It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future, but that's exactly what we'll try to do in this article 2021 was a strange year.
There was a significant regime change, we finally beat the pandemic, and everybody took off their masks and went back to the office.
That was the original plan anyway. Unfortunately, it's your conspiracy theorist uncle on Facebook who keeps making the correct predictions, but as developers and entrepreneurs, we don't care about these externalities.
We figure out ways to make money writing code with the environment. They give us. We thrive in the chaos, then we'll start things off by looking at primary trends that will influence the developer landscape in 2022.
For each trend, I'll give you one of my personal, weird app ideas that you can use to build a quadrillion-dollar startup. The first trend we need to talk about is web3 or the decentralized web.
Web3
Some people think web3 is the point where all modern technology converges, out of which new unimaginable technologies will diverge in the future. Other people, though, think that web3 is just the latest buzzword to pump crypto scams, but what is web3 exactly.
A completely decentralized version of our current internet, with no firewalls, no tolls, no government regulation, you want to build a new internet…
It's basically a vision for the internet, where everything is decentralized and regulated with smart contracts and crypto. Instead of the current status quo, where everything is controlled by Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
In a decentralized app or dapp, the user owns all their data instead of an email, password identity users are identified by a blockchain wallet address that usually connects with a browser plugin like MetaMask, while the app itself is code that lives on the blockchain in the form of a smart contract,
The idea is really cool because it gives people absolute control over their own slice of the internet as opposed to using services that are mediated by a central ivory tower like a big tech, corporation, or government,
On the other hand, there are a ton of ways one might criticize web3:
- It's chaotic hard to develop quality apps with current toolchains.
- It doesn't benefit most mainstream businesses in any practical way.
Most of the tokens are owned by silicon valley insiders, so it's not really decentralized at all, and you really don't need cryptocurrency to build a decentralized app in the first place.
If crypto prices collapse, for whatever reason, I think a lot of the excitement for web 3 would disappear. I could go on, but one of my favorite quotes is
Building a decentralized internet is not an easy thing to do. There's a huge opportunity for developers who are willing to tackle the problems in this space. A big part of success is timing.
Facebook, Google, and Amazon were all in the right place at the right time to capitalize on web 1.0 and 2.0. I think you should be skeptical about web3, but if it does go mainstream, you'll be happy.
Here's my web3 startup idea. The corporate media is dying. Not many people in the key demo actually trust or watch the mainstream media.
They can continue to force-feed us this content by making it artificially rank high on platforms like Twitter and YouTube, and even by removing things like the dislike button to limit our ability to point out harmful content.
I think an entirely decentralized news network would be awesome, where journalists could upload video articles and other reporting and be compensated based on its reach. It would incentivize good journalism and eliminate the possibility of the top-down propaganda machine. Journalists win, consumers win, the only one who gets **** is the establishment.
The metaverse
The metaverse you likely saw mark Zuckerberg's ultra cringe. I mean inspiring vision about the metaverse. I totally agree that the vision was dumb because I would never want to be involved in any kind of metaverse run by Facebook, a company with a terrible track record of abusing our data and violating our privacy. That being said, Facebook is not the only company building a metaverse; they're just trying to hijack the name.
The general concept is to build an internet-based platform that has multiple access points like your phone, VR, and AR.
Then you have a single profile that you can use to interact with different businesses and apps within that platform and communicate with other users in a virtual environment like you would in VRChat or an old school app like second life.
The concept is actually really cool, but I don't think the VR aspect of it will ever go. Super mainstream VR has been around for a long time now, and the technology is excellent, but most people just don't like using it.
We already know we're addicted to social media and video games. The idea of strapping on a headset to further detach from the real world just doesn't seem like something that humans will do; that being said, metaverses are being built, and there will be opportunities there for developers.
If you want to get into it, learning something like unity or the unreal engine would be an excellent place to start or 3d modeling software like blender,
Here's my startup idea, there's a lot of hype and investment going into the metaverse and during a gold rush. It's a good idea to sell shovels. The idea is to create something like a Squarespace or Shopify for the metaverse.
A platform where any business can build a digital metaverse experience and VR apps is extremely hard to develop. If you can give brands a way to get their foot into the door of the metaverse, there are likely millions of potential customers out there.
That will want to interact with customers on the metaverse but don't have the technical skills to get the job done now.
Artificial intelligence ( AI )
AI has come a long way in the last couple of years, and in 2021 it affected us, developers, personally with the release of GitHub co-pilot, which is a tool that uses ai to automatically write code for you, It's not to the point where it's going to replace developers, but I'm sure we'll get there someday.
The one thing that's a little disappointing about ai is that it's kind of dominated now by big companies that have control of these algorithms like GPT-3,
It would be challenging as an individual or startup to train ai models that can compete with it. For two points:
- You won't have the massive amount of data needed.
- You won't have the computing power.
The second point will become especially true. If quantum computers ever become helpful and can train an ai model, then it's pretty much game over. That being said, it's still a good idea to learn data science because it's still very difficult to process and analyze huge amounts of data, which means there are many high-paying jobs out there for that role.
Here's my startup idea: join them if you can't beat them. Microsoft has exclusive access to GPT-3, but there's still a public API where you can use gpt3 to build a product. Many people like to interact with psychics, but that business model doesn't scale very well because you need to meet each client individually.
What you could do is use GPT-3 to create an ai driven psychic hotline where customers could interact with lost loved ones, and gpt3 would automatically generate responses that come from the other side.
Databases
Now I want to take a minute to talk about something, a little more boring databases; a trend that I've noticed is that relational SQL databases are back in vogue.
SQL has always been the most widely adopted type of database, but now it's a cool technology to use again. We're also seeing ai being implemented into databases like MindsDB to make machine learning workflows much more accessible.
n addition, you have tools like PlanetScale and Supabase, which are making relational databases much easier to work with.
At the same time, you have NoSQL databases like MongoDB becoming more and more powerful, which can now be deployed in a serverless way and supports full-text search.
Then you have Redis becoming a multi-model database to support graph time series and full-text search features.
Then you have Firestore from Firebase, which really didn't change in 2021, but I'm going to keep my fingers crossed for some new features in 2022. If not, the serverless SQL platforms are looking very appealing,
Javascript
The next big trade I want to talk about is Javascript always bet on javascript. If you learn Javascript,t you'll never go hungry. Last year, I predicted that we're mostly done seeing changes to the big frameworks of React, Angular, and Vue, and that prediction has held true.
The core frameworks are pretty much the same; react concurrent mode is still experimental, just as it was last year, while Angular and Vue remain solid and stable. All the exciting stuff is happening with the META-Frameworks.
NextJS is the leader in the space, and its parent company Versel is now a multi-billion dollar company. Over the last 20 years, what we've done comes full circle originally; we had server-rendered applications. Then we went to client rendered applications, and now we have things like NextJS, which provide the best of both worlds.
Nuxt version 3 and the view ecosystem look absolutely incredible. Still, it does not feature complete; we also have React-server components around the corner, which led to new frameworks like Hydrogen from Shopify.
There's also Remix, but the most exciting development, in my opinion, is the fact that Rich Harris, the creator of Svelte, was hired by Vercel to work on Svelte full-time.
-- iframe
Everybody knows that Svelte is the most excellent UI framework ever created, but it came a little too late in the game and never had the financial backing of a big company.
That's about to change, which makes me feel very optimistic about the future of Svelte kit, a framework for server-side rendering, in addition to meta-frameworks.
You'll also want to keep your eye on meta-meta-frameworks; one example is Blitz js, which is built on top of next and makes it much easier to build a database-driven application.
Another excellent javascript tool worth mentioning is Astro, which allows you to build a website using multiple frameworks. At the same time, without sending any javascript down to the client.
Build tools for front-end developers also improved a ton in 2021. The best example is Vite, which provides a far simpler developer experience than Webpack. It's much faster and way easier to work with.
Here's one way that you, as an independent developer, can make money around meta-frameworks. You might be familiar with sites like ThemeForest that sell premium WordPress templates, many of which are based on react, Vue, and Angular. However, these themes aren't beneficial if you're building a server-rendered application with a meta-framework. I think there's an opportunity here to create custom server render templates that can help other developers get things done faster, like next already has an e-commerce template. Still, there's an infinite number of variations.
You can make on this and provide other templates for e-learning, small businesses, enterprise dashboards, real estate, and different industries.
Now, because NexJS is server-rendered, you can do things beyond the UI like integrate stripe as a payment solution or include SendGrid for transactional email.
Other Trends to Know
Here's some other information that you'll want to know going into 2022 JetBrains is releasing a new lightweight ide fleet that could compete with VScode. The VScode itself is better than ever, and you can now run it directly in the browser by visiting the link vscode.dev .
TailwindCss is becoming more and more popular, and it got incredibly awesome in 2021, thanks to just in time mode.
Typescript is also more popular than ever, and we have some cool new features coming to the Javascript language, like "at" to get a negative index or the last element in an array.
[1,2,3].at(-1)
We have top-level weight standardized.
await fun()
And a much more ergonomic way to use Object Prototype has its own property.
Object.hasOwn(object, "foo")
In 2022, Graphql is still not going to replace rest, and the hype around it seems to have died down quite a bit.
WebAssembly will not replace Javascript, but it is quietly changing the world. One example is stack blitz, which brings server-side capabilities to the browser.
No code is still a trend to keep your eye on, but it's still not going to take your job as a developer, just like it hasn't for the last 50 years.
Flutter and react native will continue to dominate the cross-platform space when it comes to mobile development.
You might see brain interfaces like Neurosity, where you write code; they can react to changes in your brain waves.
Aws will continue to release many products you don't need, while google cloud and azure continue to play catch-up.
The only prediction I'm 100 confident of, though, is that things will change, and when that happens, I'll be right here on your computer screen with a new article about it.
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