's probably not quite as acute a need for a vast majority of desolates, they're probably not feeling it as much as we are. So I don't know. I'm sure we'll settle into a happy medium somewhere. And I think like you need still drives a lot of this. If a dev gets an ask like, Hey, our time to first load on the landing page is too slow to like, go see what tech is there to make that piece of the app quicker. Or the, like this thing seems too clunky. The user experience is slow. It's like, Oh, maybe we've pushed too hard and we need to like, get more onto the client here and Use the Technology of the browser to make this feel better. So I, I dunno, I try not to overthink it too much. It'll be fine. Everything will be fine. Yeah, it'll be fine. Next question, [00:32:00] Aditya asked in 2024, will there be a rise of low code web development with the rise of Wix and other editors? And Wix has been around for a long time. These tools have existed. I will say as a layperson who's not an engineer, I have seen and have been getting more advertisements for Wix, and I think maybe this person is wondering, is there a job in Jeopardy if more people like me can easily use Wix's tools at a higher level, because they are expanding their capabilities. I Think it's great to have those sorts of tools, especially if you are less technical and you need a website of some sort, but I don't think that anybody needs to be concerned that their jobs are in jeopardy. Developers can do so much more than these low code editors can, especially when it comes to the really specific interactions that people that designers and customers always want to have on their sites.[00:33:00] And they just can't do that with low code editors because they have to put guardrails around it so that, things work and don't, and they probably are not going to be exactly what they want. So I think that Wix will stay around, Squarespace will stay around, those sorts of things will always be there as options. But when you start talking to the really big companies or even the mid sized ones that have their way of doing things or their specific needs and use cases, I don't think we need to be concerned that they're going to turn to these tools instead of people who do this for a living for the most part. Yeah. I was going to make this podcast brought to you by Squarespace joke there, but like there, I feel like the real conversation is does AI change this? And I think this is what we were alluding to before is does, do we now have the capacity to like break through some of those guardrails? I like to use pages turn there like to make this more powerful without needing to be able to code and like maybe we do but I think it's going to be tricky and buggy like if the question is can we design a [00:34:00] beautiful website without a developer like you can get pretty far with these tools and you have been able to do pretty well with them already like you probably can't get it perfect like you know you're like a local or a midsize small to midsize company like You can get pretty far and have been able to for a long time, get something that feels really good and snappy, like is using the latest in browser tech. So I don't think that this is going to drastically change unless again, like those boundaries are meaningfully pushed by what we can do with like generative code tools. So We'll see, but I'm not like trembling at the Wix advancements, I guess right now. And even if the boundary is pushed it's all about your adaptability as an engineer. If you're just like a TypeScript react engineer, then yeah, maybe you're going to have some issues if a great solution comes out. But if you peg yourself as like a, just a technologist. And you're willing to learn anything, then you can grow with those as the boundaries grow. I think it also just depends on the complexity of what you work in, right? Are you just making a simple landing [00:35:00] page? Then, sure, , these sites could potentially, or a customer could potentially go to Wix instead of Vue, right? To stand up a simple landing page. Like, I use these tools as well. It's so much more convenient. But when it comes to complex tasks that goes, I don't think we're anywhere near that being scared of that level. But you mentioned, if I'm a developer, should I be scared of these tools? If you're making a simple landing page, maybe there's a chance that they will choose this tool over you, right? Because it's potentially cheaper. I know I use something called Format and it's a hundred dollars a year and it just does everything for me. If I paid a developer, it'd probably be exponentially more expensive, to be honest. But again I would use this as just fuel to just level up and just always be ahead of the curve and, just get good at your craft, right? That's not like a dig on anybody but everyone should be, trying to push forward, get better, and just stay ahead of it. And that's just how I'm approaching it. I think we're ready to get into our predictions as the pod rocket hosting team. Paige, what are your predictions for [00:36:00] 2024 for the world of web dev? I think it's going to be another great year. Honestly, I think a lot of really good things happened in 2023 and all sorts of different frameworks to help push the web forward. So I think that there's a lot of that coming for 2024 as well. And one. Thing in particular, I think we're going to be just shocked at what has happened with the AI tools within a year. I know that there was some really big announcements with GitHub Copilot of how they're going to start integrating it into the GitHub site in particular next year and have it doing security scans and creating, fixes for issues that people open and suggesting changes and all sorts of stuff. So if that comes to fruition in the way that they said it would. I think it's going to be such a different looking world next year. But I can't even probably imagine what AI is actually going to be capable of in that time frame. So I'm excited to see how it continues to evolve. Noel, what are your [00:37:00] predictions for 2024? Oh man. I don't want to just talk about like frameworks, but I feel like that's the thing I'm most confident talking about. think we'll see more of like a spike in interest in remix in the place they're in. I think this felt kit, this felt hype will continue. It's like steady inclination. Those are probably my big like part of me also wants solid to start like clawing at some of this market share But we'll see I'm a little more skeptical there so those will be mine. I don't again. I feel like there's so much there's so much happening right now I'm hesitant to speculate much so I'll stick with that Let's What are your predictions for 2024? RSCs are here and they're gonna continue to be integrated into the ecosystem. But even though those are server oriented, I feel like we're gonna have more and more work being done on the client. Local storage, , once you use a snappy UI with like local storage, you don't want to use anything else. Like that one second makes a big difference when you click a button. I don't want to call [00:38:00] it the decentralization of the web because that hails a little too hard to the blockchain stuff, but it's more like the localization of where things happen. Chris, what are your 2024 predictions? Yeah, so Noel, same thing as Noel, I think Remix is going to see a little bit more interest as they're ramping up on their RSU stuff. I know Ryan Florence has been teasing a lot of stuff that he's excited to share and I'm ready for it. I think one thing that I'm hoping is, we're not hoping, but I think will happen is I don't know. Maybe it's just a hot take, but I think Bunn's going to see a lot more adoption. Maybe stealing some market share from Node, potentially. I feel like they're moving incredibly fast. So if they can, I don't know. I just feel like we'll see what happens. I don't, I'm not, I don't have anything to base that on. Other than I just firmly believe Jared is just an insane engineer and he has a great team. So I just think they're just going to keep continuing to crush it. And we'll see how it goes. I agree with you. Garrett is insane and pushes so fast. It's incredible to see. Awesome. Thank you everyone for your predictions. Do we have any [00:39:00] closing thoughts about the year? I mean, I just don't think anybody saw AI coming the way that it did so be prepared for us to be completely wrong about these predictions at the end of next year and something we don't even see is going to take over and be the new big thing. And we will be back next year to go over all of these predictions again. I want to thank all of you for coming today and joining me and you're all my hosts. And it's been a great year with you all. So very happy we could do this last episode together. Paige, where can people find you online? If people want to reach me, I am around on X under PNEDRI, P N I E D R I. And everywhere else you can find me at PageN11. I've got my own website also, PageMeDreamHouse. com. So I'm writing there regularly and you can see my latest blog posts about tech stuff there. Noel where can people find you?\ [00:40:00] I'm here on the podcast, but the only social I'm really on is Blue Sky. I'm at noel. minc. how. Paul, where can people find you? I don't really post on social much, so I would just say here on the podcast, and typically I point people to my GitHub, which is just my full name, Paul Mikulskas, all one word. And Chris, where can people find you? You can find me on X, Twitter, whatever we call it, at I hate saying this out loud, but TrashDev, Trash underscore Dev with two H's. I'll never get used to saying that out loud, I It's still my favorite name. I'm going to say I think it's fine. Yeah. I don't know, man. prime branding. Yeah, when I hang out with people in person that know me from online, they just call me Trash in front of everybody, and all the restaurant servers and whoever, they're just like, what? Like, Is this like a weird situation happening? Yeah, I don't know. Anyways. Eww. No, it's all endearing. Thank you everyone. And thank you to our listeners who have listened throughout the year. We have a lot of exciting things coming up in the new year.[00:41:00] Thank you again for a great year and thank you to all my hosts for joining me today.