2022 Predictions

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

Oh, welcome to Cintact. I forgot that I had to start the podcast.

Scott's Looking at me like, are you gonna go? We are on the podcast of our 2022 web development predictions. So Our last episode was us going over the predictions we made for the last year, and some of them we flopped. Some of them we nailed.

These are our predictions whether how crazy they're going to be for 2022.

I also asked on Twitter for people's predictions as well. Some really hot takes there and some not so surprising ones. So, buckle up. We are sponsored by LogRocket JavaScript session, replay.

Hash node, everything you need to start blogging as a developer, and FreshBooks Cloud Academy. We'll talk about all of them partway through the episode. But Happy New Year, Scott. How are you doing today? Woah.

Wait. This episode's coming out in in 2022 in the future? Yeah. Yep. The future. The ball's dropped.

I'm good. I'm I'm very good. The alien overloads that came on the night of the new year. They're treating me well here. No. It's I'm doing good. It's all good. Just trying to predict the future. Yeah. Right on.

Alright. Well, let's let's rid. Talk about predicting the features. Look. We've got a huge list of transition, Wes. Look at that transition. Yeah. Yeah. You know me? That's my year. It's my year.

Rid our first prediction is Svelte is king.

I think that Svelte will continue to grow in popularity. I think we're gonna see a lot of rid. People, building popular websites out there. Like, I I specifically whenever I'm on a big website looking at something, it's Almost always built in React. And obviously, that's not entirely true, but any large website, any big company like I was on Instacart the other day and And moved over to Netflix, and then I was on Uber Eats. And, like, all of these things are built in in React. So I'm very curious to see, rid. What will happen with Svelte and see what big companies it probably will be a couple more years until we start to see that if it even happens Because it obviously takes a year. Like, people bet on React 2 years ago. Yeah. But there's lots of room for new startups and stuff that are just picking their tech stack,

to to choose fault. And I think you were right about that. And I think that, you know, Rich Harris getting hired by Vercel is only going to increase the amount of trust people will have in choosing Svelte as a platform because Having somebody working on Svelte full time such as Bridge, for a company like Vercel, you can kind of bet that it's not going to just fizzle away at this point. So, I think I think there's a lot of people who'll be more likely to bet on Svelte as a package if they're going to be using it to build sites with. I also I wonder what kind of improvements we're gonna see. You know? Now that Vercel has some, you know, incentive essentially to, improve Svelte and SvelteKit. I I I would like to you know, I can't I'm excited to see what could possibly come out of this partnership or or growth in the future. Who knows? We should get Rich on the show to talk about the future of Yeah. That would be a lot of fun. Rid Yeah. Like, there's there's gotta be, like, some like, what like, what I'm trying to ask myself. What's still a pain in the butt about this type of stuff right now? I would like a, like, a server component style thing. Right? So, like, in in SvelteKit, you have your load function, which is kinda hitting Just an API and then you have an API route or in our case a GraphQL API. But it would be really dope if there was just a little function in there that I could Query the database directly or something and have that data available as props. And this would be like a server only thing. Who knows? That's just me talking.

Rid. Let's talk about Next. Js.

I kinda feel like Next. Js is at a point with their framework where they've They've got most of the stuff that we've been asking for. We got images. We have, pre render. We have render on demand. We have server side render. We have, rid. Serverless functions.

Like, the the big part that is I don't know if it's missing or they're intentionally rid Choosing not to do is some sort of data layer. Right? Like, I wish that they will do something even similar to the stores that we have in Svelte.

Rid. I'm curious to see if, Next. Js will roll out some sort of baked in data layer.

Because they have done it with with CSS. Say s SWR isn't isn't that isn't isn't considered that type of thing. I'm not smart enough about SWR to know. It's just like, rid I don't know. May maybe maybe I haven't looked at it as as much as I should.

I I every time I look at it, I'm like, yeah. But, like, I think the the Svelte stuff is is even more interesting to me. And I mean, like, maybe it will become baked in and be, like, this is the way to do, rid to do data in in Next. Js? I'm just dreaming here. And also I'm thinking I'm I'm gonna make a prediction that they'll they'll release a CMS, or some sort of, like, collaborative coding thing or something that sits on top of, rid on top of Gatsby or not sorry. Not Gatsby, Next. Js. I'm not really sure because they announced this thing called Next Live rid. Which is like you can code and collaborate at the same time. Mhmm. And I'm just like, like, what there's thing there that we don't know about yet. And they are obviously cooking some like, I would love to go into the Vercel, Labs of what kind of crazy ideas they have. So kinda interesting. Yeah. We're smelling like the onions and the garlic simmering right now, but we're not seeing the soup. They're doing something, and maybe they're waiting for, suspense and server components to be fully cooked.

And then they're gonna be like, Guess what? Dinner's ready. Yeah. Yeah. Just a ready. Yeah.

Come on in. Good. Yeah. Rid. Put down your lego. Time for dinner. Yeah. Yep.

I know we can just keep this good analogy going. You know what? It's funny because you mentioned, like, the image components of I would love that in Sveltekit too. There is people are using, like, the Vite package, or there's, like, a Vite plug in for, like, image processing.

I would love, like, an official here's the image component for SvelteKit that handles things like that. I don't do many local image things, but I know That would be super handy for a ton of people.

Web components. I think this is the year. I'm gonna say it right now. This is the year for web components. Yep. Web components is gonna have a glow up. Rid. There there's been a a hardcore following of web components and around lit and all that rid Stuff. And anytime you talk about it, people are like, yeah. Web Components are amazing. Why is more people not using it?

And I feel like this is the year. They're hard to write. You know, I did a whole course on them. There's a lot of little things you have to know. Not only that, but even how people write the same like, if you if you were to take, like, a tabbed Tabbed web component. If you were to okay. Let's think about it this way. Take a step back. Yeah. You're writing a tab component in React. There's only gonna be a handful of ways that that thing is done. You're writing a tab component in web components. I've seen, like, 8 or 9 different permeations of the exact same component in, like, a totally different approach.

So it doesn't feel like there are the same standards.

Like, if you're opening a web component, you don't always know what you're going to get in terms of how they organized it.

And to me, that seems like There maybe needs to be, like, a layer there for authoring web component libraries to make it easier. I know we have frameworks like, rid. It was a lit html, which is like a web component thing. There are web component libraries, but, like, what is what what is the way to rid Easily, and I'm talking about easily write a web component and publish it as a web component.

Does Svelte end up doing that? Because I know there are things there with Svelte And web components, I don't know personally, but I honestly I don't love the API for writing web components, but I do like consuming them. I know web component fans might not be super psyched to hear that, but I I personally have spent quite a bit of time writing web components.

And it doesn't feel great to me, but it does feel great to use them. So I don't know. Maybe there's some some ease of use there that comes. Rid Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm very curious. That's that's always been my thing with web components is I love the idea, but why isn't it more popular? You know? Yeah. Work with attributes for a little bit and check it out. Yeah. Less and less of people, like, bashing them as well, you know? Like, rid. That's you also hear a lot of, like, negative things about them as well, which is is kinda odd, but maybe this is the year. I'm I'm saying it's gonna be rid. Big glow up. I think the thing with web components, what you get is you get people who, you know, say it's the platform. You don't have to ship any more JavaScript to use them. Therefore, you should use them. And there's the people who work in things like React and Svelte and say, wait a minute. I'm used to working in these frameworks that are way easier right and honestly do more out of the box. Why would I pick something that is harder to use and kind of Yeah. Does less out of the box? Well, it's in the platform, and there's arguments on both sides. But I do think that we'll converge to a point. I we've said this for a long time that, You know, maybe in the future, you you can ship web components with React, and, maybe you could ship web components with Solid. And we're really starting to see a little bit of that happening In terms of, just the the the coordination between the usage here and the frameworks versus the platform. So we'll see. I'm gonna Say, my next prediction here is Oh, wait. Hold on. Before we move off of web components, I do want to link to this, Which is the open hyphen u i.org, which I think you might be interested in. It relates to web components. The open We talked about this before. Yeah. Open UI It's a platform for essentially the the missing industry standard definition of UI. You could think of it as, like, the missing, rid. You know how the browser has their own built baked in components. Well, these would be an additional Grouping of components that are like a standardized way within web components. So this is a project to keep your eyes open on. It's still in its infancy, but there's a discord group. Rid there's a lot of cool stuff in this project and maybe something worth checking out. Yeah. We let me let's link to the, podcast where we talked about this. Mhmm. Rid. We did a podcast number 353,

Hasty Treats Styling the Unstylables.

Mhmm. And one of the rid solutions to this was OpenUI.

So, excited for them. Maybe maybe we'll see some some big stuff. There's it seems like they're still in research mode right now. They're rid So I've been, like, alright, these are the these are the things, alert, avatar, badge, breadcrumb, card, skeleton, slider, table, tabs, rid. Toast, and they're saying, alright, these are what a Toast looks like in, in Bootstrap and, rid. And all these, like, different UI frameworks. So what should it include

Mhmm. So that you can style them if we were to make a standard version of it. Which is great. I just wanna get that in the show notes. That way, when Open UI releases something big, I can be like, yep. Told you. And it was gonna be big. 165 days Now we're gonna be recording this and be like, Scott nailed it. Yep. Nailed it. Okay. Next one here is I I think both of us are on this This train, this Rust will become more popular.

That is, of course, if they can get their sort of, interpersonal Issues together. I don't know if you see all the the constant drama amongst the team. No. I The like, the community the community people quit, and then, rid. There was somebody just did a post yesterday on Hacker News about how the core team is toxic and who knows what. Now there's There's issues there, and I don't wanna even speculate on what they are. I don't know anything about them. But, like, if they can get it together in that regard, rid. I think there's the sky's the limit for Rust. It's awesome. Yeah. We, specifically I've been, like, hearing about it, and I think, like, this is the year I'm gonna try to write something in Rust. Rid Specifically, I wanna write it so that it runs in Wasm.

I wanna, like, do something very simple, like like, resize a photo or add two numbers together And then bring it back because there's so let me read you this. There's a guy on, Reddit, our JavaScript, rid. And it was it was on a thread about, Redux.

And I I didn't even read this thread, but the comments rid. The comment was, our company is in a bit of a unique situation. We have some complex processing logic that we need to run on both the client and the Server to keep everything in sync. Okay. Kinda interesting.

Because it is also pretty performance sensitive, we have written this part in Rust. Rid. Our entire back end is Rust, which makes it a good fit. Fortunately, that logic consists of pure functions so we could call it easily from Redux users.

Rid. However, that created its own performance challenging challenges passing state in and out of those functions across the Wasm bridge, rid caused quite a serialization overhead. So we moved started moving more of our state into Rust, which helped us rid. Perform fewer individual cars crossing the bridge. Soon enough, primary reducers were written entirely in Rust. So that got me going like, Oh. This guy moved this guy moved his JavaScript producers into Rust because they were there's probably a pretty unique situation. But Isn't that nuts? Isn't that cool?

Yeah. You know, the the small amount of rust and wasm that I've done, That seems hard.

But, yeah, it seems it seems very interesting, to me. That that bridge is it the hardest part, I think, in that bridge is The tooling of, like, the development experience there. You know, you're not gonna have the same developer experience that you'd be used to having.

Rid. But yeah. That sounds neat. Sounds neat to me. Yeah. I I asked him right in the thread.

Can you come on the podcast? Yeah. I would love to hear about what their flow is. Yeah. Rid. I don't know. I have no idea what,

who he is or what company he works for or whatever, but sounds cool. Yeah. That does sound cool. But, yeah, I I think we'll continue to see it being used. Like, we have in here Rome, which is a tool that will probably, we'll see something out of this year that's built in Rust.

We will I I you know already the the whole WASM pack thing to use Rust and WASM together, it's not, like, Crazy difficult, but it would be it would be great if there was, like, some nicer way to do that. I I think I don't know what that that's a thing or is coming or whatever. Rid. I I personally I'm not picking Rust to build a lot of stuff with right now, but only because I almost, like, don't know what to build With Rust.

I also don't have the problems that Rust solves, but I find it interesting. That's exactly why. And it is difficult

to work in, especially if you're a JavaScript person.

And if you found TypeScript to be hard, Just wait until you try Rust. It's like Is is Rust fully typed as well? Rust is very fully typed. There's, like, 18 different types of strings. Rid. So so, I mean, it's like That's that's a lot. I that's an exaggeration. If you're a Rust person, you're hearing me say that, and you might be rolling your eyes. No. There there is a lot of types.

So whether or not you you're you're having to specify, like, what type of int it is. Is it like an int that's going to like, how many bytes is this in going to take out the stuff? QL. I always had to do that. Yeah. There's a lot of a lot of things with the type system, but it's good. Yeah. What else is good, Scott? Rid. Just a number of any of our sponsors, they're all good. But one of our sponsors is very good, and that is log rocket@logrocket.com.

This is the perfect place to see all of your errors and exceptions happen. And, you know, me, I'm using all these tools. I just got to even, get to get to use LogRocket the other day Just to see exactly what was going on in a user's situation. In fact so what LogRocket is is it gives you a video replay, The session replay, they call it, of somebody doing something that caused an error or exception on your site, and you can see it happen.

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Next up is going to be serverless and cloud functions. Again, not something I use a ton of, so I'm interested in your thoughts on this, Wes. Yeah. I I think that it rid. We certainly predicted this last year, and I'm gonna say it again. It will continue to have a huge glow up, grow up.

I I think the tools And stuff that we are writing are slowly getting away from being monoliths and it's getting easier to move code into serverless functions.

Certainly seeing big companies, bet on them. Cloudflare, begin. We had Brian Larew on the podcast, Vercel. Even freaking Wix Has serverless functions. Like, you can you can you can build something in in Wix and still write a serverless function in there. It's just a great way to get a sip of JavaScript. That's the kinda what I say. I'm so my bet here is that, we'll see, rid players, DigitalOcean, Linode, GoDaddy, maybe, get into, offering those as well, rid. As we start to see people, get into it. It's sort of on the same thought process of that is that Cloudflare becomes a major It's becoming a major player, in pretty much everything. Everyone say like like you I I think like as much as people love to build on AWS rid. Or and on Amazon, you're gonna start seeing people build on Cloudflare. Their their whole Wrangler thing for they have, like, a Netlify competitor that is Cloud for pages, they have a serverless, offering. They have database key value storage.

And then they also have all of the DNS there and all of their of And they announced images and they they're doing videos. It's just like, if you take a second and look at all the stuff that Cloudflare has announced Over the last couple I I love them. I tried to get them to sponsor. They said they didn't actually even reply to my email, but that's how much I love them. Rid I am very bullish on Cloudflare being a major player in these things. And I also think like it's going to be a it's like, you can see Amazon, changing a lot of their like, there was something that Cloudflare rolled out with, like, you don't have to pay for ingress or or something like that. And then like a week later Amazon announced the same billing platform as well. So it's it's really cool to see These 2 go head to head, but I think Cloudflare will do the same stuff as Amazon, but it's so much more approachable.

I would say a lot of the AWS stuff. That's one of my favorite things about the cleft first stuff is how approachable it is. And to me, You know, I'm a dumb guy engineer. I think that would, that would, you know, definitely make me pick 1 over the other. If one of them is easier to get up and running on, easier to use this stuff, rid. Definitely definitely influenced my decision. Definitely. Next one I have here, this guy is not gonna like this one, but I think

I think rid. I'm wrong about Tailwind. Oh, well. I'm just gonna go out and say they're yeah. Big I don't so I not to say that I I have, changed my mind yet, but I got to be wrong about this because everybody freaking loves it. Everybody's crazy about it. It seems to be Like like, it's the best thing. Like, I don't hear a single person be, like, you know what? I I gave it a good shot. I I we did a whole project in it, and it's not for me. It's rid. Always. You know what? I was not sure about it. I wasn't I did it was a bit different to work on it, but I freaking love it all the time. That's what it is. So I'm I'm

gonna go out on a limb and predict that my opinions will change, and I will be a tailwind convert at the end of this year. I'm going to go ahead and say I'm gonna have a different opinion for you. I Okay. I'm going to say that I waited long enough that I avoided it And that is going to be replaced by other things. So Oh, what is that? Well, one of these new things is the open props, which is Adam Argyle's project.

And to me This is awesome. Subatomic styles. This, to me, when I saw this like, when I first saw Tailwind, I said, rid. I I don't I don't like atomic CSS to be my entire project. I don't like that. You know what? The Mix of tailwind I do like are using maybe, like, the apply stuff and, like, applying things in your CSS and writing CSS more that way than rid. Doing it atomic with classes, and this is exactly my style. Not only is it CSS variables, But if you look at the atomic CSS props and how they're being used in real CSS, it it actually feels very much like how I wrote my own CSS platform.

So for me, I could see this as being like, this is exactly how I work already.

Only I don't have to write all of the structure aspects of these. These props just exist for me to use, kind of like how Tailwind Has all these existing things that make it really easy to get up and running.

Only this works with how I actually like to code already, And it it it brings you so many of the same benefits. So I'm gonna say I waited long enough that our Adam Argyle came and save the date for me. Next one. And this is this is the next one and not I'm going to use the next one. So sometimes you wait long enough, you get to use the next one. That's what I'm saying.

So this is just CSS variables that are preset. And A whole bunch of presets. Yeah. Rid. Overwrite them with your own colors and whatever. And then you instead of coding with your own, you just code with the variables.

Yep. And that's really what kind of the benefit of tailwind is too if you think about it. Tailwind is is limiting the amount of choices You have to make and things will look better. It's, you know, atomic bootstrap or whatever.

This is is atomic Bootstrap with CSS variables instead of with classes. So hey. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. We should do a whole show on this rid And, and then get into it. That's cool. I think I like, it's it's one kind of cool thing that I don't think is possible with CSS variables is that You have to still specify the property, and then the variable is the actual value in the CSS. So you say like gap var dash dash size 4. Mhmm. Right? And, like, it it would be cool if you had, like, a Like a dash dash gap 4 or something like that. And you could probably build that. Right? Yeah. You could also though, I would I would be I would love if there was, like, mix ins, which I guess rid. Are kind of just classes, but yeah. I don't know. Beautiful. Alright. Well, it's this is us saying it's a big year for CSS.

Rid. Not in terms of CSS, the language, but CSS methodologies and and how we write CSS.

Yeah. And I also wanna say I I I wish nothing but the best for every CSS project. I think they're all fantastic, and I hope they all have big glow up years. So Whether or not Blow up. Yeah. That's the weird word of the year. Ding dong. Yeah.

Do you watch Glow Up on Netflix, Wes? No. What's that? Oh, it's a show about, rid.

Makeup artists and they compete in the host. 1 of the hosts, every single episode will will say ding dong, And that's how you know that. That's her favorite one of the week. So she'll say ding dong.

So I I say that occasionally if there's something that I really like, rid. Which is absurd.

Next one we have here is next gen dev tools.

We started to see a little bit of eakings of this already this year. So we, rid. We have Fig, which is the sort of the autocomplete drop down that goes on top of your existing terminal. Rid. And then we also have Warp.

Warp is a, a new shell written in what is it? In Rust? Yep.

Again, everything's written in Rust, and it's smoking fast, really cool.

People are saying like are terminals Slow? Like, are are we really, like, at a point where and, like, I use hyper which is it's a little It's a little, sluggish compared to Iterm. Yeah. I use Iterm. Yeah. Iterm is pretty quick. I see no reason to use an electron amp for that. That that one is weird to know. No. I don't I rid. I over the only reason I'm on hyper still is just because I like the way that I styled it, and it looks really cool. But I'm actually not using any of the plug ins. I moved Everything over to my ZSH setup. Mhmm.

But this warp one looks really cool because it's it's kind of like v s code For your terminal.

So it it it does add like a layer of completions and text editing and there's a command palette and you can go back to Like, have you ever, like, npm installed something and you can't scroll back because it's too far back? You can't just jump back to the last one that you wrote. Mhmm.

Rid. So it's pretty cool. I tried it out. It's it's not quite there yet in my opinion.

You can kinda use Some of your ZSATA stage stuff with it, but I think the idea here is that it just replaces the the need for ZSATA stage and oh my ZSATA stage. No. Sorry. Not ZSATA stage. Oh, my adaptation. The custom prompt and all the all the plugins that we use, it's it's supposed to replace all of that. So I'm keeping an eye on that, and I bet that we'll see some big, Big, uptake. Because, like, the terminal, we've had this the same silly terminal for so long, and we've We've styled it in custom fonts and get prompts and stuff like that, but, like, where's the Versus code for a terminal? Right? Yeah. I think that this this is we're gonna get that this year. I like Iterms still, and I I use it with Starship, which I've linked here, which is the minimal blazing faster. Infinitely customizable prompt for any shell.

So that's what I use for my prompt starship. I know a bunch of people really enjoy this project as well. So, I think this is something that you would like, Wes, and maybe you should check it out. Well, that's cool.

Does it have all of my plug ins? Rid I use a lot of ZSH plug ins. I'll give it a shot. It's it's not something that I really wanna spend too much time on. But every couple years, I'm like, alright. Let's take a look at this again. You set it up once and then you don't touch. I was on fish for so long, fish shell. And then I was, like, getting really frustrated with not being able to copy and paste all my commands,

you know? So Oh, yeah. Having to always fix and change syntax in the fish shell.

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Alright. Next step is going to be CSS.

So I think container queries will be coming at us in a real way where we Neither use them just straight up polyfilled, or we can use the real real container query syntax.

I think CSS layers are going to be a thing. If you don't know what CSS layers are, it's basically a way to specify a specificity level that you can then say this specificity level trumps this one. So you're basically building layers of specificity on top of CSS, and you can declare them yourself.

Go back and listen to our episode of Miriam Suzanne if you wanna learn more about that. That was really, really neat.

I I think, we'll get more functions in CSS. What actually lands in the browser and what we're able to use is gonna be a different story, but But I think we'll actually be able to get to try some stuff out this year in terms of, like, maybe even color functions or things like that. Who knows? But I think there will be more rid functions in CSS for us to work with. And, subgrid, who knows? Maybe we'll actually get to have it this year. I I'm not holding my breath Just because, but we'll see. And then did you mention the the cascade stuff we talked about with Miriam as well? I think that was the layers. Right? Rid. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I was just looking 2 days ago, Miriam sent out a tweet that says, working draft of contain level 3. Yep. Just containers.

And, FPWD, 1st production working draft Oh, yep. Rid. Something like that, of cascade level 6, which is scope. I believe that is layers as well. That's that's what layers is. Rid. Cascade level 6. Cascade. That's a good it's a good level. I'm excited for that level. So we'll see, in a year from now if, that's starting to look pretty good.

I really hope we get subgrid, though.

Yeah. At this point, I'm so, like, not even thinking about designing in subgrid just because it feels Like, I can't count on it till you know, to to use it. Yeah. Next one, GraphQL.

Where do you think that's going, Scott? I don't know, but I think things rid get better. You know, there there has been more of, like, I think more energy into, like, GraphQL as a a thing in in its evolution.

Rid. You know, the the guild does just some amazing GraphQL projects, so I wouldn't be surprised if they release something really cool. But, you You know, one of the things I I I think a GraphQL is missing that kind of everybody knows that it's missing is more data types. It's a really tough problem to solve. The scalars thing, like, the fact that there isn't a built in date type or things like that. Right? Yeah. It'd be really nice if some of that stuff just exists. Now I'm not, I'm not ignorant to the the problems that exist in that space and the fact that we've gone this long without it, so everybody's kind of implemented their own. Like what happens now if you introduce 1. So, like, there are there are there are challenges, I think. But I I I would imagine that we're gonna see more tools, More GraphQL tools because one of the coolest things about GraphQL, the fact that it's fully typed, is that it makes it really easy to to have interesting tools Whether that is just cogeneration stuff. But also Yeah. I think we're gonna see, more options for servers. You know, the like, in the past, it's like been Apollo server.

Rid. But, there are a lot of really interesting GraphQL servers. There is a Rust based server that I haven't used myself yet. I know I don't Remember what it's called, but I I know there's one that exists. The the server that I use is Mercurius, and they just released, like, a new caching update to their caching plug in. Their loaders are super easy. I think more people will expand their reach on GraphQL servers because it really is rid It's pretty neat. Like, I was able to swap Apollo server out with Mercurius and, like, have no issues and instantly have access to built in data loaders and, like, caching Really easily.

So Mhmm. I I think we'll see more options there or those tools evolve a little bit more. Yeah. I think the rid The the generation or the the generation of all this stuff is like, I know Prisma does it now. All the cogen stuff you're talking I think you were early on that, And I think this is the year we're gonna see, generated, so you don't have to write TypeScript types rid and GraphQL types at once. You just have to do a schema, and it kicks out both of them for you. And everything just works, and it's beautiful. And rid. Add on GitHub Copilot to that, and it's gonna be good life. Good life.

I'm curious about we talked About Deno in the last one where we didn't really see much from Deno in 2021. Not to say that it wasn't being worked on, but like it wasn't like a big like, oh, man. I I didn't see anybody go like, wow, this is awesome and I'm using it now. So I'm curious to see what will happen With Dino this year, what do you think?

I don't know.

You have a you have a note here. It says it's going to fizzle out. What do you think? I don't wanna I just I don't wanna say that because I I think it's a new project. But I honestly, I think we will end up seeing something about rid Where I think we will end up seeing many of the features that were baked into Deno come to node Or be announced to be coming to node or something to that degree to the point where we're saying, why are we using this separate thing anyways? One thing I think that could get better in in note world is, like, you can just load a TypeScript file in Deno. Right? So TSNO, those types of things, if you could just fire up a TypeScript pilot node without having to compile it.

You know, what's the really, what's the reason to pick Deno at that point? I I know there are reasons, but are are there are there enough projects on Dena where people are gonna be dropping their node stack for it? And I don't know if that's happening. I I mean, we'll have to see. But, rid Yeah. Maybe I'm just ignorant to that community, but it doesn't necessarily seem like it's really popping off. Yeah. I'm very curious to see.

Now that, rid Node. Js has a concept of loaders that was introduced with when they put ESM into the language. And I'm curious, like, will there be a TypeScript Loader? Is that even something you can do? I don't know. You know, like like that that's we talked about I0.js.

I0.js in the last episode, we talked about how they forked it and then, Node. Js was like, oh, wow. Like, people actually are want this stuff. And not to say that people working on Node aren't working hard, but, Like, we we want fetch. We want TypeScript support.

And should that be something that is first party supported? Rid. Or is that still something that we should just use the third party tool for and then it bundles and then runs Node under the hood? I feel like somebody who Runs lots of little scripts and quickly spins up stuff. I always have that sort of like, I just want to use a TypeScript file here really quickly or I just want to use Fetch really quickly,

and there's too much setup. Here's the thing. As I was, like, I want I wanna write my build my, My my, like, custom build file for my ES build file, and I wanna write it in TypeScript.

But shoot.

I gotta compile the typescript now for the thing. So now anytime I update my build tool, I gotta run TSC on the build tool itself. I gotta build the build tool. My god. Dang. This stinks.

Yeah. Yeah. There's chicken and egg, problem there, I guess, at some point at some point, you gotta write JavaScript in that. I don't wanna do that. That's that's always the that's always the thing. Like, is I'm sure if You suggested this to the Node folks. They'd be like, no, like, this is not this is not JavaScript.

This is TypeScript is just something that you guys are compiling And this is not it's Microsoft made it and it's just this it's not part of JavaScript at all. But just because it's popular, doesn't mean we should integrate it. It's the same thing happened with jQuery.

Is that like yeah. JQuery is popular, but we're not gonna just put jQuery in the browser because everybody's using it right now because that might not be Mhmm.

Rid What we're using forever. Maybe JavaScript will get types at some point, and then they'll start to put that in the language. But for now, I wish the node story With TypeScript was much easier. And there there that's my prediction.

The the node story with TypeScript will get much easier in 2022.

I think I also say that in our TypeScript section of this. So this is still on the Deno part, but Oh, yeah. I think If we're getting into our TypeScript predictions, I think things like ts node will become a more of a thing, and we'll have to do less compiling.

Rid we can just run TypeScript files, hopefully, from either Node or a third party that chooses, like, TS Node to do it for us. Either way, I think those tools will grow up a little bit and be easier to use, less error prone, and will just hashtag work.

Rid. I asked on Twitter a what the, like how what's the best way to run, rid A TS Node? Node right now. Yeah. And a lot of people don't use TS Node anymore. It's not the like. Yeah. A lot of people were saying use, Oh, what was it called? ESR?

There's one that there's one that uses ES build to compile the file Yeah. Like, in the background. I can't find the tweet.

It was, like, there was, like, e s r. So there's all these, like, little packages that have 3 letters, and I cannot remember what they are. But it was, like, it was using ES build under the hood to very quickly strip the types and then just run JavaScript for you.

And that worked that worked pretty well. But, again, first party support would be.

Yes. Yes. Absolutely. It'd be chef's kiss emoji.

Rid I'm gonna guess I'm gonna say here, some sort of way to clarify the difference between interfaces and types.

Rid. I'm saying they're gonna be merged full well knowing that they do they have lots of

minutiae of differences between the 2. But I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna go ahead and say I'll throw it on hard cash and say they will not be merged. I will I will put money on that. Feel like that rid. Dude, maybe wishful thinking on my end. Yeah. If yeah. Once once once the hard cash comes into play, then

rid. Glass drops out of that one. I would not put a hard cash on that. I'll go as far as to say that.

And also, like, another thing is, rid. Like, a lot of people don't know but in TypeScript, there's, like, this, like, I don't know, like, this crazy level where people write custom types Specifically for, like lower level libraries and frameworks. Like like some of the authors of Redux were talking about this on Twitter with me, where If you wanna write TypeScript types for something that people build anything with, you have to build this very abstract obtuse rid. Types that are using, like, infer and require and pick and Mhmm.

Read only and all these crazy things. And that is rid Super difficult to write because, like, even if you just want to loop over some properties on an object and turn that into a type or infer things, It's very difficult because you don't use JavaScript to do that. You use Generic and TypeScript.

Yeah. Generic and TypeScript and infer and and whatever. Rid It's really difficult. And I was like I'm always thinking, like, shouldn't there somebody said I'm working on something that will allow you to write just JavaScript and convert it to the equivalent.

And I'm curious if TypeScript will

roll something like that out. I I so I have, like, some pretty complex types for g query.

And Yeah.

I I had to do, like, a spread a spread generic or a spread function, essentially. What what do you call the thing that wraps around generics? It's like that, wrap, function type. I don't know what it either way, I did do, like, a spread. So I had, like, 2 types, and I needed them to, like, Kind of merge the 2, but I needed to spread for some reason. So I was like, oh, yeah. That looks right. That was, like, just a huge giant pain in the butt. And and so many of the like, I'm not writing Redux types here, but even, like, writing 20 lines of complex types can really rid. Bend your brain sometimes and, like, having to dig through those giant error log that just says, this type is not The same as this. It's missing the following, you know, things, but then that giant giant string is just impossible to parse. What's actually needed? What the actual problem is? Yeah. Some of that stuff is very painful.

What you were trying to explain was they're called types, but they are they're functions. Types can be functions, meaning that rid. They take in arguments and return a not a value, but they return a new type from that. Right? That's that's what a generic does. Right? Rid. And you can get into there's there's libraries of there's almost like a Lodash version of of type. If if if you look up utility types Yep.

Non nullable symmetric difference, set intersection, of the stuff. Personal keys. Just these words. Acquired keys. Yeah.

I make interfaces. I should not have to know those words, you know? No. And That's

I I I did a screenshot of that.

And, on Twitter being like, man, I'm glad there are smarter people than I that write these types of things in TypeScript. And a lot of people are like, I don't understand why anyone would use TypeScript. I think a lot of people thought that's what TypeScript was. Mhmm. This is very rid angle brackets.

And that's not what it is. It's people who the authors of Redux need to know how to do that. Scott and I, rid. Who are writing smaller libraries and just using TypeScript almost never have to touch that stuff. Thank you. I'm so glad about that.

So shout out to people smarter than us. Yeah. Shout out.

What the next one we have here is server comeback. Rid. We talked about this a little bit over the past year, and I feel like it's getting more and more is that, we're seeing, Hotwire in Rails rid livewire in Laravel PHP land, Remix, React server components.

Doing more on the server is becoming popular again, which is really funny. The pendulum has kinda swung back, and we don't necessarily have to do everything in the client. And I think that will continue to become popular and simplify our lives. It will. It will also make some people's lives a little bit more complex just because

The server's a different animal than the browser, and many of us are used to working in the browser. So I think some people are gonna have to learn a little bit more node, A little bit more server based stuff, and and that's not that that's not a a bad thing. I actually really like working on the server myself. So, Yeah. There's a lot of neat things there. What we are seeing a lot of No more course issues at least. Yeah. Right? I did so many, like, really nice little security things. Right? You don't worry about Keeping keys private and thing I mean, obviously, in your repos, but you don't have to worry about, like, not having keys in your client side code.

That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, I think server come back. We're already seeing, you know, server based platforms. I think Remix will get a lot of new developers. I think React server components will be a thing. I think we'll be writing a lot of server side code. Static tools like Astro will continue to to gain People using it. And I bet there'll be even things that in platforms that we haven't thought about. I think there'll be more server stuff in Svelte too. Who knows? Definitely. Definitely. Or SvelteKit, I should say, not rid. You know what also could happen? You might need to, invoice some people, and you might need a, a FreshBooks to do that. Yes. Rid. FreshBooks. It's 2022.

It's a new year. This is the year you get your taxes. New year. New you. New year. New year. You got your taxes squared away. You're gonna use FreshBooks for your accounting software, to run your business, to invoice your clients, to, rid. To track your expenses, to track all of your time, anything you want. Is FreshBooks is the tool that you need to run your small business accounting on. Rid. Check it out. Freshbooks.comforward/syntax.

Make sure you use syntax in the how did you hear about section. You're gonna get you're gonna make a lot of money, this year, rid and FreshBooks is there to help you track all of that. Thank you FreshBooks for sponsoring.

Tech. Oh, this is one I am very I'm sort of dialed into right now because I am going to rewrite my checkout flow at some time in the next year.

And, I have I've had lots of calls with people.

Rid I've gotten lots of emails about different services and platforms and and whatnot.

And I think checkouts.

Rid. Specifically both payment processors.

PayPal, Stripe, Braintree. Those are the big ones, but there's certainly other ones.

As well as the actual, like, checkout UI, Shopify.

I know Paddle is another one. People are are Getting really popular. I think that those are going to get a a big I'm going to say a glow up again.

And what am I saying? Multi currency, parity purchasing power will be built into these things.

Ability to accept crypto would be a big one very easily and and whatnot.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say, you know, Wyze, like, Transfer Wyze is now Wyze.

It's a I don't think That's a glow up of a brand name right there. Because Transferwise Transferwise sounds all techie and, you know Now it's wise.

I was joking the other day because I love I love Wyze the cameras. I love Wyze the banking platform and I love Waze rid The app.

And I always have to talk to all of my family members about all 3 of them, and they're like, the camera company has your money? Wise paid.

Rid. Anyways, I bet Wise will roll out credit card processing pretty soon because, at least in Canada, Wise has made my banking online banking life a 100 times better. And just all of the issues I have around multicurrency and converting money and And everything like that, Wise has made all of those things very, very simple. I love freaking love Wise. I don't know anything about it. Rid. It's, you can have multi currency bank accounts. You can get debit cards for each of those or no. You can get a debit card and then just hold money In different currencies and use them in different currencies which is huge for Canadians because 80% of my expenses are In US, anyways, you can get a much better rate than what your credit card company would charge you. And if you have to if you have to pay somebody in a different currency, rid See, you can very quickly do that and send the money. And, I now they give you a US bank account, which is key for things like PayPal and whatnot.

Rid. It's just just a huge huge thing for, online banking in general. And like I'm I'm thinking I'm looking at it being like, man, this is awesome. These guys are like Stripe of online banking. I bet they will become, online, like a credit card processor in the next year. Yeah.

I don't know anything about this. Maybe I'll sign up for an account because I think we need to do some end of the year evening up. So and send some money back to where it lies. Yeah. You know what? I I think I think you're right. I although there is one of those names that you're gonna be wrong about, I would imagine that Braintree is not going to do anything because they don't do it. Rid Hey. There there's, like, the Braintree UI has said, like so there's a Braintree UI package, Wes, which is actually what I use.

There's been, like, an open GitHub issue that's just, like, change this div into a button. Like, this is not Valid HTML, and it has been open for, like, 2 years. And all they need to do is turn it into a button. It already looks like a button. Just make it into a button, And the they just like ignoring that issue entirely just like they're yeah. So if there's one one thing I do not have confidence rid And it's it's an entirely brain tree getting any more developer friendly organizer at all. So The PayPal guys called me the other day because they're like, hey, we noticed that you were using PayPal for

PayPal but not for credit cards.

And They're like, we have Braintree, and you can you can integrate it, and you could save 1,000 of dollars versus Stripe. They were offering me, like, a better rate if I move from Stripe. And I was just, like, sitting there being, like, is it worth my time? Is this much money worth the pain That would be to integrate Braintree instead of Stripe. I can tell you it's not as a Braintree user.

I always just joke that it's like, You know, the way to cancel a subscription in Braintree is to grab the current subscription, then check how many billing cycles they've done, And then set the maximum number of billing cycles to be the current amount of billing cycles, and then resave that, instead of just telling it to set to cancel. Rid Cancel.

Yeah. Why do I have to create my own? And then, like, if you complain about it, which I've said, it'd be really great to have some additional, you know, developer tools for these types of things. We'll say, well, Yeah. You know, you can always integrate with one of our partners who's written these things for you, who takes, you know, x, y, and z cut. 3%. Yeah.

You can write that functionality yourself. Yes. I know I rid. But your competitors do it better and easier than you, so you should probably think about doing it better and easier yourself. That's

rid That's Stripe and Stripe. Stripe is APIs. Then they also have a checkout experience. And then they also have, like, the middle, which is they have, Like React components, Stripe elements you can put into your only thing. And, like, it's, like, play all the sides. You know? Make me happy at every point in my

Online journey. Yep. I I regret honestly moving off of Stripe, but I I had to support PayPal. I felt like I had to support PayPal. Now I just wish I would have said You gotta. Just stay on Stripe. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

What's next here?

Temporal API solidify. This is something Scott and I are both excited about. What's the temporal API, Scott? The temporal API is the replacement of the JavaScript date API. And let me tell you, I Even though it says it is experimental, we'll just try it, whatever.

I I've written a number of of, things in temporal, and I have a polyfill for it in our code base, And I love temporal.

It it was just like just just like a couple days ago. I was dealing with time zone stuff in in the JavaScript data API. And the thing about temporal that's really nice is that it's all immutable. So, like, if I'm if I'm changing something, it's going to Without a new object, it's not going to modify the the current date that I'm on. When I'm working with the data API, I'm never quite sure if the thing that I'm doing is actually changing of the date or not.

But also, you know, just to simply be able to say, here's a plain date And then dot day dot month. Like Yeah. I'm not having to use moments. I'm not having to use any of these things. I can just use the temporal API And I honestly really love it. I've I don't know if I'll open source this because I don't know if honestly these are useful to anybody else, but I have, like, a whole file of temporal helpers, And it's, like, so nice. Get epoch from plain date. Get plain date from instant. Get date.

Date is on or before. And these things are So insanely easy for me to use. Oh, good.

I I just really, really enjoy the temporal API, the more and more I work with it. And I would love for this to be finalized and ready to go and in the browser and in the next version of JavaScript because this to me is a huge globe for the date API And definitely one of those things that I I I really would like to

really rely on and use full time instead of JavaScript dates. Last One and this is something we've been talking about all year as well, and I think it's finally gonna get some good traction is, remote dev or Thin client will become very popular. And what we mean by this is that you are writing the code likely in a browser, but All every literally everything in in the server that it's gonna be running on, the linting, the compiling.

Literally, everything will run on a server somewhere, and your laptop will be a thin client that just streams changes to it. So we talked, We had Gitpod on the other day.

They're doing something like that. There's GitHub Codespaces.

There is Stackblitz.

Rid. We're we're just seeing lots and lots of these tools. I've specifically, I know probably Versus Code will, roll out an option to do that As well, they're already working on that. So I think I don't even know what that's called called cloud coding. Yeah. What do we call that? I I call it iPad coding Yeah. Which means that, like, it happens

in the yeah. Totally. IPad coding will become a thing. I mean, I I agree with you. And I think it's gonna be more more and more useful.

I don't know if I'll be doing it regularly or not because I I really love this new MacBook Pro. This to this thing to me is kind of like the the peak of coding right now. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I don't think I'll be doing it, but it'll be nice to have those tools exist.

So I I'm interested in that. But, yeah, I don't I don't really have anything else to say there. So I think that's It for our predictions. I'm sure we're missing a ton of stuff because I'm I always feel like there's got we're gonna shut this off, and I'm gonna be like, oh, shoot. We didn't talk about this big thing. So, rid Yeah. I don't know. I'm excited for this year. I I like, every single gear, things seem to get better and easier and better and easier, rid And at the same time, a little bit more complex and better and easier and better and easier. So, shout out to Simplicity, and let's hope more devs find Simplicity and the ease of use in their complexity this year while they're developing. Alright. Thank you so much for tuning in. But first But we have shameless pugs and Oh. Sick pigs.

So I am going to sick pick.

Let's stick pick a podcast here. I have lots of podcast picks. I'm always picking podcasts picking podcasts. Here's a really interesting podcast.

This is called, a show about animals. So just search for a show about animals, and it's about the Koko the gorilla And how they taught the Coco the gorilla was a gorilla that could like sign language and they could communicate with.

And this really dives deeply into the project kind of surrounding Coco, the controversy, whether or not, Coco was actually using the sign language or whether or not it was just, like, suggested behavior.

It's a lot of fascinating things. And if you're like me, You maybe have heard of Coco the gorilla, but maybe, hey. That's the gorilla that could sign language, and that's it. The I I found this whole thing to be Extremely interesting. And at times, you know, you you feel a little bit bad for the gorillas or whatever. But I found the entire project to be Fascinating and definitely the type of thing that I personally, I don't know. It just the the idea that this kind of scientific rid could have even happened in the 1st place and what the results of it were and how you can look at the same situation from 2 completely different perspectives And it will kind of try to get to the the reality of what the situation is. So check it out.

Definitely an an interesting podcast.

I am going to, sick pick something that I just got super stoked about, and that is Wise. So Wise is an I'm gonna call them an online bank.

They got really popular in that they they sort of came on the scene to rid to very very good currency conversion, better than most banks will give you.

I I look at it. I have like a Special account with my bank, like, a special trading account, and and it's the exact same dollar that they give you. And Wise, you can rid. You can transfer, like, $3. And they also give you balances, which you can you can hold US and Canadian, different currencies all at once, and you can get cards for them now.

Rid. So if you're going traveling to the the Europe or something like the Europe. If you're going to Europe, you can get it.

Rid. You can keep recipients on that. So I specifically pay, AJ, our support guy via, Wyze and I can send money to him in South Africa very easily, and it's just it's just good, man. Just awesome. Compared to at least rid. Banking in Canada, all the banking tools that I have are just painful to use or like, even sending a wire transfer Mhmm. In Canada is, like, I have, like, A little thing on my key chain that I have to type in the numbers every time I send a wire transfer. Like, how old is this thing and rid. Wise is the best. I use it personally. I use it for my business. Interesting.

Awesome, awesome company. So check it out. Rid I'll I have a little referral link, that I think it's it says if you refer a friend, You get $800 in a fee free transfers. Oh, okay. So if you get $800, I'll use that right now. Rid No. No. Like, I think I think, you get a couple bucks whenever you refer some friends. But, you don't have to pay the transfer fees, rid which are very low, but you don't have to pay them on your first $800. So if you need to convert some money, and you can also rid Typically, for my Canadian friends, this is the only way to get US money out of PayPal, without Converting it to Canadian first. And if you have PayPal converted to Canadian, they take, like, 3% for themselves just because Which, like, screw them. Yeah. Because Yeah. I would I save literally 1,000 of dollars a year on this. So check it out. Wise.com.

So it's a bank account? That's what it is? It's like a checking account?

Yeah. It's, well, they have they had they initially started as currency conversion. So you would just wire the money or, what's what's the way you send money in the states?

ETF or I don't know. We don't we don't people don't really use that. Rid Send money. Oh, okay.

Whatever the way you send money from bank to bank in the US is. You just send it that, and then it will convert it and then, rid. Send it back to it. But now they have this thing called balances, which you can literally just hold money if you have to pay people or if you rid. Wanna play the stock market and, convert money back and forth between the different values? You you totally can do that.

Rid. And like it just seems it seems like they're another one of these like Cloudflare companies where it's like, wow, they just keep rolling out rid. More and more products.

That is very interesting to me, and that's why I think they're gonna roll out credit card processing soon. That'd be neat. Cool. Alright. Well, now it's time for shameless plugs. I'm gonna shamelessly plug level up tutorials.com.

Our latest course is going to be on remix. So if you're interested in learning this Hot new platform on level up tutorials from yours truly. I will be teaching you the basics of Remix as we get up and running with the tech behind it And how you can become a competent Remix developer. So check it out at leveluptutorials.com.

Rid. I'll shamelessly plug all of my courses. Westboss.comforward/courses.

Learn beginner JavaScript, master Gatsby, Full stack advanced React GraphQL ES 6 for everyone. Take my free course, JavaScript 30, Rack for beginners, CSS Grid, learn Node. You name it. There's rid Dozens of courses on there. Not dozens, but there's a lot. Check it out. Westboss.comforward/courses.

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