legendary computer scientist Alan Kaye once said the best way to predict the future is to invent it I love this quote because as developers we have the incredible privilege of building the future for Humanity but based on the way things went in 2022.
I think we must have done something wrong because 2022 has been a messed up year and there's probably more pain to come first Russia and Ukraine went to war then all the high-flying tech stocks declined like 90 Bitcoin dropped from 69 to 16k while simultaneously gas and food doubled in price Zuckerberg Zuckerberg the metaverse while Elon destroyed free speech by allowing people to speak freely but most shocking of all I found out my 100 Natty Fitness coach the liver King is actually juice to the gills yes I'm on steroids apparently if nothing is what it seems.
In today's article we'll look at 10 Trends affecting software development and technology that you can capitalize on in 2023.
let's kick things off by talking about tech jobs all the big Tech corporations have either had hiring slowdowns hiring freezes or mass layoffs if you're learning to code or look looking for a job these headlines can be pretty scary now while the job market for software Engineers has definitely softened there are a few things to keep in mind here first when there are massive layoffs like this the vast majority of jobs have nothing to do with software engineering Engineers are still extremely valuable and most of those that were laid off were able to quickly find employment elsewhere second outside of fang the job market still seems to be pretty strong it's by no means Frozen up and there are still tons of job openings out there, especially at non-tech companies that have struggled to modernize the bad news is that interest rates are still high and will likely remain high at least until 2024.
That means less easy money for startups to over hire there's still a labor shortage in Tech and if that ever changes Look Out Below because that means the greater economy is likely going straight to hell now speaking of jobs back in 2020 I talked about the work from home Trend I thought that Trend would be more permanent but it appears to be making a reversal because managers often hate it like they get frustrated when their employees are secretly working six full-time jobs at the same time Snapchat recently called its workers back to the office and I think we'll see more Companies do this to implement soft layoffs where they simply get rid of all the people who don't want to come back to the office as Elon said they can pretend to work somewhere else.
But now let's switch gears to crypto in 2022 we saw the Pawn's economics of the crypto World exposed there was collapse after collapse with people's life savings
being wiped out in the process creates a contagion effect where people no longer have enough money to spend millions of dollars on pictures of monkeys during all this chaos hashtag web 3 went missing if you see it anywhere please contact the local authorities while there is a lot of cool stuff going on in the crypto space a lot of it feels like vaporware and even though it's been around for over a decade now it still has yet to disrupt centralized Computing in any meaningful way the so-called decentralized web 3 companies often rely on centralized services from AWS and GCP that basically tells you everything you need to know the hype train has derailed but that's a good thing if you're betting long term on crypto because there's a lot of scammers and criminals that need to be weeded out.
Speaking of derailed we should also talk about the metaverse. Zuckerberg changed the name of Facebook and poured billions of dollars into this project but the only good thing about it is all the Dank memes making fun of it in my opinion the metaverse is something that sounds good on the surface like flying cars but actually kind of sucks, in reality, humans already spend way too much time staring at screens and the idea of strapping a screen to your face to block out this entire shitty world to escape to an even shittier world is just an absurd idea now the metaverse is not just Facebook there's also decentral land whose Mana token is down 90 and a bunch of other companies investing into their own metaverses like crypto there will be opportunities in this space.
however, I don't think we'll ever see a day when everyone is walking down the street with one of these things strapped to their head it'll be more of a niche market for gamers and masturbaters now at this point this Article has been pretty
negative but things are about to get worse because AI got so much better in 2022 it's now possible for AI to generate art using tools like Dolly 2 and stable diffusion Google came out with dream Fusion 3D which can generate 3D models from a text prompt just imagine how much easier that could make the development of 3D games than meta came out with make a video which takes a text prompt and generates a video you've got voice cloning that's now almost indistinguishable from the real thing like this podcast between Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs you're a memory from the past good to see you buddy it's been a long time since I've been on the show and over the past week, the world has been going crazy over chat GPT which is smart enough to do your algebra homework write poetry for your wife and fix your broken code stack Overflow even took steps to ban it because people are using it to post answers about stuff they know nothing about but now I want to take a 180 and talk about front-end web development one of the most noticeable Trends is the willingness of developers to move away from react and try out newer Frameworks like spelled solid and quick react is still the status quo.
But there's been a lot of little trauma surrounding it Shopify drops the server components from its framework and took the remix approach but most importantly there are just really appealing Alternatives nowadays that offer 0js by default and better performance cleaner apis and things like that and there are new JavaScript Frameworks coming out every single day pushing the limits of what's possible.
Being a web developer is watching the evolution of design Trends over time we went from no design to Geocities to way too much complexity and then finally to minimal flat designs which most websites still use today to figure out the hottest design trend of 2023.
I reached out to Gary Simon from the design course the hot new trend we're seeing is
neo-brutalism where you have vibrant colors high contrast strokes and cartoon-like Graphics I think it provides a very nice aesthetic but it's the kind of design I'll probably be very sick of by the end of 2023 when every other website is using it now when it comes to front-end web development another big trend is the death of the single page application nowadays there's a strong preference among Developers for server-side rendering by default that means react developers are using Frameworks like nexjs view developers are using Linux felt developers are using the svelte kit and so on one of the main drivers of this trend is cheap serverless cloud computing in addition to High-Performance Edge Computing it's
incredibly easy to deploy serverless functions on vessel netlify and Firebase and it's just easier for developers to build full-stack applications when both client-side and server-side code is handled by a unified framework in addition developers in 2023 place a much higher value on type safety across the entire stack most of these Frameworks offer end-to-end type safety, and there are tools like trpc that make it much easier to implement end-to-end type safety anywhere now speaking of the back end we've seen a ton of innovation round databases, in the last year I feel like almost every week I'm getting hyped up about a database I've never heard of before which I like to call New Wave databases they're Cloud-native or serverless and usually combine multiple database paradigms usually some combination of relational graph and document we have tools like surreal DB Edge DB fauna and Zeta all of which have very Innovative new ideas about how a database should work then we have other companies taking a more traditional approach like Planet scale and Cockroach serverless to make the gold standard relational databases easier to work within the cloud you've also got popular databases like neo4j and MongoDB offering serverless options.
Another thing we need to talk about on the back end is this idea that people desperately want to get away from languages like C plus in 2022 Google announced carbon but it's years away from being production ready the dominant new systems language in 2023 is clearly rust maybe not in total adoption but definitely in the mind share of newer developers not only is it loved by developers and being used in a lot of modern systems but just a few months ago it was officially added to the Linux kernel that means future updates to the Linux kernel can be written in Rust now I realize that most of us here are far too dumb to ever even think about contributing to the Linux kernel but the fact that Linus Torvalds is welcoming rust into the ecosystem says a lot about the language's future.
