2020 Latest Web Development Trends
Tags: webdevelopment
Published: 2020-04-19 22:19:52

The year is coming to an end. And with that, I'd like to have a look at the trends in web development that I see for next year. Now, of course, these are only my ideas, my thoughts. So definitely also share your thoughts below the video in the comments. Now, also, keep in mind that this is for web development, not the trends in general in technology. There are loads of interesting topics out there and also topics outside of [web development](https://pencil.sa/).

But here I will share my ideas or my thoughts on what will be important in web development in 2020 and what might be worth learning for you. I hope you like it. Let's have a look at what my trends are. So let's explore my personal web dev trends for 2020, so the things or topics I think will be important in a year and that I would recommend learning or diving deeper into. Now, one thing will always be important, and that, of course, knows the basics.

In past years, I listed this as a trend, but I can see that this is not really a trend.

But knowing HTML see as s and of course very important javascript is super, super important.

These technologies in the end power the web unless you're a pure back and only developer.

So these technologies really are important no matter which web application you want to build. If you work on the front and if you do some work on the front, that at all you need to know these technologies.

And even as a back end developer, if we're honest, you need to know how the web works and how these technologies work. Atleast roughly.

Now, of course, you will always specialize. You don't have to be an expert in each technology, but knowing the big picture and how they work together is important. And of course, JavaScript specifically is extremely important.

We can use it to build powerful front end user interfaces with frameworks like React or angular and on the back end. We can use it with node j ust to build server side applications as well. But with that, let's have a look at the top trends. I identified for next year and I came up with seven things I would recommend that you look into or that you will explore in the next year.

Now the trends are not necessarily ordered by importance. Basically just in the order they came into my mind.

And one trend we absolutely have and which we already had and this year is of course that the JavaScript frameworks, the basic frameworks and libraries will stay important, react angular or view.

I would recommend that, you know, at least one of them. If you are into front end web development, if you are not, if you're only interested in back end web development.

This, of course, is not really a trend for you. You might still want to explore one of them to understand what your front end developer teammates are doing. But of course you don't need to learn it. If you are a full stack or front end web developer, though, then you definitely need to know one of them and learning one of them. And diving deeper in that topic or maybe also picking up a second one is something I absolutely recommend here.

It makes you a better developer and it will be the tool you work with for the next year. And speaking off that, I often get asked which one you should choose. Now, for one, I have a dedicated video and article on that which you can check out. But besides that, they're really all great right now. React and angular are the biggest ones.

They get used by most companies, but Vue also has a decent community and some large companies which are using it. So unless you're applying for a specific job where you know that the company uses react or uses angular, you can pick any of those and you'll have a great framework for building amazing user interfaces.

Now all the related to front end web development. But not only is Web site performance and optimization techniques. Now, what do I mean with this trend? It has always been important that you write good code and that you build web applications, no matter if that's on the front end or the back end, which have a good performance and which, well, basically execute as fast as possible and provide a good user experience that has always been important. But with ever more third party libraries and frameworks which we're using in our projects, it becomes more and more important.

Also, with more and more regions of the world gaining access to the Internet, it's more important than ever before to ship Web sites, to ship Web applications that perform great.

Now, if you are a front end web developer, that means shipping as little code as possible, optimizing your images, creating accessible web pages as well, not just small and fast ones, but also accessible ones, which everyone is able to use.

And on the back and of course, you also want to create web applications that are fast to use, provide short response times and so on. This has always been important, but it's definitely not getting less important. It also is a huge topic which sometimes can be overwhelming because so many parts make up this topic on the front. Then as I said, we have the different assets we're using like JavaScript in images and accessibility and on the back. And we also have tons of languages we can use and tons of libraries all working together.

But it is a topic I would recommend to explore to find out what's all inside of this topic and where you as a developer could grow.

Kind of related to that, you could say, is another major trend, micro services. Also, this trend is not new. And by the way, dad is probably the case for all those trends. After all, the web is at evolving thing, but migrant services also are becoming more and more important or interesting. Now, what are my core services?

Put in simple terms, a mike or service architecture simply means that especially on the back end, you don't just have, let's say, one huge database which stores all the data that belongs to your application and one euge API with all the endpoints, but that you have multiple, smaller, individually managed and still connected parts that make up that bigger system. So if you're building an online shop, you could have one mike or service that's made up of an API and a small database for storing the products.

A separate one for storing the orders and a last one for storing your users.

Now, of course, these different API will also talk to each other, but if you have smaller individual pieces which probably are managed by separate teams, then every team is able to move faster.

Of course, documentation is key here so that all the services can talk to each other and the general. There are some concepts there which should be kept in mind.

So diving into micro services can be interesting for large scale projects and applications in order to manage them more efficiently and ultimately hopefully also provide a great user experience and great performance.

Another big trend, which I also listed in past years already is server lists. Now server list does not mean that we're not working with servers anymore, it just means that we're not managing them on our own.

Instead, nowadays we have tons of resources like A.W. as Lam and a lot of Obert A.W. as resources and also on Azure and Google cloud ends on which we can use to run code on the MOND in isolation.

Advantages of server lists are that you only pay for what you use. If coach doesn't execute, you don't pay for its hosting dad. You also can scale quickly if you have, let's say, a function that adds a user to a newsletter list. Then this will execute one time for one user, and if 1000 users sign up at the same time, simply 1000 separate instances of that function run simulataneously. So to say therefore you got infinite scalability at a very low price point out of the blocks, which is why server list is amazing.

And if you want to learn more on that, we got some resources on that which you find linked below to video. And in general that's true for all the trends I'm mentioning here.

If we got resources on those topics both free and paid, you'll find that below the video.

Let's move on. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are, of course, megatrends in general. Also, outside of web development, there are a lot of things that can be achieved with that and a lot of untapped potential. But also inside of our web development cosmos, there is a lot we can do with machine learning and artificial intelligence. For example, there are projects that allow us to use machine learning and A.I. to predict which parts of the web page a user might visit next.

So that to gather with code splitting where we only download source code when it's really needed, we can download code in advance before a user uses a certain feature on the page.

Things like that can really help us build amazing user experiences. And of course, it's not just about smart code downloading. It's also about adding features to your web pages which rely on machine learning and artificial intelligence like product recommendations. Chat bots and Zorn's are really a lot of exciting things. We can dive into deeper inside of the web development world, but also outside of it, of course.

Now, clearly focused on web development is the next trend I want to mention here. And that is testing now. Testing is, of course, not new and it also is not new that testing matters and can really, really ensure that you're writing clean and working code and you don't break code when you work on updates. But I would argue that the more complex our applications tend to get and the more technologies that are involved, and especially when all is looking into you, architectures like micro services and so on.

Testing is definitely not becoming less important, at least I would argue it's becoming more important. We want to ensure that our code works and we're living in a world where depending on the project size, of course, and the kind of project, but where we often ship knew where. Tons of our applications multiple times a day, maybe multiple times an hour or at least a couple of times per month or a week.

And if you do so, you'll of course want to ensure that your web application doesn't break.

When you add a new feature or when you fix a bug and manually testing, everything is only possible up to a certain extent. The bigger your application is, the more features it has, the more people that are working on it. Well, the harder it gets to test it manually.

So automated testing with unit tests, integration tests and entrance testing matters and therefore is an area I would recommend that you at least have a look at.

Now, the last trend I want to specify here is the trend to progressive web apps and cross-platform maps.

Now, again, just like all these trends, actually, this will, of course, not affect everyone. But I would argue a lot of web developers.

It's really great that we're living in a time where it has never been easier to write code once and ship it for multiple platforms to build native mobile apps based on web apps with tools like Capacitor Ionic or to use web DAF knowledge like JavaScript or certain framework knowledge combined with tools like REIQ, native or native script to build native mobile apps.

But it's also not just about native mobile apps. Also, our web apps are becoming more and more powerful often in a lot of browsers and operating systems. We can tap into native device features like getting the user location, working with device cameras, using face authentication, stuff like that.

This is already possible today in a lot of browsers and more and more features are getting added there and we often summarize all these features. Also under the term progressive web apps, which also of course includes things like service workers providing offline support ends on building such web applications where we have no clear distinction between is it a web app or is it a native app?

That is definitely a big trend. We got a lot of potential here because we can use our knowledge, which we already have to build brand new user experiences that reach way more users.

We can use cool features in our web applications.

We can build web applications that work without the internet or can at least survive short periods of not having an Internet connection.

So there we get some super exciting possibilities and looking into progressive web apps and how you can leverage your existing knowledge to ship apps for more platforms and to tap into more native device features. By the way, not just on mobile phones, but also on desktop devices.

That is really exciting to me and definitely a huge trend in 2020 in my opinion. Well, and then I got this last point here because the slide would have been empty by now. And that matters to me, by the way, I could have added more and more points here. That's not that hard. We got a lot of technology is a lot of new technologies every year and month. A lot of frameworks and a lot of things you can learn.

I also maybe overlooked some things which you find important. So please share your opinion below the video, share your comments, share your idea, share your feedback.

Also, keep in mind, this is, of course, just my list and I deliberately wanted to keep it short because if I specified 20 trends here, I'm not sure if they're really all trends.

Right. So that's my list.

Share your thoughts and is below the value. I hope that you'll like it and I hope that this was helpful.