Hi
2022 recap
What a year. I've spent the last couple of months adapting to life in Japan and unsurprisingly, the only way it has affected my remote job is that my internet is 10x faster.
Memes of the year
Everyone is obsessed about AI this year.
GitHub's Copilot is an 'AI pair programmer', which I haven't used but I have watched videos. It looks cool and fairly accurate.
ChatGPT is another AI, which answers all life's questions. You can ask it natural language questions about (anything?) and it gives human-like responses.
There also seems to be a lot of low-code / no-code platforms popping up. From my experience with these things, companies use them to build something, then hire a team of devs to fix it or rebuild it properly.
Personally, I'm not worried about AI taking my job. Until we go full matrix, I think these technologies will only increase the demand for developers.
Elon Musk bought Twitter on the premise of increasing free speech and unbanned all the banned accounts. However, there were reports of him banning people that personally offended him. He also fired half of Twitter's workers, then another ~1200 quit. I deactivated my Twitter account.
My Rails experience
I spent a couple of months building a personal project with Rails 7. It is probably the best developer experience I've ever had. Usually I loathe 'magic', and Rails is 90% magic; yet it still manages to be satisfying with clear docs, everything working as expected, and a huge community. I wish that I had more excuses to use it.
So for the last few years, frontend web dev has been a cacophony of SPA frameworks. I have been an advocate of these since I first used Vue years ago. After really thinking about it; with all the tooling, new paradigms, complex state management, and libraries, it has become super complex. Furthermore, frameworks like Next and Nuxt are bringing back SSR! This is really cool and gives us benefits like SEO, but aren't we circling back to the good ol days?
Enter Hotwire, by the creators of Rails!
This suite of libraries introduces a new paradigm for frontend web dev. Instead of everything being JavaScript, it allows you to replicate the SPA experience (dynamic pages) with very little JavaScript code. It uses Websockets and other cool tricks to swap HTML in and out of the page without reloading.
Now, I have little confidence that Hotwire will gain popularity, simply because the frontend market has exploded thanks to SPA frameworks; and people will probably be reluctant to abandon their years of React experience.
Plus we will need lots of React devs to play janitor on all the atrocities that have been developed in the last few years.
Even so, using Hotwire only for a couple of months was an absolute dream. It brought me back to simpler times where I don't need to debug the frontend and backend separately. Having all my files in one place eased my cognitive load immensely. It reminded me that the HTML is the important part - not the JavaScript.
I like to think we're on the cusp of a paradigm shift in the web dev world. Tools like React and Vue add too much complexity and dev hours to projects. Ideally the solution will simplify things (lol good luck).
Or maybe the AI will take our jobs.