A question popped up recently in my office from our content team: What are the web development trends for 2020?
It was directed towards us, the dev team, as it was assumed we might know a thing or two on this topic. We did suggest a few things here and there, but to me that spawned a deeper thought on what are the 'trends', if I may, that I've seen in professional web development that I personally care about.
An alternate and more appropriate (and perhaps a tad less clickbait-y) title for this post would've been...
What web developers actually talk about?
And I'd only talk about web developers for now, because one: that's the people I spend a lot of time with, and two: the stuff we usually talk about hardly ever makes it to a magazine article listing trends. So, without further ado, let's get right into it.
Talks about ethics in tech
Ethics, especially in tech, is part of every other conversation that we have. Many engineers I work with, and many I'm friends with care deeply about doing things right (with each of us having our own definition of what that means). I feel glad and fortunate to have such values driven people around me.
Cooking
We talk about cooking from time to time. We also cook good food sometimes, and sometimes mess things up. Food being such a basic necessity that it surprises no one that so many people have, at some points in their lives, taken cooking seriously.
Comics
A couple of us are also into comics. Reading, and sometimes even making. Most of us are very much into memes, but this is specifically about comics. They're different, right? I think they are, but can't explain how.
Clubbing
Back in college, my lack of exposure to many developers and the idealism of start years had led me to believe that developers hate doing anything that's not to do with their computers and code. Clubbing and partying would've been the last things I'd have guessed a coder to do, but hey, we all learn.
Beer Making
That still does surprise me, but hey, why not?
Trying the new AWS stuff
Many of us are on our own side-learning quests. Someone is excited about learning Go while someone else is trying their hands on machine learning. We talk about it often, and share the material that we work with. Sometimes we even show each other code from our pet projects.
Native technologies
We often discus the new features that browsers ship, new paradigms that help better software development and make us better software developers. Frameworks come and go, but paradigms, patterns and best practices stay. ReactJS might not be here five years later, but separation of concerns might not become irrelevant anytime soon.
Web developers, especially the ones who work with JavaScript, know very well how volatile things can get, and having an idea of what is ephemeral and what not is critical.
Hiking
Hiking is something I got into because of my cousin. It is far less common back home than it is here in Europe. Here, many people around me frequently visit the nature and mountains. They bring back good stories from there, and one of my personal OKRs this year is going hiking. Let's see how that goes.
Going back home to see friends & family
I work with many immigrants, and as such, there's always the topic of going abck to see friends and family. The lucky Europeans do it multiple times a year, while the rest of us try to go back home at least once. We talk about how's home, what we do when we're there and if we'll ever want to move back. It is quite surprising how similar it is for most of us.
Trying interesting food & travelling
Oh, the cliche. Like almost every other person, we are super into trying tasty food and travelling. We talk about new restaurants to try, and new places to explore. In fact, we take it very seriously, especially the lunch part. We bike to places around us and then join other groups from the office to try out new places. Honestly, I look forward to my lunch everyday at work.
In closing
Of course this article is written for fun. I know how stressful job hunting can be, and sometimes it is good to read the trends in web development to check if you're going going completely tangent. As you can tell from this article, trends can mean different things for different people. For job seekers, it could be the stuff to learn to become more relevant, while for companies, it could be sticking to tools and technologies that make finding talent easier. For a developer in their day to day life, it could be, as you just read, something totally different. I hope it was fun reading this one. Until the next one then!
Thank you for reading!