2021 In Review

You're listening to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Strap yourself in and get ready. Ready. Here is Scott Talinski and Wes Boss.

Welcome to Syntax. We've got 2021 in review for you. It was a re Crazy year. Lots of stuff happened in the web development space. We're here to sort of go through both our predictions, what we do at the start of the year as well as we predict rid What we think will happen in the coming year, and then we revisit it a full year later. So we're gonna go through some of those. Some big flops there and some some stuff that was bang on.

We'll talk about highlights as well as, like, what was the hot tech in 2021.

We are sponsored today by 3 awesome companies, .tech domain names, rid. Sentry, Air Exception, Performance Tracking, and Mux Cloud Video,

the API for video they call it. We'll talk about all of them partway through the episode. How are we doing today, mister ready. We are doing good. We are doing we're doing very good. I got a you know, I just I just got back from a little bit of a little family trip. Got to see the grandparents, and, rid Kids had a great time. So yeah. Do you know what? I don't know about you and how much you how much, like, air flight you've done with kids. But, like, for me, If I'm flying with kids, I'm just, like, thinking about that flight for, like, a month ahead of time. And for me, it's almost like I have how are we gonna get The car seats, which are giant and heavy, how are we gonna get the car seats on the airplane? And how once we get them off of the airplane, how are we gonna get those to the car? And it stinks so badly. Just even, like, carrying them to the car when you're all done. It's so hard. I I like to get anxiety about it for, like, a month. It it's so rid. It's so intense for me. So, like, just the fact that I don't have that hanging over my head anymore.

I have I've become the mule, and I've rid. Carried the car seats to the car. Oh. So Car seats are the, like, the heaviest material in the world. Like, if you wanna get ripped, just carry around a couple car seats rid. And try to, like, tighten them in your car.

Oh my god. They are so heavy.

Oh, man. Alright. Rid. So what what should we start it off with here?

I think we should start off with our highlights for the year. Sure. And then we I think we should do the predictions last because rid Let's see. Okay. Yeah.

Alright. I'll start off with my just a kind of a look in review. It was a it was a tough year where kids were home again for a large re chunk of the year, which was super frustrating, to have them home and have them trying to balance having work and having kids at home. But, rid. Glad that things are looking up now, and they're back in school, and they're enjoying that a lot.

What what do we do? 104 syntax episodes in 2021.

It's like this podcast is probably the most consistent thing in my entire life that I've ever done.

Yeah. That's great, though. That's awesome.

Rid. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's good for just showing up and doing them. People are still tuning in, really enjoying it, so that's good.

At the very beginning of the year, I rereleased my advanced React rid Of course, I rerecorded that sucker in Keystone JS. We use GraphQL and Next JS and whatnot, and, I am just about to launch an update for that. It's rid Not a re total rerecord, but just a couple little updates here and there for a couple updates in Keystone. So kinda did that course twice this year.

JavaScript T shirts was a big one for me. I spent a couple weeks working on this, like, custom selling and fulfillment platform. You can go back to the episode on selling T shirts with TypeScript, rid where we sold I sold, I don't know, a couple 1,000 JavaScript T shirts and shipped them and all that good stuff. That was that was really fun.

Read. I wrote a vaccine bot to scrape and ping me when vaccines were available, which was, another really fun project, to do. Rid. Most of my year course wise was spent working on a massive TypeScript course.

So I was kinda heads down for a good chunk of the year just working on that thing.

And, that's gonna be released next year. I'm pretty excited about that. That's I feel like like I guess we talked about this last year, but read. TypeScript is here, man. Everybody is switching over to it. Everyone's loving it. So I'm really excited to get that course out for everybody to to learn a thing read. Or 2 about TypeScript.

What else? I rewrote my video player. Just about to launch that maybe actually this afternoon.

I added course notes, Which is gonna be a really nice thing to add, copy pasta, little updates, little gotchas. Like, you know, you know, when people do a course and they rid They accidentally do something or there's, like, common issues that pop up. Yeah. Again, it'd be nice to have, like, videos that can go with every single, rid Sorry. Not video. Notes. I can go with every single video. So excited about that.

Doing a lot more course improvements. I guess that's looking forward to next year.

Rid and then stickers stickers are printed.

I will sell them early next year. They're sitting here. And rid I have, I think, 12,000 packages of them sitting here in my office. Woah.

Looking forward to selling those as well. Yeah.

It's so funny that you say that because I can't even see. I can't see any stickers.

I'm looking around. I'm trying to Let me go to camera 2. Camera 2. Camera 1. Camera 2. Rid Yeah. What's that? Oh, okay.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. I was gonna say that looks like 2 small boxes. Now you got a lot of boxes. Yeah. Lot of boxes.

Lots of boxes. How about you? How was your year? A crazy year as always. It's always a crazy year.

It I was like writing some of my highlights, and then, like, halfway through, I was like, oh, yeah. I moved, which is like That feels like that's the biggest thing that the truck doesn't. Yeah.

So I moved, which was intense. And that kind of, you know, entire process takes Months. And we're still I mean, it it's been months since we've moved into this house, and this house feels like 10%, adapted to how we want it to be to live in, you know? Furniture, everything's delayed. You can't can't find or order anything anymore. So, re it it my feel my life feels like a certain degree in, like, mass chaos because of the house situation.

And even my office, although it, like, feels pretty put together, I I like to just finally got all of my gear off of my rid my desk because every time I post anything on Instagram, people are like, cables. Your cables are all over the place. Ugh. Yeah. I'm I'm still working on it. Rid Still working on it. But the entire house is like that, so everything feels it it all feels out of control. But, we still managed to do a ton of Massive things like rewrite our entire platform in Svelte.

Yeah. SvelteKit, which was the biggest thing. And honestly, something I'm still really working on because We got the whole front end of it done.

And there there there has been some, like, lingering little bugs here and there from that as there would be after rewriting this type of thing. But also, the admin section of the u the UI, which is like a big component of our site that most people don't ever get to see, rid because it's an admin section. Right? But the admin tools for us are pretty important. So I'm getting a chance to rethink all of my admin tools, and I, like, just rewrote 2 weeks ago, I just rewrote the video uploader system, which oddly enough uses one of our well, not oddly, but, coincidentally uses one of our sponsors, TodayMux, read. To upload our video and the new uploader is so much nicer. It's so nice.

So I I'm getting an opportunity to rewrite My admin tools, charts and graphs and and useful data for our team now. So it's been it's been a lot of fun, and I'm kinda taking my sweet time with it just because of of that. I'd like can we can we just say for a second? I actually really enjoy writing admin tools. There's something about

the stakes being a little lower.

Rid you can experiment.

Yeah. Yeah. You can do some fun stuff, and

it's it's a little bit more complex at times. So, yeah, I I really enjoy doing admin stuff as well. The the the worst part about admin tools is that I like not sharing them with everyone all the time because Yeah. Yeah. It's some of the best UI I've written has been in our admin tools, and it's just for fun. It's like you said, there's a lot of, like, really neat things. Like the, rid Because of our admin tools, I like wrote a forms package, which I I always say I'm not going to do, and then I do anyways.

So that's like something Or or tables or any of that stuff. There's there's a lot of really neat stuff in it. I'm using Vercheris' pancake library to do our charts, which isn't like a ready. Super production ready thing, but I I'm using it in our admin tools. And it's been, like, super fun because what I did is I wrote a little wrapper around it for ourselves. So now I can just, like, kind of pass on all sorts of data, and it automatically will build these, like, really gorgeous looking charts for us. So rid. Little things like that, they're just a joy to work on.

We hired somebody. We hired, Caitlin Bloom to do marketing and, all sorts of stuff for us. So that's been really huge for us. She's been incredible, and, that was just very recent at the end of the year. But, re You know, we're super glad to have her on the team, and she's just been doing in a just a fantastic job. So, if at any point you interact with Caitlin, she's on the discord and, rid. Just say hi. She's, new around the level of tutorials parts, and she's doing a great job. We also had a ton of new authors on level of ready. Which is something that was big for me because, that's been a a huge goal of mine for a long time. But when the pandemic rid. It got really tough to organize that kind of stuff. And next thing you know, I'm doing 12 tutorial courses in 1 year.

So that's obviously lot. Yeah. Not sustainable for More than that little given bit of time. So we had a bunch of authors come on to level up tutorials this year, and that was organized in re In part with some LevelUp tutorials, team members who who made that happen. And now we've had courses from, Brian Douglas who did a course on GitHub. Colby Fayock did a course on Next. Js. Ryan Olinska.

Amy Kaepernick did a course on, rid accessibility, and we have more planned. We have more scheduled. So it's it's gonna be really great. I can't wait to see what happens in twenty rid 22 with that aspect.

We have some really awesome content creators going to be doing courses for us and stuff I'm super duper excited about.

And I have too many courses that I want to do because it turns out after doing 12 courses in 1 year, when you cut that down to 6 courses, you end up having a ton of ideas. I'm like, I'm so flush with ideas for stuff. So, I also worked on a ton of packages.

We we moved when we moved to SvelteKit, We were on this thing that I wrote very briefly called Avalanche, which was kind of like a mono repo setup, but it was it was rid. Doing a lot of, like, orchestration for us, but then I ended up building that orchestration into, some of our our mono repo tools instead, and it ended up working a little bit more smoother.

So we're on PNPM in a mono works work, or mono repo now, and I I ended up publishing a lot of packages, many of which are still in flux. They're They're little Pikachu construction guys. But so like I have a Svelte toy, which is like a, like a state manage like management dev tool. I have a Svelte side menu, which is just a little pop out side menu, which I actually end up using ton of these things. I end up making one for our admin tools rid Or I I have, like, 3 or 4 of these little side menus on our our site for different authors, admins, whatever. If you're, like, an author And you wanna be able to update any piece of content. If you can update that content, like, a little pencil will appear on the side menu. It's like WordPress days. It's great. Re I have a element queries package that I did to polyfill the or or just to add the resize observer to be able to do element queries with a Svelte action.

I made an auto form library that's still very early on, but, man, I love this auto form library because you kind of pass it rid A it's kind of like a schema. You can give it a string, and it's gonna know that you want a text field, whatever basic stuff. But you can also rid. Do some more intense types of fields whether it's like a tag field or, we have like a search kind of field. And rid like I said, it's pretty rough still, but we're using it. And it it's just really nice to to have, like, a a package where you can just drop in a form component And have it just build the whole forum for you.

And also gquery, which is not done, but we're using it in production. And rid. I I would love to have a version of this thing out before the end of this year, so I'm gonna say hopefully that a version of it that's usable will be out, And that's how we're doing all of our GraphQL queries. It's super, super bare bones, very, very code gen focused. Everything generates rid code where the GraphQL file is, and then you import it. You get caching. You get all sorts of stuff. And it's simple, and I really like it. It works well as Svelte. So, I I've worked on a ton of open source projects that many of which are half finished, but we're using them all. So they're they're good enough for us. Awesome. Wow. Sounds like a lot in 2021.

It seemed like the year went super quick. I know everybody's saying that, but, Yeah. Honestly, to me, it seemed like it just whoo. And buy. Yeah. Yeah. Very quick. Let's break for .tech domains who well, If you are starting a new project in 2022,

maybe you want to look at having a .tech domain. Wes, do you wanna talk about them? Ready. Alright. Yes. Dot tech domain names. It's what they do in the name. They provide dot tech domain names. They are the domain name for your re next project. If you wanna sort of, put yourself in alignment with all the new and improved tech stuff out there, you should use a dot tech domain name. Rid. I personally have uses .tech, which is a pretty sweet domain name. It has a list of all the users pages on there. I've rid got west.tech still as well. Let me know what what you think I should be doing with that. I wanna put some kinda cool stuff on there. Rid it's the domain name extension that's taking the tech industry by storm. You wanna grab, your dot tech domain names at 80% off rid off with a 5 year registration. Coupon code syntax 5. Go to go.techforward/ rid. Syntax is tech. Make sure you hit up the URL in the show notes for that. Thank you. Tech for sponsoring. Alright. Alright. Alright. Let's keep this moving into the next section where we're gonna be talking about,

tech that was hot in 2021.

So, 2021 saw a lot of new tech as every single year is kind of want to do at this point.

Rid you know, it is funny because it's just so many cool things come out over the course of the year, things you saw coming, things you didn't see coming. Rid. Sometimes a project just pops up out of nowhere and kind of changes the game a bit. So I got a question for you. Before you even go into any of the tech, rid. If you were to describe

all the tact that that dropped in 2021, is there any word you'd use to describe it? Hot. No. Oh, okay. Okay. If you want my actual, one word Or or less than 5.

Less than 5. Less than 5. More More than one possible.

I would say less JavaScript.

Interesting. Why? Well, can you rid I I think so many of the tools gave freedom from, shipping a lot of client side JavaScript. Oh, yeah. So I'm not talking about writing in JavaScript, but you could also say that means of, like, TypeScript still being useful ubiquitous too. Right? You're writing less JavaScript, more TypeScript. But, rid what I really meant by it is is you have Astro. Right? Astro shipping, these server side, static builds that You have to opt in to client side JavaScript.

SvelteKit makes it super easy to not rehydrate a page or only have, like, a static page if you want, Ship static if you want. Then we have Remix, which is also a platform that really gives you less having to use client side JavaScript.

Rid. Yeah. Even though you're writing these tools with JavaScript or TypeScript or whatever, I guess my my idea is, like, what's being presented to the user, rid Shipping less. Totally. I like that. I like that. I I will say,

if I were to describe it as as, wow, that's easy or that's much easier. That's way better.

Rid it seems like a lot of the stuff that dropped in 2021 was like, ah, that's awesome. That's so much easier than the way it used to be. That was rid That was kinda tricky before. Like, I think, like, we had this initial wave of JavaScript and single page apps and everything. And they were awesome rid in terms of the experience, but there often was a lot of, like, cruft that had to sort of come along with it, whether that was config or lots of boilerplate code or red. Stringing 3 or 4 things together. And, here here we are. We're just looking at the top 4 things on our hot tech list as Svelte, ASTRO, Remix, and Next. All of those things make

writing these apps so much simpler than it used to be. Yeah. Totally. And and I I guess The word could be more better. Yeah. More more better. More better. Yeah. There you go.

So I think Svelte rid. Kit is probably the darling, at least for you and I, of 2021.

SvelteKit is the framework built on Svelte, rid. And they are pretty much merging into the same thing. Would is that is that true, Scott? No. Well, so Okay.

Svelte is is the library. It's the framework. Rid. Svelte is the front end framework. It's the thing that allows you to write JavaScript and have it, you know Yeah. Build build the UI. But Sveltekit is is the framework for building apps or packages or whatever.

So they do kinda serve I mean, it is like it is Really, if you think about it, React and Next. Js, like, if you're gonna build an app yeah. They both come from the mothership,

of Of Svelte. Right? Like, they they are both being officially developed. And that's kind of one neat thing is that with Next. Js, it's kind of like an at least rid. We we now we have Remix as well, but Next. Js seems to be like the the blessed path going forward from the folks at Facebook, whereas SvelteKit has an official, rid path going forward, which is is from them, which I I appreciate.

So I think rid. It had a huge glow up in 2021. And I don't know if that's just because you rewrote it and I started working in it and, we're like, wow. This is awesome. The way that it does everything ready. We're really into it. Yeah. As someone who's been involved in the Svelte community for

a little while now, I I think this Uber is, like, very big Or adoption of Svelte in terms of the amount of people using it, but also just the amount of discovery of just how nice it is. A lot of times people will look at it and maybe say, Okay. But, like, I I don't necessarily I don't want another front end framework. And then what happens is they use it, and they say, oh, wait. All these things I'm used to writing in a really abstract over the top kind of way, I can now do in a simple one liner or a very simple statement.

And I like that because those are things you have to do a 100 times over the course of an application or even just like writing forms. Oh, I don't have to deal with All this extra stuff. You know? I I think really what happens is is is is people saw and used Svelte a lot and then found out.

Rid They f around and found out is really what happened. Are you familiar with that saying, Wes? No. I'm not. What's that from? I don't think it's from anything. It's just like a saying, you rid You you f around and find out, like, oh, so so and so. Oh, I'm familiar.

I had a I did a funny tweet the other day, which is, map and reduce.

Map is f around, and reduce is find out. Okay. CS. Oh, you are. Yes. Rid. We also have, Remix. Remix just launched, I think early December.

And it seems in the last, like, week and a half, people are going rid Bonkers over that.

We are yet to have the folks from Remix on the podcast just to chitchat about rid. Their approach definitely seems like they rethought a lot of it's not just like, oh, it's another Next. Js. It definitely thinks like looks like they're taking a different approach rid To building websites in React, I'm pretty excited about it. I've yet to to try it myself.

But from the hype so far, seems like people are pretty Pretty stoked about it. So I've tried it, Wes.

It's cool. You're a big fan? Yeah. Yeah. I'm a big fan. Beautiful.

Astro, rid. Astro is the framework for building websites that allows you to use both Svelte

and React components and view and solid and whole bunch of other stuff. You want. Yeah.

So you wanna talk about that one? Yeah. It's a static site builder rid Is really one one thing that I don't think it's said enough. It's for building static sites. But, the thing that's really great about Astro is that, again, you're you're having to explicitly opt in to client side JavaScript.

So Astro components themselves are all static No matter what, if it's an ASTRO file, it's static.

However, if you wanna bring in a reactor, Svelte, or whatever, you can do that. But even if you do that and have a Svelte component, it's still static unless you say, hey. This thing needs to be client side hydrated, which is, I think, a really great approach because there are just about there's a handful of components in your platform that need to be dynamic and all sorts rid things. Meanwhile, tons of other components that are end up being built in a a client's a JavaScript way, they don't need to be. Right? So I I think This takes a really great approach to say, hey. You know what? All this stuff, we can make all this stuff static first and foremost and only rehydrate when we want to. Rid. I think it's a fantastic platform if you're building static sites, and, I would reach for it in a second. Very good. Yeah. I'm I'm curious to see, where that goes. I think, like, ready. It's going to

have its own little niche of, people who are crazy about it. Same the same thing with, like, frameworks like Eleventy rid Yeah. No. It's it's never that's never going to be the Next. Js and as popular as that. And that's not what they're going for. But people who build the type of websites rid That needed, I think it's gonna have a huge following.

Or peep not a huge following, but people who use it are going to love it. Rid Hi, Greg. And I don't end up doing them in many static sites considering I'm I'm working at one site primarily.

But if I was doing, like, client work, Things like that. And you're trying to ship a very fast, very, easy to deploy kind of static site. Like, I would consider that in a heartbeat. Rid. Again, what you're getting out of it is,

very much like a an HTML experience in a good way. We also saw Next. Js 11 and 12, re launch in 2021.

Some big improvements to them. We got, the ability to do next images, rid Which it was this one of the killer features from Gatsby. We'll talk about, Gatsby in just a sec in the in our predictions from last year. Rid. That was a big one. They also released using SWC, which is the Rust based compiler.

Rid. And I just upgraded my what? No. I never know if it's SWC or SWR because this is an SWR. They're Data one. What's the Next. Js thing that was like a SWC is the compiler. Yeah. And SWR was their data fetching. Yeah. SWR

is rid. Stale while revalidate.

Yeah. That's You're right. It's very similar. Their data package is stale while revalidate?

I think that's why what it means.

Yeah.