5 Dev Trends to Follow in 2024

It’s 2024. The economy will probably collapse, all our jobs will be automated, we are at the brink of a 3rd world war and UFO’s SORRY UAP’s are openly discussed by high government officials.

On the bright side, the web dev space is more alive than ever. Here are 5 trends you should keep an eye out for in 2024 and maybe, just maybe, your skills will still be relevant for another year, until Chat GPT completely takes over and replaces us all.

JavaScript Replacements

First, let’s look at a trend that is slowly getting more traction and has the potential to fully change the way we build web apps.

As we all know JavaScript is the language of the web. Douglas Crockford (the inventor of JSON among other things), was a big advocate of the language for the past 20 years. However, this are his thoughts on JavaScript now: ‘Now my evangel is that we should stop using JavaScript. That it has so many congenital defects, it really is a smelly language.‘

In all fairness, there is a lot of effort put into JavaScript these days, and we are enjoying various new features and quality of life improvements. However, there is something missing, and this is obvious when looking at TypeScript’s growth rate for the past couple of years. We need better tools to build for the web, and our best bet for a JS replacement is probably Web Assembly. Thanks to WASM, frameworks like Leptos are gaining popularity, and it is now fairly common to leverage a powerful language like Rust to build full stack, fully typed, high-performance web apps.

As a quick side note, Rust itself is worth following in 2024 thanks to its rapid adoption. After all, we are talking about a programming language which was fully released in 2015, and, in just a few years made its way into the Linux kernel, is adopted in large teams at Microsoft, and even became a serious player in the web space.

Backend as a Service

Another interesting trend to follow is the shift towards backend as a service products since it is now easier than ever to build and maintain scalable backend systems.

When it comes to the server, the direction is clear - everything moved first to the cloud, and now to the edge. Speed and performance are very important metrics, and developers are now hosting both static assets and COMPUTE processes closer to end users to decrease latencies.

This trend is rapidly growing thanks to A LOT of backend as a service platforms and various other services pioneering seamless cloud and edge solutions. These range in features and complexity from simple database products like Turso to full fledged backend systems like Supabase or headless CMS solutions like Strapi.

AI

The next trend is really a no-brainer. AI is a hot topic discussed everywhere these days. The question for us devs is how we can leverage this tech to work more efficiently and improve the products we are building.

The impact of AI in our daily lives is one of the main takeaways from the GitHub’s yearly report - Developers are building with generative AI in big numbers, and almost all questioned developers experimented with AI coding tools last year.

Thanks to platforms like HuggingFace, building Apps that leverage powerful AI models is easy, and we’ll see most established companies and new startups focusing on AI powered products.

Meta Frameworks

Next, let’s look at one of the main trends in frontend development - the shift towards employing the server in the rendering process, and the increasing popularity of meta frameworks.

I don’t think that this is debatable any more - it’s simply smarter to choose a meta framework directly when starting a new project. Most popular UI libraries have their own dedicated solutions, and Astro deserves a special mention here due to its flexibility and multiple UI integrations. HTML first, server rendered apps (also known as Multi Page Apps) are far from being a new concept, and this architecture was actually the norm up until the 2010s. We are now simply returning to the server, and libraries like HTMX are pushing this idea to the limit.

Simplicity & Efficiency

Finally, one of the best things I’m seeing in the web devspace right now is an active drive towards simplicity and efficiency. I believe this was kickstarted by Solid, which showed us there are better ways to handle data and reactivity on the web. As a result, a couple of years later, most frameworks are following along in reimagining their core architectures, removing some of their abstractions, and keeping things as simple as possible.

The generally accepted idea is that shaving off a few bytes from a server response doesn’t really move the needle. However, when frameworks like Qwik are reimagining the way apps are sent and rendered on the client, and platforms like Deno Deploy are prioritizing saving milliseconds in the request-response cycle, you either follow along with clean, efficient implementations, or you risk being left behind.

Until next time, thank you for reading!