What to expect in Q1 2021 for Meteor ☄
Tags: javascript, meteor, mongodb
Published: 2021-01-05 21:50:27

Many will make year long predictions and promises. In here I will limit myself to the first quarter of 2021 in which we have quiet a certainty of what is going to come for Meteor and the Meteor Community.

## Meteor
### Meteor 1.12.1
Very soon (as in matters of days) we will see a patch release of Meteor. This will be mainly to address a [bug in IE](https://github.com/meteor/meteor/issues/11264) and to provide Node v12.20.1 for security updates. You can already get the beta (`meteor update --release 1.12.1-beta.0`) so it won't be long for the final release to come out.

### Meteor 2.0
[Meteor 2.0](https://github.com/meteor/meteor/pull/11206) is in works and after the winter breaks we can expect the work to pick back up, though there is still a few major things to be resolved before the final release. Also its release will most likely coincide with the release of Meteor Cloud. Most notably we this release will include tree shaking, hot module reload and upgrade to Node v14. Other things like updated logging packages MongoDB bulk insert and other smaller things are also [being worked on](https://github.com/meteor/meteor/milestone/74).

### Meteor Cloud
Announced at Meteor Impact 2020, Meteor Cloud aims to unify all of the Meteor online services into one unified platform. This should make it easier to manage your Meteor account, hosting and packages, but we don't know the details yet. What can be said though is that this will also include the return of free Meteor hosting and with it an integrated MongoDB database.

### Meteor 3.0
After the release of Meteor 2.0 we can expect the start of a discussion of how Meteor 3.0 is going to look like. Meteor 2.0 is focused on improving happiness of current Meteor developers and their advance uses. That will most likely remain emphasis of the 2.0 line. 3.0 was already announced to be more focused towards beginners and ease of getting started. In my opinion Meteor still maintains the great magic that made it so appealing years back when it started, but with the explosion of front-end libraries and introduction of new tools there are new expectations that need to be addressed. What that means specifically will be a matter of debate after Meteor 2.0 is released.

## Community
### Community Packages
Community Packages have addressed the most pressing needs around the it maintains. In Q1 we will see continued maintenance and probably a few releases (can confirm that with certainty for [meteor-link-accounts](https://github.com/Meteor-Community-Packages/meteor-link-accounts/)), possibly inclusion of one or two new packages, but probably no more than that. What we are also likely to see will be finalization of package template and moves towards code unification across all the projects.

### Meteor Impact 2021
With [Meteor Impact 2021 announcements](https://forums.meteor.com/t/meteor-impact-2021-is-going-to-happen/54754?u=storyteller) we can expect to see the official domain to switch to the new year later in Q1. At the same time there will most likely be some initial announcements about the structure of the conference and possibly early speakers and companies.

### Organization
One big question that the Meteor Community Packages will have to answer is what form of organization and relationship it wants to take with Meteor Software. This discussion was already started at Meteor Impact 2020 and much more needs to be discussed, especially when it comes to supporting community developers, governance and relationship with Meteor Software. Some sort of an agreement between this group and Meteor Software is likely to develop.

What are your thoughts and predictions?
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