2020 was an awesome year for tech, but next year might be even better! Let’s check out some trends & predictions for developers going into 2021. Sponsor me on Github for $1.00 https://github.com/codediodeio 

References:

Remote Work Predictions https://twitter.com/chris_herd/status/1334842553561198593
GPT-3 https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165
College Degree not Required https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/16/15-companies-that-no-longer-require-employees-to-have-a-college-degree.html
JS Framework Fatigue https://medium.com/@reverentgeek/choose-your-own-framework-the-curse-of-javascript-fatigue-846562be5d17

00:00 2020 Highlights
00:46 Remote Work
01:51 Web & JavaScript
03:44 WASM + PWAs
04:52 AI 
05:41 Nocode 
06:39 Serverless 
07:56 Black Swan 

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2024-02-04T06:01:23.541Z
nova-2
2-general-nova
2024-01-09.29447
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67875a7f-c9c4-48a0-aa55-5bdb8a91c34a
deprecated
Not very much happened in 2020.
Bootstrap 5 was released.
A Star disappeared.
Angular added a new datepicker.
A bunch of stuff caught on fire.
View 3 was finally released.
Beirut exploded.
React suspense left us in suspense.
Murder Hornets.
RIP 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 2nd term in January.
I think 2021 will be an even better year.
2020 has been a defining year for tech.
There have been big winners and big losers.
Today, we'll look at 7 predictions about tech going into 2021, along with a bunch of events and trends from 2020 that provide a roadmap for developers as relating to the web, back end, 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 6 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 4 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 Vue fighting for a distant second place, and a bunch of other good frameworks like Svelte, Ember, and LitElement 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 Vue's 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, It's an awesome language to work with by any standard.
Over the last 5 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 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, WebAssembly and the web platform itself for 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 synced, 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 biodigital 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.
Date ticker jab.
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 AppSheet 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 hand, and VCs will throw money at it without batting an eye.
The server is dead.
Long live serverless, which are actually just servers, the 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 Docker container.
But just a few days ago, AWS announced that Lambda supports for its 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 back end 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 SPACs, 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.
$100,000,000,000 market cap on only 400,000,000 in revenue and a loss of 350,000,000.
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 3 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 of the craziness.
Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.

Speaker 0: Not very much happened in 2020. Bootstrap 5 was released. A Star disappeared. Angular added a new datepicker. A bunch of stuff caught on fire.

View 3 was finally released. Beirut exploded. React suspense left us in suspense. Murder Hornets. RIP 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 2nd term in January. I think 2021 will be an even better year. 2020 has been a defining year for tech. There have been big winners and big losers.

Today, we'll look at 7 predictions about tech going into 2021, along with a bunch of events and trends from 2020 that provide a roadmap for developers as relating to the web, back end, 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 6 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 4 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 Vue fighting for a distant second place, and a bunch of other good frameworks like Svelte, Ember, and LitElement 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 Vue's 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, It's an awesome language to work with by any standard. Over the last 5 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 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, WebAssembly and the web platform itself for 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 synced, 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 biodigital 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.

Date ticker jab. 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 AppSheet 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 hand, and VCs will throw money at it without batting an eye.

The server is dead. Long live serverless, which are actually just servers, the 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 Docker container. But just a few days ago, AWS announced that Lambda supports for its 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 back end 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 SPACs, 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. $100,000,000,000 market cap on only 400,000,000 in revenue and a loss of 350,000,000. 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 3 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 of the craziness. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.
Not very much happened in 2020. Bootstrap 5 was released. A Star disappeared. Angular added a new datepicker. A bunch of stuff caught on fire.
View 3 was finally released. Beirut exploded. React suspense left us in suspense. Murder Hornets. RIP 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.
documentary
film
space exploration
pornography
media
And when Donald Trump starts his 2nd term in January. I think 2021 will be an even better year. 2020 has been a defining year for tech. There have been big winners and big losers.
Today, we'll look at 7 predictions about tech going into 2021, along with a bunch of events and trends from 2020 that provide a roadmap for developers as relating to the web, back end, 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.
technology
ibm
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 6 figure tech salary. The bad news here though is that I predict this will make the job market more competitive.
vacation
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 4 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 Vue fighting for a distant second place, and a bunch of other good frameworks like Svelte, Ember, and LitElement 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 Vue's 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, It's an awesome language to work with by any standard. Over the last 5 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 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.
programming
logic
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, WebAssembly and the web platform itself for a collection of features that we call progressive web apps.
software development
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.
internet
Things like push notifications, offline mode, background synced, 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 biodigital 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.
artificial intelligence
google
games
technology
apple
copyright licenses
neural networks
software development
video gaming
intellectual property
robotics
graphic design
amazon
software
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.
Date ticker jab. 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 AppSheet 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.
software development
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 hand, and VCs will throw money at it without batting an eye. The server is dead. Long live serverless, which are actually just servers, the 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 Docker container. But just a few days ago, AWS announced that Lambda supports for its 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 back end 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.
databases
infrastructure
technology
data management
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 SPACs, 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. $100,000,000,000 market cap on only 400,000,000 in revenue and a loss of 350,000,000. 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 3 and potentially lost opportunities for entrepreneurs.
stock market
investing
revenue
sales
earnings
industry
finance
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.
youtube
I just wanted to say thank you to everybody for making 2020 an awesome year, despite all of the craziness. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.
holidays
Not very much happened in 2020. Bootstrap 5 was released. A Star disappeared. Angular added a new datepicker. A bunch of stuff caught on fire. View 3 was finally released. Beirut exploded. React suspense left us in suspense. Murder Hornets. RIP 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 2nd term in January. I think 2021 will be an even better year. 2020 has been a defining year for tech. There have been big winners and big losers. Today, we'll look at 7 predictions about tech going into 2021, along with a bunch of events and trends from 2020 that provide a roadmap for developers as relating to the web, back end, 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 6 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 4 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 Vue fighting for a distant second place, and a bunch of other good frameworks like Svelte, Ember, and LitElement 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 Vue's 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, It's an awesome language to work with by any standard. Over the last 5 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 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, WebAssembly and the web platform itself for 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 synced, 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 biodigital 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. Date ticker jab. 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 AppSheet 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 hand, and VCs will throw money at it without batting an eye. The server is dead. Long live serverless, which are actually just servers, the 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 Docker container. But just a few days ago, AWS announced that Lambda supports for its 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 back end 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 SPACs, 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. $100,000,000,000 market cap on only 400,000,000 in revenue and a loss of 350,000,000. 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 3 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 of the craziness. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.
Not
not
very
very
much
much
happened
happened
in
in
2020.
2020
Bootstrap
bootstrap
5
5
was
was
released.
released
A
a
Star
star
disappeared.
disappeared
Angular
angular
added
added
a
a
new
new
datepicker.
datepicker
A
a
bunch
bunch
of
of
stuff
stuff
caught
caught
on
on
fire.
fire
View
view
3
3
was
was
finally
finally
released.
released
Beirut
beirut
exploded.
exploded
React
react
suspense
suspense
left
left
us
us
in
in
suspense.
suspense
Murder
murder
Hornets.
hornets
RIP
rip
Kobe,
kobe
Eddie,
eddie
and
and
Kim.
kim
SpaceX
spacex
used
used
web
web
components
components
while
while
Elon
elon
got
got
hacked.
hacked
UFOs
ufos
are
are
real.
real
UFOs
ufos
are
are
real.
real
Lambda
lambda
supports
supports
containers
containers
while
while
Kubernetes
kubernetes
drops
drops
Docker.
docker
Slack
slack
sold
sold
out.
out
AI
ai
learned
learned
how
how
to
to
write
write
code.
code
And
and
when
when
Donald
donald
Trump
trump
starts
starts
his
his
2nd
2nd
term
term
in
in
January.
january
I
i
think
think
2021
2021
will
will
be
be
an
an
even
even
better
better
year.
year
2020
2020
has
has
been
been
a
a
defining
defining
year
year
for
for
tech.
tech
There
there
have
have
been
been
big
big
winners
winners
and
and
big
big
losers.
losers
Today,
today
we'll
we'll
look
look
at
at
7
7
predictions
predictions
about
about
tech
tech
going
going
into
into
2021,
2021
along
along
with
with
a
a
bunch
bunch
of
of
events
events
and
and
trends
trends
from
from
2020
2020
that
that
provide
provide
a
a
roadmap
roadmap
for
for
developers
developers
as
as
relating
relating
to
to
the
the
web,
web
back
back
end,
end
mobile,
mobile
AI,
ai
and
and
more.
more
If
if
you're
you're
new
new
here,
here
like
like
and
and
subscribe,
subscribe
then
then
let's
let's
get
get
right
right
into
into
it.
it
The
the
Office
office
is
is
dead,
dead
and
and
that's
that's
a
a
great
great
thing
thing
both
both
for
for
companies
companies
and
and
their
their
employees.
employees
No
no
commute,
commute
better
better
work
work
life
life
balance,
balance
live
live
where
where
you
you
want,
want
and
and
the
the
list
list
goes
goes
on.
on
2020
2020
forced
forced
virtually
virtually
every
every
company
company
to
to
embrace
embrace
and
and
implement
implement
remote
remote
work.
work
Big
big
companies
companies
like
like
Microsoft
microsoft
and
and
Facebook
facebook
are
are
now
now
permanently
permanently
allowing
allowing
many
many
of
of
their
their
employees
employees
to
to
work
work
from
from
home.
home
This
this
has
has
led
led
to
to
an
an
exodus
exodus
of
of
people
people
from
from
Silicon
silicon
Valley
valley
to
to
more
more
affordable
affordable
cities
cities
throughout
throughout
the
the
United
united
States.
states
I
i
happen
happen
to
to
be
be
a
a
California
california
refugee
refugee
myself,
myself
and
and
while
while
it's
it's
a
a
great
great
place
place
to
to
visit,
visit
living
living
there
there
kind
kind
of
of
sucks.
sucks
But
but
the
the
great
great
thing
thing
about
about
a
a
global
global
pandemic
pandemic
is
is
that
that
now
now
you
you
can
can
live
live
wherever
wherever
you
you
want
want
and
and
still
still
bring
bring
in
in
a
a
6
6
figure
figure
tech
tech
salary.
salary
The
the
bad
bad
news
news
here
here
though
though
is
is
that
that
I
i
predict
predict
this
this
will
will
make
make
the
the
job
job
market
market
more
more
competitive.
competitive
With
with
jobs
jobs
moving
moving
out
out
of
of
the
the
valley,
valley
you
you
now
now
have
have
to
to
compete
compete
with
with
everyone
everyone
in
in
the
the
United
united
States
states
or
or
potentially
potentially
everyone
everyone
in
in
the
the
world
world
for
for
a
a
role.
role
Regardless,
regardless
It
it
is
is
still
still
a
a
great
great
time
time
to
to
learn
learn
to
to
code,
code
and
and
there's
there's
more
more
options
options
than
than
ever
ever
before.
before
If
if
you're
you're
self
self
motivated,
motivated
you
you
can
can
get
get
a
a
better
better
education
education
here
here
on
on
YouTube
youtube
than
than
you
you
could
could
sitting
sitting
through
through
4
4
years
years
of
of
college.
college
And
and
many
many
big
big
companies
companies
like
like
Apple
apple
and
and
Google
google
no
no
longer
longer
require
require
college
college
degrees
degrees
for
for
software
software
engineers.
engineers
Overall,
overall
when
when
you
you
take
take
a
a
step
step
back,
back
the
the
tech
tech
industry
industry
has
has
fared
fared
much
much
better
better
than
than
virtually
virtually
every
every
other
other
industry
industry
in
in
this
this
new
new
dystopian
dystopian
normal
normal
that
that
we
we
live
live
in.
in
JavaScript
javascript
frameworks
frameworks
are
are
dead.
dead
Well,
well
maybe
maybe
dead's
dead's
not
not
the
the
right
right
word.
word
They're
they're
done
done
reinventing
reinventing
the
the
wheel,
wheel
or
or
innovating,
innovating
I
i
should
should
say,
say
at
at
least
least
in
in
ways
ways
that
that
will
will
change
change
the
the
current
current
status
status
quo.
quo
React
react
has
has
been
been
the
the
dominant
dominant
framework
framework
or
or
library
library
with
with
the
the
majority
majority
of
of
the
the
market
market
share,
share
as
as
long
long
as
as
we
we
pretend
pretend
jQuery
jquery
doesn't
doesn't
exist,
exist
followed
followed
by
by
Angular
angular
and
and
Vue
vue
fighting
fighting
for
for
a
a
distant
distant
second
second
place,
place
and
and
a
a
bunch
bunch
of
of
other
other
good
good
frameworks
frameworks
like
like
Svelte,
svelte
Ember,
ember
and
and
LitElement
litelement
in
in
a
a
distant
distant
third
third
place.
place
I
i
don't
don't
expect
expect
things
things
to
to
change
change
much
much
in
in
the
the
future.
future
When
when
React
react
released
released
hooks
hooks
back
back
in
in
2019,
2019
people
people
acted
acted
like
like
it
it
was
was
going
going
to
to
end
end
world
world
hunger.
hunger
While
while
hooks
hooks
are
are
great
great
and
and
they
they
inspired
inspired
things
things
like
like
Vue's
vue's
composition
composition
API,
api
I
i
think
think
it
it
signaled
signaled
the
the
beginning
beginning
of
of
the
the
end
end
for
for
the
the
JavaScript
javascript
framework
framework
wars.
wars
There's
there's
been
been
a
a
constant
constant
push
push
in
in
the
the
JavaScript
javascript
world
world
to
to
create
create
new
new
releases
releases
that
that
do
do
things
things
differently
differently
year
year
after
after
year.
year
That's
that's
led
led
to
to
the
the
awesome
awesome
JavaScript
javascript
frameworks
frameworks
we
we
enjoy
enjoy
today,
today
but
but
it
it
does
does
feel
feel
like
like
the
the
constant
constant
churn
churn
is
is
really
really
slowing
slowing
down,
down
and
and
that's
that's
probably
probably
a
a
good
good
thing.
thing
On
on
a
a
similar
similar
note,
note
The
the
JavaScript
javascript
language
language
itself,
itself
or
or
ECMAScript,
ecmascript
is
is
pretty
pretty
much
much
done
done
getting
getting
better
better
at
at
this
this
point.
point
JavaScript,
javascript
and
and
especially
especially
when
when
used
used
with
with
TypeScript,
typescript
It's
it's
an
an
awesome
awesome
language
language
to
to
work
work
with
with
by
by
any
any
standard.
standard
Over
over
the
the
last
last
5
5
years
years
or
or
so,
so
it's
it's
experienced
experienced
a
a
renaissance
renaissance
with
with
a
a
whole
whole
bunch
bunch
of
of
powerful
powerful
new
new
features
features
being
being
added
added
to
to
it.
it
But
but
in
in
2021,
2021
things
things
look
look
pretty
pretty
quiet
quiet
for
for
JavaScript.
javascript
There
there
There
there
are
are
a
a
couple
couple
of
of
new
new
features
features
finalized,
finalized
like
like
logical
logical
assignment
assignment
operators
operators
that
that
allow
allow
you
you
to
to
assign
assign
a
a
variable
variable
if
if
it's
it's
not
not
already
already
defined,
defined
also
also
called
called
the
the
mallet
mallet
operator.
operator
Overall,
overall
nothing
nothing
too
too
game
game
changing,
changing
and
and
if
if
you
you
use
use
TypeScript,
typescript
you
you
can
can
already
already
use
use
the
the
syntax
syntax
today.
today
Speaking
speaking
of
of
which,
which
and
and
I've
i've
been
been
predicting
predicting
this
this
for
for
years,
years
TypeScript
typescript
will
will
continue
continue
to
to
dominate.
dominate
It's
it's
already
already
used
used
by
by
almost
almost
everybody
everybody
for
for
big
big
complex
complex
projects,
projects
but
but
I
i
think
think
there
there
will
will
be
be
even
even
more
more
adoption
adoption
now
now
that
that
we
we
have
have
Deno,
deno
which
which
is
is
a
a
brand
brand
new
new
JavaScript
javascript
runtime
runtime
that
that
came
came
out
out
in
in
2020
2020
that
that
runs
runs
TypeScript
typescript
natively.
natively
It's
it's
an
an
alternative
alternative
to
to
Node
node
JS,
js
and
and
I
i
think
think
we'll
we'll
see
see
a
a
lot
lot
of
of
growth
growth
in
in
Deno
deno
over
over
the
the
next
next
few
few
years.
years
And
and
another
another
thing
thing
I'm
i'm
excited
excited
about
about
is
is
a
a
new
new
build
build
tool
tool
called
called
Snowpack.
snowpack
It
it
makes
makes
it
it
really
really
fast
fast
and
and
easy
easy
to
to
start
start
a
a
project
project
with
with
TypeScript
typescript
and
and
your
your
preferred
preferred
framework.
framework
The
the
most
most
exciting
exciting
thing
thing
for
for
the
the
web,
web
though,
though
has
has
nothing
nothing
to
to
do
do
with
with
JavaScript,
javascript
which
which
brings
brings
me
me
to
to
my
my
next
next
prediction.
prediction
Web
web
apps
apps
and
and
native
native
apps
apps
will
will
become
become
more
more
indistinguishable
indistinguishable
than
than
ever
ever
and
and
there
there
are
are
two
two
main
main
reasons
reasons
for
for
this,
this
WebAssembly
webassembly
and
and
the
the
web
web
platform
platform
itself
itself
for
for
a
a
collection
collection
of
of
features
features
that
that
we
we
call
call
progressive
progressive
web
web
apps.
apps
WebAssembly
webassembly
is
is
a
a
common
common
target
target
that
that
multiple
multiple
languages
languages
can
can
compile
compile
to,
to
which
which
means
means
that
that
you
you
can
can
now
now
build
build
high
high
performance
performance
web
web
applications
applications
with
with
languages
languages
other
other
than
than
JavaScript.
javascript
On
on
top
top
of
of
that,
that
the
the
web
web
platform
platform
or
or
browsers
browsers
now
now
have
have
most
most
of
of
the
the
features
features
that
that
used
used
to
to
only
only
be
be
available
available
for
for
native
native
apps.
apps
Things
things
like
like
push
push
notifications,
notifications
offline
offline
mode,
mode
background
background
synced,
synced
Bluetooth,
bluetooth
and
and
many
many
more.
more
And
and
what
what
this
this
means
means
as
as
a
a
developer
developer
is
is
that
that
you
you
can
can
deliver
deliver
a
a
full
full
native
native
app
app
experience
experience
entirely
entirely
through
through
the
the
free
free
and
and
open
open
platform
platform
known
known
as
as
the
the
web.
web
And
and
that
that
really
really
begs
begs
the
the
question
question
of
of
why
why
are
are
we
we
giving
giving
Apple
apple
or
or
Google
google
30%
30%
of
of
our
our
revenue
revenue
just
just
to
to
use
use
a
a
closed
closed
off
off
marketplace
marketplace
that
that
supports
supports
censorship,
censorship
unfair
unfair
distribution,
distribution
and
and
bans
bans
on
on
third
third
party
party
payment
payment
systems.
systems
Everybody
everybody
knows
knows
it's
it's
unfair,
unfair
and
and
Epic
epic
Games
games
went
went
to
to
court
court
with
with
Apple
apple
in
in
2020.
2020
It's
it's
a
a
long
long
way
way
off,
off
but,
but
hopefully,
hopefully
developers
developers
see
see
the
the
opportunity
opportunity
of
of
developing
developing
progressive
progressive
web
web
apps
apps
with
with
WebAssembly
webassembly
and
and
get
get
consumers
consumers
comfortable
comfortable
with
with
using
using
apps
apps
outside
outside
of
of
the
the
App
app
Store.
store
The
the
technology
technology
is
is
here
here
today,
today
but
but
I
i
think
think
it'll
it'll
take
take
multiple
multiple
years
years
to
to
see
see
any
any
meaningful
meaningful
change
change
in
in
that
that
direction,
direction
so
so
we
we
might
might
as
as
well
well
just
just
move
move
on.
on
Artificial
artificial
intelligence
intelligence
will
will
not
not
take
take
your
your
job,
job
or
or
maybe
maybe
it
it
will.
will
They
they
took
took
our
our
job.
job
By
by
now,
now
you've
you've
likely
likely
heard
heard
of
of
GPT
gpt
3,
3
which,
which
of
of
course,
course
is
is
a
a
generative
generative
pre
pre
trained
trained
auto
auto
aggressive
aggressive
transformer
transformer
language
language
model.
model
It
it
can
can
do
do
all
all
kinds
kinds
of
of
scary
scary
things,
things
including
including
write
write
code.
code
This
this
guy
guy
on
on
Twitter
twitter
built
built
an
an
app
app
where
where
you
you
can
can
describe
describe
the
the
layout
layout
of
of
a
a
website,
website
and
and
it
it
will
will
generate
generate
the
the
actual
actual
HTML,
html
CSS,
css
and
and
React
react
code.
code
And
and
now
now
it
it
looks
looks
like
like
he's
he's
building
building
a
a
whole
whole
startup
startup
around
around
this
this
concept.
concept
I
i
don't
don't
think
think
you
you
have
have
to
to
worry
worry
about
about
AI
ai
taking
taking
your
your
job,
job
and
and
here's
here's
why.
why
Once
once
AI
ai
starts
starts
to
to
write
write
code,
code
it'll
it'll
be
be
able
able
to
to
create
create
its
its
own
own
AI,
ai
and
and
that'll
that'll
be
be
the
the
true
true
inflection
inflection
point
point
propelling
propelling
us
us
to
to
the
the
technological
technological
singularity,
singularity
at
at
which
which
point
point
we'll
we'll
all
all
fuse
fuse
together
together
as
as
one
one
biodigital
biodigital
organism,
organism
or
or
our
our
new
new
digital
digital
overlords
overlords
might
might
enslave
enslave
or
or
exterminate
exterminate
us.
us
In
in
either
either
case,
case
you
you
don't
don't
have
have
to
to
worry
worry
about
about
AI
ai
taking
taking
your
your
job.
job
What
what
you
you
do
do
have
have
to
to
worry
worry
about
about
right
right
now
now
is
is
something
something
entirely
entirely
different,
different
and
and
that's
that's
the
the
no
no
code,
code
low
low
code
code
revolution,
revolution
which
which
might
might
take
take
your
your
job.
job
Date
date
ticker
ticker
jab.
jab
There
there
are
are
a
a
variety
variety
of
of
tools
tools
out
out
there
there
now
now
that
that
make
make
it
it
easier
easier
for
for
people
people
without
without
engineering
engineering
skills
skills
to
to
develop
develop
apps.
apps
There
there
are
are
tools
tools
like
like
Webflow
webflow
for
for
building
building
websites,
websites
then
then
Amazon
amazon
has
has
Honeycode,
honeycode
and
and
Google
google
has
has
AppSheet
appsheet
for
for
building
building
mobile
mobile
apps.
apps
Over
over
the
the
last
last
couple
couple
years,
years
there's
there's
been
been
a
a
ton
ton
of
of
venture
venture
capital
capital
flowing
flowing
into
into
low
low
code,
code
no
no
code
code
apps.
apps
It's
it's
a
a
great
great
area
area
to
to
be
be
in
in
if
if
you're
you're
a
a
startup,
startup
but
but
you
you
might
might
be
be
wondering
wondering
if
if
these
these
tools
tools
will
will
take
take
your
your
job.
job
My
my
prediction
prediction
is
is
that
that
they
they
will
will
not.
not
If
if
anything,
anything
I
i
think
think
they'll
they'll
make
make
developers
developers
more
more
valuable
valuable
because
because
they
they
abstract
abstract
away
away
some
some
of
of
the
the
most
most
annoying
annoying
parts
parts
of
of
being
being
a
a
developer.
developer
For
for
example,
example
You
you
might
might
use
use
a
a
no
no
code
code
tool
tool
to
to
scaffold
scaffold
out
out
a
a
UI
ui
very
very
quickly.
quickly
Instead
instead
of
of
taking
taking
a
a
week
week
to
to
build
build
a
a
baseline
baseline
prototype,
prototype
you
you
now
now
have
have
one
one
in
in
a
a
few
few
minutes,
minutes
and
and
you
you
can
can
move
move
on
on
to
to
the
the
more
more
exciting
exciting
features
features
that
that
low
low
code
code
tools
tools
can't
can't
handle.
handle
In
in
fact,
fact
if
if
you're
you're
a
a
developer
developer
working
working
on
on
something
something
repetitive
repetitive
that
that
could
could
be
be
represented
represented
with
with
a
a
drag
drag
and
and
drop
drop
UI,
ui
you
you
probably
probably
have
have
a
a
great
great
idea
idea
for
for
a
a
startup
startup
in
in
your
your
hand,
hand
and
and
VCs
vcs
will
will
throw
throw
money
money
at
at
it
it
without
without
batting
batting
an
an
eye.
eye
The
the
server
server
is
is
dead.
dead
Long
long
live
live
serverless,
serverless
which
which
are
are
actually
actually
just
just
servers,
servers
the
the
ones
ones
that
that
you
you
never
never
have
have
to
to
think
think
about
about
or
or
maintain.
maintain
The
the
growth
growth
of
of
serverless
serverless
computing
computing
has
has
been
been
accelerating
accelerating
for
for
the
the
last
last
few
few
years,
years
with
with
tools
tools
like
like
AWS
aws
Lambda,
lambda
Azure
azure
Functions,
functions
and
and
Google
google
Cloud
cloud
Functions
functions
leading
leading
the
the
way.
way
But
but
in
in
the
the
past,
past
there
there
are
are
a
a
few
few
reasons
reasons
you
you
may
may
have
have
not
not
wanted
wanted
to
to
use
use
functions,
functions
one
one
of
of
which
which
is
is
high
high
latency
latency
when
when
they
they
initially
initially
start,
start
known
known
as
as
a
a
cold
cold
start.
start
But
but
in
in
2020,
2020
we
we
got
got
a
a
new
new
feature
feature
from
from
AWS
aws
Lambda
lambda
called
called
provisioned
provisioned
concurrency,
concurrency
which
which
ensures
ensures
you
you
always
always
have
have
a
a
hot
hot
function
function
available
available
to
to
give
give
you
you
predictable
predictable
latency.
latency
But
but
another
another
big
big
drawback
drawback
of
of
serverless
serverless
is
is
that
that
you
you
can't
can't
control
control
the
the
runtime
runtime
with
with
a
a
Docker
docker
container.
container
But
but
just
just
a
a
few
few
days
days
ago,
ago
AWS
aws
announced
announced
that
that
Lambda
lambda
supports
supports
for
for
its
its
containers,
containers
and
and
you
you
also
also
have
have
tools
tools
like
like
Google
google
Cloud
cloud
Run
run
that
that
have
have
supported
supported
serverless
serverless
containers
containers
for
for
a
a
while.
while
The
the
bottom
bottom
line
line
is
is
that
that
serverless
serverless
functions
functions
are
are
becoming
becoming
suitable
suitable
for
for
more
more
and
and
more
more
use
use
cases.
cases
On
on
top
top
of
of
that,
that
we're
we're
now
now
starting
starting
to
to
see
see
more
more
serverless
serverless
databases,
databases
like
like
Firestore,
firestore
for
for
example,
example
or
or
FaunaDB.
faunadb
In
in
the
the
not
not
so
so
distant
distant
future,
future
I
i
think
think
it'll
it'll
be
be
rare
rare
for
for
a
a
developer
developer
to
to
have
have
to
to
think
think
about
about
how
how
they
they
scale
scale
or
or
maintain
maintain
their
their
back
back
end
end
infrastructure.
infrastructure
Everything
everything
will
will
just
just
magically
magically
work
work
in
in
the
the
cloud,
cloud
similar
similar
to
to
how
how
your
your
electricity
electricity
works
works
when
when
you
you
plug
plug
something
something
into
into
the
the
wall.
wall
It
it
just
just
works
works
unless
unless
there's
there's
a
a
massive
massive
outage,
outage
and
and
then
then
you
you
pay
pay
your
your
bill
bill
based
based
on
on
what
what
the
the
meter
meter
says
says
at
at
the
the
end
end
of
of
the
the
month.
month
It's
it's
incredibly
incredibly
simple,
simple
and
and
the
the
industry
industry
has
has
been
been
trending
trending
this
this
way
way
for
for
a
a
long
long
time.
time
Now,
now
I
i
wanted
wanted
to
to
save
save
my
my
worst
worst
prediction
prediction
for
for
last.
last
I
i
believe
believe
it's
it's
possible
possible
we
we
might
might
see
see
a
a
black
black
swan
swan
type
type
event
event
in
in
2021,
2021
just
just
like
like
we
we
did
did
in
in
2020
2020
with
with
the
the
rona.
rona
When
when
the
the
market
market
crashed
crashed
back
back
in
in
March,
march
it
it
rapidly
rapidly
recovered
recovered
back
back
to
to
all
all
time
time
highs
highs
in
in
less
less
than
than
a
a
year.
year
The
the
recovery
recovery
was
was
led
led
by
by
the
the
tech
tech
industry
industry
and
and
driven
driven
by
by
stimulus
stimulus
from
from
the
the
government
government
and
and
money
money
printing
printing
from
from
the
the
Federal
federal
Reserve.
reserve
Tons
tons
and
and
tons
tons
of
of
tech
tech
companies
companies
went
went
public
public
during
during
this
this
period
period
using
using
SPACs,
spacs
or
or
special
special
purpose
purpose
acquisition
acquisition
companies.
companies
Meanwhile,
meanwhile
Everybody
everybody
that's
that's
locked
locked
up
up
at
at
home
home
has
has
learned
learned
how
how
to
to
become
become
a
a
day
day
trader,
trader
which
which
turns
turns
out
out
to
to
be
be
pretty
pretty
easy
easy
when
when
the
the
stock
stock
market
market
does
does
nothing
nothing
but
but
go
go
up
up
and
and
up
up
and
and
up.
up
All
all
this
this
has
has
contributed
contributed
to
to
companies
companies
with
with
insane
insane
valuations.
valuations
Just
just
look
look
at
at
companies
companies
like
like
Snowflake
snowflake
that
that
went
went
public
public
this
this
year.
year
$100,000,000,000
$100,000,000,000
market
market
cap
cap
on
on
only
only
400,000,000
400,000,000
in
in
revenue
revenue
and
and
a
a
loss
loss
of
of
350,000,000.
350,000,000
And
and
there
there
are
are
many
many
other
other
stocks
stocks
just
just
like
like
it
it
that
that
don't
don't
make
make
any
any
money,
money
have
have
modest
modest
growth,
growth
yet
yet
their
their
Stock
stock
prices
prices
have
have
doubled
doubled
or
or
tripled
tripled
over
over
the
the
last
last
few
few
months.
months
This
this
can't
can't
go
go
on
on
forever
forever
and,
and
eventually,
eventually
there
there
will
will
be
be
some
some
kind
kind
of
of
catalyst
catalyst
to
to
bring
bring
everything
everything
crashing
crashing
down.
down
Companies
companies
that
that
don't
don't
make
make
a
a
profit
profit
can
can
only
only
survive
survive
with
with
a
a
high
high
stock
stock
price
price
or
or
an
an
infusion
infusion
of
of
cash
cash
from
from
somewhere
somewhere
else.
else
If
if
the
the
market
market
does
does
crash
crash
again,
again
there's
there's
a
a
very
very
high
high
potential
potential
for
for
job
job
loss
loss
in
in
the
the
tech
tech
industry
industry
3
3
and
and
potentially
potentially
lost
lost
opportunities
opportunities
for
for
entrepreneurs.
entrepreneurs
Now,
now
don't
don't
get
get
me
me
wrong.
wrong
I
i
hope
hope
the
the
party
party
keeps
keeps
rolling
rolling
in
in
2021.
2021
My
my
YouTube
youtube
channel
channel
depends
depends
on
on
it,
it
but
but
I'm
i'm
just
just
anticipating
anticipating
the
the
eventual
eventual
hangover.
hangover
I'm
i'm
gonna
gonna
go
go
ahead
ahead
and
and
wrap
wrap
things
things
up
up
there.
there
You
you
can
can
support
support
the
the
channel
channel
by
by
becoming
becoming
a
a
pro
pro
member
member
at
at
FireShip
fireship
IO
io
or
or
by
by
sponsoring
sponsoring
me
me
personally
personally
on
on
GitHub.
github
I
i
just
just
wanted
wanted
to
to
say
say
thank
thank
you
you
to
to
everybody
everybody
for
for
making
making
2020
2020
an
an
awesome
awesome
year,
year
despite
despite
all
all
of
of
the
the
craziness.
craziness
Thanks
thanks
for
for
watching
watching
and
and
I
i
will
will
see
see
you
you
in
in
the
the
next
next
one.
one
success
The tech industry is predicted to continue to be strong, with new features like web apps and native apps being more indistinguizable than ever. Developmenters will see the opportunity to develop progressive web apps with Webhair and other web platforms, and a new build tool called Snowpack used by developers to deliver a full native app experience. The potential for job losses and opportunities for entrepreneurs is also discussed, with low code tools and serverless computing leading to a "Black swan type event" in the future.
2021 Tech Trends & Predictions for Developers
Not very much happened in 2020. Bootstrap 5 was released. A Star disappeared. Angular added a new datepicker. A bunch of stuff caught on fire. View 3 was finally released. Beirut exploded. React suspense left us in suspense. Murder Hornets. RIP 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 2nd term in January. I think 2021 will be an even better year. 2020 has been a defining year for tech. There have been big winners and big losers. Today, we'll look at 7 predictions about tech going into 2021, along with a bunch of events and trends from 2020 that provide a roadmap for developers as relating to the web, back end, 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 6 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 4 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 Vue fighting for a distant second place, and a bunch of other good frameworks like Svelte, Ember, and LitElement 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 Vue's 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, It's an awesome language to work with by any standard. Over the last 5 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 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, WebAssembly and the web platform itself for 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 synced, 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 biodigital 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. Date ticker jab. 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 AppSheet 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 hand, and VCs will throw money at it without batting an eye. The server is dead. Long live serverless, which are actually just servers, the 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 Docker container. But just a few days ago, AWS announced that Lambda supports for its 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 back end 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 SPACs, 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. $100,000,000,000 market cap on only 400,000,000 in revenue and a loss of 350,000,000. 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 3 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 of the craziness. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.
The tech industry is predicted to continue to be strong, with new features like web apps and native apps being more indistinguizable than ever. Developmenters will see the opportunity to develop progressive web apps with Webhair and other web platforms, and a new build tool called Snowpack used by developers to deliver a full native app experience. The potential for job losses and opportunities for entrepreneurs is also discussed, with low code tools and serverless computing leading to a "Black swan type event" in the future.