Wes and Scott React to the State of JS

Welcome to Syntax. This is the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Today, we've got a show rid. On the state of JS, this is a huge survey that happens every single year, and there are all kinds of interesting nuggets in terms of rid. The language and back end and front end libraries and testing and tools and resources and what's the best podcast out there. So we're going to, rid. Just kinda just go through it all together. And this is more of like a a YouTube reaction video, but Scott and I will we'll try to lend our 2¢ to some of these, some of the results and why we think so and what surprised us and whatnot.

We are sponsored by 3 awesome companies today. First1 is Node Linux cloud hosting. 2nd 1 is LogRocket JavaScript session replay. And FreshBooks, the cloud accounting solution you need. We'll talk about all of them partway through the episode. With me, as always, is mister Scott Dalinski. How are you doing today, Scott? Hey.

I am doing better.

I'm doing better than I was Today, I was very sick. Too good? Yeah. I was I don't I don't know what what it was. I was getting a little bit worried that it was the the COVID thing. But, The rona? Yeah. I can't I can't imagine that it was because it was just, like, 24 hours of just, man, just totally wiped, and that's it. You know, maybe maybe it was that, but, we've been keeping it pretty pretty low key over here, so I can't imagine. But Oh, yeah. Either way, yeah, I woke up today feeling pretty normal and then had a large rid. Cold brew, and I'm now feeling even more normal. So, yeah. There you go. Seems like that was really it. But, yeah, you know, I'm ready to ready to chat about web stuff, ready to get back to work, ready to Cruise on some code, you know. Awesome. Awesome. I'm up at the cottage right now. I came up for a couple days for my birthday with a couple of my buddies. Rid. Yes. Happy birthday, Wes. Absolute.

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. It was it was really fun. It was awful getting in. So, like, we hadn't been up since Christmas, and rid The snow was, like, I don't know, maybe maybe 2 feet deep. And we have, like, a little snowblower, so we're like, oh, whatever. We'll park at the road, rid. And, we'll walk in, and we'll snow blow it, and and everything will be okay. We got in, and, first of all, we got the car stuck rid. Because, in the, like, the initial driveway where we thought we would bark, we got it stuck.

So we walk all the way in, and we we open the Open the thing, and it smells like propane in the entire cottage. Like, oh my gosh. Like, what's going on? Oh, no. I ran over to the ran over to the propane, Tank, and the tank says it's at 3%.

So the propane is almost empty. Oh, okay. So there's maybe there's a propane leak, and We're totally out of propane, so we can't run the furnace or, or anything like that. Luckily, we have a wood stove and a couple electric heaters, so we got those fired up. And then, did you Did you have to, like, let the house air out a ton? Yeah. Well, luckily, I was with my buddy who is a, a firefighter. Okay. Oh, good. Yeah. Went into firefighter,

Firefighter mode, and he's like person to have with you in case of a detector

working? No kidding. Like, it wasn't super bad. Like, rid. Like, it was almost like someone left the stove on or or, like, it wasn't sparking, but it was around the water heater, which I I'll I'll ruin the story for you right now. I'd rid. After a couple hours of worrying that something was leaking, I Googled propane smell when, and it's like when propane is low. So it's apparently a rid of, a water heater that it will emit a small amount of propane when you are dangerously low.

Rid. So No idea. No idea. It was a feature. Now maybe everyone put that in your brain next time you think, yeah, propane leak. Rid. So the proposal check is that yeah. So now we couldn't get the propane truck in because there was 3 feet of snow in the driveway, and there's a car in the way. So we get the, we get the tractor out with the lawn with the the blower on it, and, the the tire on the tractor was was totally dead. Rid.

So, and it was so low that I backed it up, and then there's a tube in the tire, and it sucked into the tire. So here we are, rid. Three feet of snow, trying to get this we took the tire off the rim, and we're trying to, like, get the rid. Little Schrader valve through the hole again just to fill it up enough. Finally, we got that back all on, and I start snow blowing this, like, 3 feet of snow, and the belt Just flies off the snowboard because it's, like, it's way too much. So we're just sitting down here. Birthday or the day before? Yeah. On my birthday. We show up, no propane, Stuck the car, fell blew off the thing. And so we we probably spent, like, 6 hours just, like, laying in the snow trying to fix the snowblower and, rid Get us dug out. And at about, like, 9:30, we got we got the car unstuck.

We gave up on the snowblower.

Rid. We realized that there's no propane leak.

And then I luckily, somebody gave me a number of a local that has a plow truck. And at, like, 10:30 at night, he came over and plowed our driveway. And then the next morning, the propane truck came, and everything was okay, but, oh, craziest birthday of

Oh my gosh. Mister Plow is saving the day. Wow. Yeah. So chaos. Chaos. That's,

we've only had this place a couple years, and rid. Now we realize that we should never, let the propane get that low or leave the driveway unplugged.

You live and you learn. Yeah. Anyways, rid. We're we're not talking about that. I thought that was interesting story to share. Yeah. We're talking about, the state of JS. So this is a rid thing that goes around.

The results aren't perfect. Anytime anytime that this thing comes out, you get people

rid. Mad about what the results are because it's obviously skewed to those who answer it. Right. Isn't that weird? Does that weird to you that, like, people get so angry every time? Like, because every time you see like, I get that it's not representative in maybe that, like, we shouldn't have that expectation that this is This is, like, the results of the entire industry. But I I feel like that's, like, kind of

standard for any survey that you you see or get the results of. The survey is It's only the results of who answered the survey. Totally. Like, you see you see all the time on, like, political stuff, people being like, 98% of people think that we should kill all the dolphins in the ocean. Like Right. Yeah. Of course, you you surveyed only people who wanna kill all the dolphins. Right? Like And, like, that's okay. Like, I know that Syntax did well, and my courses did well on this thing, but I know that that's not gonna go straight to my head. I know that that's there is because the people that answered the podcast or the and people that answered the survey are people that listen to this podcast. Right? Like Mhmm. That's why we're up high, rid. Not because it's representative of the entire JavaScript industry.

So there's yeah. No. You just gotta keep that in mind, and I I think it's still pretty.

Rid. Whenever it comes out, I tweet it out and say, make sure you also share this so it's not just my followers doing this thing, but it's, the widest possible net. And, like, I think that's the best you can do other than having the government do it, you know. And I think I think some people's

their response to the survey would be, well, I'm not gonna take it Because of that reason. And, like, I don't I don't think that's solving any sort of problem. I think the survey is still gonna go far and wide.

So Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's sorry. Let's get into, like, the actual stuff rather than the meta here. Totally. Do you wanna start with the

what do we wanna start with, I guess? Let's just start from the top down and and kinda go through it. I think the it was a couple little things on the demographics that stood out to me, is that, 42% of People have a higher ed degree, so that's less than half of people have are actually formally trained in, Like web development or computer science or whatever it is, which is is great because we're just we're mostly an industry of people that have just taught ourselves or rid have pivoted from some other other other thing. The other thing that was surprising me was that, like, 20% of the people found out about the survey via Twitter. Mhmm. That just Sort of cements that, whether you like it or not, Twitter is the place to be for web development stuff. Yeah. Or Twitter is the place to be to find JavaScript

Surveys. Cool. Yeah. Well, those I mean, that's interesting. You know, the the Ed one Is is interesting to me. It's so funny because I was thinking about this the other night where, like, people really feel like they would to get into the industry, You know, the industry is I I I either go to college or a boot camp or training or something, and then I get a job out, you know, one of these big Silicon Valley of companies. But in reality, the like, the the industry is way more, way, way, way, way, way, way more smaller companies. And, rid. You have your your start up cultures, but you also have your agencies. You have your your webmaster who works Said a a company who is maybe part of a small team or the only person, I mean, it it's way different than the Silicon Valley world of of startups and in big old Googles and Facebooks and all those things. One more that I saw here was the the salary stuff.

Rid. The ranges were kinda high for me because, like, it was Yeah. Like, 29% had 50 to a 100 k, and 22% at a 100 to 200 k. Like, there's a yeah. That's all the difference between those 2 things. So I would love to see a little bit more breakdown. I know I know Stack Overflow has, Does a huge survey every year as well, and they have some salary data on there as well. But, like, I don't know, 100 k a year versus 200 k years. Rid. Huge. Yeah. Yeah. And and and and even yeah. I mean, that 50 to a100,

if you put a break in there in the middle of the, say, like, 50 to 70 or something, That to me

seems more normal. Let's move into, some of the language features. Any of any of those that It's kinda interesting. They what they do is they show the last 2 or 3 years of the answers for each of these to see how many people are rid. Familiar with, language features and you see things like promise dot all settled, seeing a significant increase, rid.

Knowledge coalescing. The the double question mark seems to have, 45% have used it, which I was surprised by. I didn't think many people knew about it. Yeah. I was I don't use knowledge coalescing that much. Granted, I I know what it is, but I Yeah. I know what it is. I I don't often use it. Use it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not often something I'm I'm I'm going for. You know? Oh, hey.

Look at look at that just above knowledge coalescing.

Rid. This is a Scott Talinski. This is kinda cool. They asked a whole bunch of people in the industry to share their pick of the year, which is rid. Getting dangerously close to being a sick pick, so, our lawyers are ready if they, take one more step. But, yeah, it was kinda cool because they, like, They sort of just littered in these little pick of the years, and and Scott's pick of the year was SvelteKit.

Imagine that.

Imagine. We could have imagined. We could have imagined.

Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, knowledge coalescing.

For those of you who don't know, like you said, it's the double question mark. But what it does is, basically, rid. If the left left hand side of anything specifically is null or undefined, it will then use the the right hand of the the operand, rid. The the right hand side operant what is the word operant mean?

Can't take the word. Yeah.

I always see it used in sentence, but Operand, the quantity on which an operation is done. Oh. So So the thing that is being Operated on. Rated on. So if I'm going into surgery, am I the operator? The operand.

I never knew that. Rid I don't know. That's why you listen to this podcast. Yep. We had a couple people, over the last couple days say that they listen to the podcast To learn English.

Yeah.

Let me apologize for all the horrible slang that you have learned from us. It's lit.

Okay. Optional chaining. Optional chaining went from 66% to 85%, which isn't surprising because once you pop, you don't you can't you can't stop. Optional chaining is I don't know. Yeah. It it really makes my life so much easier to the point where I can't believe I had to use, like, a has A Lodash function to do optional chaining in the past. So a big fan of optional chaining.

Private fields went from 10 to 20%. I guess if you're using classes, then private fields makes sense. I don't really use classes that often. So for me, I'm not using it.

Rid. BigInt, I'm surprised 16%.

I'm surprised people are using BigInt. 16% of people are Yeah. Who's using BigInt? Yeah. Who's what are you using BigInt for? If you're using BigInt, please let us know because BigInt is just for bigger numbers. And, honestly, I I I don't deal with the numbers that large. I I guess I'm I can't even count that high. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, how am I I can't I'm supposed to do. I can't count that high. Rid.

We'll replace all. So a string prototype replace all. I'm happy that this exists. Basically, it allows you to do A, for for, like, a regex pattern match, it allows you to replace a pattern everywhere within a string.

That seems like something that Without a regex, like Oh, yeah. Just like a With replace, you used to have to like, let's say you have 4 spaces and you wanna replace those with dashes. Rid. If you wanted to do that previously, you'd have to use a regex with a g, flag on it, which means global, replace them all.

And that's kind of annoying because then you gotta get out the regex forward forward slashes or whatever and replace all. Now it's Very, very easy, especially if you have a variable that you need to replace all. Because putting a variable in a regex is really tricky because you have to, like, create the regex rid separately and then pass it in. It's a bit of a pain in the butt.

Yeah.

Let's move to the next one, which is rid Browser APIs. These are features provided by the browsers. What I this 1 the first one that popped out to me is that service workers have seen A little increase over the years, maybe a couple percent every year.

45%.

Rid. Pretty much everybody has used a service worker, but it's I would say it's like it's not stagnant, but it's kinda at a spot now where if you need to use a service worker, rid. You probably have by now, and that's like it's it's maybe just a standard technology.

So it's been around.

To me, it seems like something brand new, but they've been around for so long that now maybe they're just, part of the language now. Yeah.

Rid there's a lot of neat, you know, visual audio ones, Web Audio, WebGL, web animations, and those kinda all hover around 20% usage.

Web animations API is really interesting because it allows you to, like, play and replay and start and stop animations and control them. It's fine. The web animations API is fine. There's so many, like, little like, with any of these APIs, It feels like using a library on top of the web animations API would be the way to go there. I know, there was, like, UI motion motion dot dev motion motion.dev is the website, motiononemotion.dev.

This is attempting to be exactly that, a an animation library on top of the Web Animations API, Which, again, if I was using the Web Animations API, and I have before,

I would probably grab something like motion.dev just because, man, some of that stuff is just tedious. Yeah. What another one that, I saw that shocked me is that the intl API. So intl is good for I use it rid. Primarily for formatting numbers or currency in Yeah.

In the local currency or I pretty much just use it to pass it a number and have it kick out, Like dollar sign, whatever. But you can use it for, formatting dates and time. You can compare strings. So that rid. That was actually one thing that I ran into with my stickers is that, you're not allowed to use, accented characters when sending mail. I didn't know that, So I had to do a whole bunch of coding to strip all of those acts. Like, there was, like, so many Lukas's from Poland With the little l with this the dash through it that I had to replace with a like a normal l. I I'm I know I'm probably offending people right now, but, You know? Yeah. I'm pretty sure that letter is pronounced like a k even. Oh, yeah. You're Polish. You would know. I I'm Polish, but I would not know.

Rid Anyways, 36% of people have not used the rid. Chaining. The intl API is so good. So that's probably one you should check out. I think we did an entire show on the intl API as well. Yeah. I'm I'm interested in in that a little bit more. There's some really neat stuff. I see things on Twitter pop up there, like,

next time you need to do this, in add in like an Oxford comma with an and or something. Use the I n t l API. I I don't I don't use it as on myself. So, definitely something that I would be interested in learning a little bit more about for an episode. Adding lists if you wanna, like and do, like, I had cheese, rid. Pepperoni and mushrooms. And if you wanna, like, format those things according to whatever however language handles it,

It's all built in. There's so much logic to that. You don't have to worry about anymore.

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting.

I I've heard some date, time stuff too. Also, check out the custom elements in Shadow DOM went from both 33%, 42% to 37% and 46% with Shadow DOM. It's kind of weird that Shadow DOM went to 46%, And custom elements went to 37% when they're so tightly, tightly correlated in terms of, like, When you need 1, you're probably going to need the other one. And I would Yeah. Almost even guess that you would need custom elements more than you would need Shadow DOM. So it rid. Weird that the Shadow DOM has such a higher percentage use rate than custom elements when they're so tightly knit. Here's one I didn't know about,

rid the page visibility API.

I did not know what this was before I saw it. It looks like It's something you can use to watch for when, an element is hidden or not. And this rid Looks I would have thought, oh, yeah. You use Intersection Observer for that, but you can do it for the entire page or different elements.

That seems pretty cool.

And I think that is how a lot of websites now when you tab away from them, they pause, which really annoys me.

I'm assuming that's what they are using. Have you have you heard of this page visibility API before? Not heard of it. Yeah. Yeah. Not heard of it. No.

Now it's interesting. Broadcast channel API allows for basic communication between browsing context, that is Windows tabs, frames, and iframes,

And workers on the same origin. Yeah. No. That's weird. And it has it doesn't have support in the current version of Safari,

rid. Or Safari and Ios. So Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's probably why.

Yeah. I would I would rid. That the product that would be very hand handy for, like, desktop electron apps. Yeah. Totally. I think a lot of these things are like the native file system API.

Rid. The new file system API at 23% usage, I have not used this myself, but it allows you to manipulate the device's local file system.

And this has kind of partial support in Edge, Chrome, Safari, Opera, but not like full support anywhere. So it this one's looks rid. Super iffy. But I would imagine if you have, like, a hyper specific app case, the file system access API would be pretty exciting. Last one rid. We have here is a web share API. A lot of people have not heard of the web share API, and,

this is such a simple API that you can use to literally share things. So the best example I can give is that when you're done your Wordle And you wanna share your actual answer with people, there's a share button. And then that will pop up the native Android or Ios or whatever, rid Share dialogue, and then you can airdrop it or SMS it to somebody. And I think that's really cool because, like, you don't have to like, there's no JavaScript, rid Airdrop library that you have to integrate into your app. It's just web share, and then that hooks into the native share, rid. Things that are in your end. And if you wanna simply just copy some text or if you want to send it to text message for somebody or if you wanna literally anything.

Rid. That is a very easy one. It's promise based. It's a totally modern library and works, right really well across the board. So I'd check that one out if you haven't yet heard of it. Yeah. Unfortunately, not a ton of support there for it.

Not supported I just said it was. What is the support? It's not supported in Firefox. It's partial support in Chrome, partial support in Edge, no port in Opera. It is on Safari and iOS Safari.

Android is is kind of there. Chrome and Firefox are the big ones for Android. Those Do you have support for it? Oh, yeah. It it's it's not it's not perfect. It's not like It looks like it is

a 100% supported on All the mobile browsers and not very well supported on desktop. Okay. Well, then But Yeah. That's Yeah. I think that's okay because sharing stuff On your phone is always a pain in the butt. Whereas if you're on a desktop, you have a URL. You can you can share it with somebody. But, like, you can also use this for, like, images and stuff like that. It says, so can I use has it at 94%

for mobile and 87% for overall? So that's pretty good. That's pretty good. It's They're getting there. That's pretty good. You know what also is is pretty good? Better than pretty good.

Rid. I'm I'm feeling a little bit better here because now I get to, tell Wes to talk about Linode. Wes, would you want to talk about Linode? Linode.

It's pretty good. That's what they're No. That's not what I said. It's better than pretty good.

Linode is cloud computing that developers rid. Trust. So if you need Linux solutions and services for your business, for your project, for whatever it is that you need to do, you wanna check out Linode, whether you are Simply just hosting a node application and you wanna throw it up on a server somewhere, or if you need dedicated, CPU or high memory, bare Bare metal, Kubernetes, block storage, object storage. You can put your images on there. They have databases. They got everything you need to run your Services. They're gonna give you a $100 in free credit, so try it out. You got a note app. You're like, oh, I wanna get this thing online, but I don't wanna necessarily pay for it. Rid. Try out Linode. They're gonna give you a [email protected]/ syntax. Thank you, Linode, for sponsoring.

Sick.

Yep. Yep. Yep. What's the next section we got there, Scott? Alright. Next section is libraries. And, since we are JavaScript people, you know, we we gotta love libraries. Rid. Right. That's what we're we're working with these days. Front end frameworks is the 1st section here in libraries, and you can kinda see satisfaction over time. You know what? The the only real beef I have with this chart is that, like, svelte satisfaction went from 89 to 90%, but it still went down in the chart. So, like, to to me, like, that doesn't necessarily represent. And, like, even, like, Preact went from 84 to 74, but it rid. Looks like it's taken a big old tumble down, and it's not really. You know? So I don't I don't know about the representation of the data here, but it it is interesting rid to see kind of just where people are feeling, like, on these things. You know, it is it's really, exciting for me, Personally, if you're looking at the, satisfaction, interest, usage, and awareness to see that Svelte Satisfaction is still high, high, high. It went up from it's gone up consecutively every year. Interest has, gone up every year. Usage has gone from 8% to 15 to 20, and awareness has gone from 75 to 85 to 94. So people are really, really finding out about Svelte.

So Yeah. As somebody who's a big fan, I'm I'm happy to see that. I think that that's a very good

indicator of rid. What should you focus on next? Probably Svelte's a good a good use case to focus on next because it has rid. Very high interest, very high awareness, very high satisfaction, and kinda low usage. Rid. Meaning that it's probably getting set to explode, in in terms of that that usage, which is really exciting. You take a look at the actual huge usage from the top down. We have React, 80% people, 54% Angular, 51 view, 20% view or svelte, and that goes React, amber, lit, alpine, solid, and stimulus. So, rid. React still still dominating on on the top there. It's been 80% for 3 years straight. Hasn't hasn't gone there. But You know what's wild here is that React

awareness has been at a 100% every single year. So everybody knows React. Everybody knows about React. That's the one. So it's kinda interesting. I I really like seeing this. It's kinda interesting rid. To see. Can you imagine being the developer who takes this the survey in 2022 and be like, wait. What is this React thing? What is this?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it could be someone brand new to Well, yeah. To to development. Never have have heard of frameworks at all. Let's actually even do, like so React, Angular view, Svelte, Preact.

Preact is like a fast version of React, a smaller, faster well, not faster. A smaller version of React. Rid. Ember, has been around for a long time, been a a player.

Lit is a web components based framework from Google.

Alpine JS West. Can you tell us about Alpine JS? Do you know anything about it? Yeah. Alpine JS is the, like,

you render your server.

It's sprinkles. Right? We talked we had a show about sprinkles. So you you render your HTML out, and then you have your, like, rid Your loops and stuff. Remember Angular one was very much like that where Mhmm. You just wrote the, ng dash 4 in each all the attribute. It's rid. Very similar to that.

So people who are writing server applications that are rendered out in It's very popular in the PHP community because, maybe you just have a good traditionally, server rendered application, which is funny because we're going back to that as well. Rid that's very popular in those look those, those things. I've I have had a a couple of podcasts I've listened to with I think it's Caleb, the author of Alpine JS, and rid People absolutely love it. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's really especially if you just need to, like you need to make, like, a couple little pieces of your your website dynamic. Rid. Like, what are your options there? Well, you could write some vanilla JavaScript and and then pick it up from there, or you could throw jQuery in there, or you can Just throw Alpine JS on there and sort of code the code it right in your templating language that you've you're been using already.

We also have, the weird one. Stimulus kind of stands out here as not being one that people talk about a lot, but this is part of the whole Hotwire, stack from, re Basecamp.

So it's Hotwire Stimulus, and then they have, like, something else, apparently.

No. I've I've never really heard of this Until this really I I don't pay attention to stimulus, but it looks like it's very

data attribute focused. So yeah. Yeah. It's rid Very similar to Alpine JS. Seems popular in the Rails community as well. I think we're gonna see I bet next year, rid. Our predictions will be that we'll see a lot more, as we people say, oh, maybe we shouldn't have built this entire application in a JavaScript file. Rid. But I just needed like, again, just sprinkles added to that application, then you can you can reach for that type of thing.

Rid. I'm just looking at the positive negative split.

Would not use again, let's see the largest percentages.

Rid React is 11%, would not use again. Vue, 9. Angular has the biggest one. I feel Like Angular and Ember don't have the best representation in this Totally.

In the survey. And if you were to look at the Stack Overflow Survey, which seems to be a bit of a different audience that has a much, larger I would say Angular has a much Larger representation in that. So, similar, we say this all the time on the podcast. Just because we don't use Angular doesn't mean it sucks, and it seems to be People say that as well because of what? 26% will never use Angular. And I think also that people get mad at the difference between Angular and Angular JS. So

Whatever. Yeah. I honestly don't even know the difference, and I should know the difference.

Oh, man. You're gonna make some people.

Rid. Interesting is, like, kind of, like, the trends.

You know, since 2016 to 2021, I if you look at React, would not use again has Consistently increased every single year. 4% to 4.4 to 6.8 To 8.6 to 10 point to 13 point.

I I you know? I mean, maybe this trend's gonna continue to grow. I I think the problem with React is is largely that, you know, people be people find out that, you know, you could do the same things easier and other things, and Maybe they don't need React for its rendering engine prowess or its powerful features, and maybe they just need to add some dynamic stuff to their page, and maybe React isn't the best fit for that. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Totally. Imagine imagine an if statement. That'd be sweet.

Rid. It is it is also kind of funny that so so many of these things do see a kind of similar thing where even view 1.3 to 2 to 2.8 to 6% to 7.3 to 10%.

People are just, like, slowly saying, yeah. I'm not gonna use this over time. I don't that's interesting to me. Yeah. I think that's that's what like, literally anything, though. Like, if if you were to look at, like, jQuery, that would that would happen as well. I think any any framework that has been around for long enough will eventually start to trend down because people move on to Frameworks that have solved the problems that they have hit, in it. And I guarantee we'll be sitting here in, State of JS 2027, and we're gonna see poor old Svelte, trending down because there's something new.

Yeah.

Rid. And, like like, that that happens. Right? Like, you you can't you can't be at the top forever.

But, rid. Yeah. It's it's interesting to see people finding more, user friendly framework stuff that's a little bit easier, rid. To use and saying, like, you know what? I thought I'd love to react, but I love this even more because it's It does the same thing, but it's way easier to actually write this stuff. Totally.

This is very interesting. How happy are you with the state of front end frameworks? 2% very unhappy, 2.5 unhappy, 14 points, 14% neutral, and 44% happy, and 22 or 21% very happy. That seems high on the happy for me. Like, I Yeah. Everybody's happy. And I I always respond happy, but, like, I'm surprised Because I feel like people typically are like, thanks. This all stinks.

But maybe that's just, like, the people who are you know, that like that online. But, rid. Yeah. No. I I'm happy that everyone's happy. It seems like things have have really,

I don't know, gotten interesting lately. Yeah. Rid. It's even if if you look at it at the percentage of people that actually responded to that question, it's 70 rid. 8% of people are either happy or very happy Yeah. Which is we're in a we're in a good spot right now. Yeah. Can't deny that. Like to complain, but, yeah, let's take a break for One of our sponsors move on to back end. Yeah. One of our sponsors. Who could that be? That sponsor is

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Do all of that as well as engage and understand what your customers are thinking with heat maps, Scroll maps and data driven decision making.

This is kinda neat because LogRocket, for a long time, has just been this video session replay, which is, Don't get me wrong. A very cool feature. In fact, this allows you to see all of your errors and bugs happen in a video replay.

But now You can also really, get a handle on what your air users are think. It's more than just errors and exceptions. It's like understanding user behavior in a different way. So they have some new feature bullet points, proactively surface issues that impact user conversion rates, surface technical user UX issues, rid. Easily build custom funnels based on events like page view clicks, checkouts, custom events, see how users journey through your site.

This is really pretty neat, and LogRocking continues to innovate here with adding new features like this throughout their site, allowing you to really understand what your users are doing, where they're Getting hung up and how you can smooth out some of those rough edges. Right? Let's say you're you're running your hand along your website and you get a little Splinter, this is gonna say, hey. You missed a spot here. Let's go, sand that down just a little bit more. So check it out at log rocket.com forward slash syntax, and you can get the 1st 14 days for free. This is definitely one of those services you want to try. So thank you so much for LogRocket for sponsoring. Alright. Let's talk about back end frameworks. This one's really interesting to me. And they

to give you an idea, they talk about, SvelteKit as a back end framework, Next. Yes. Astro, Express, Nest, Nuxt, Blitz, Gatsby.

Interesting that they put Gatsby as a back end. I mean, same with Astro because it's it's a static generator. Because it's like it is server generated, technically.

Yeah. Man, Gatsby took a tumble. This so they went from 89% satisfaction in 2019 to 51%

and even worse interest, 66 to 39%.

I think what happened, and even this myself, is that, People hit the limitations of Gatsby as they started to build bigger and bigger sites. And we we had a show. Those those issues are solved, But it it might have been too late for a lot of people, and then they they moved to other things like Next. Js,

allow them to that solve those issues for them. Yeah. You're totally right. And I you know, I mean, if you think about it, when Gatsby first came out, Next. Js couldn't do static. It was server only At that, there was nothing like it at all in the view space. There was no Svelte SvelteKit Sapper. Alright. Maybe Sapper existed, But there was nothing like that within the Svelte ecosystem, let alone no one was using Svelte anyways, really.

People were using it, but it wasn't, You know, a large percentage, not like today. And in the angular space, I can't think of a specific static site generator that did anything like Gatsby did. So when Gatsby came out, It checked all these boxes of, you can work with data. They had the image component stuff. It was super lightning fast, and it worked really well. And then over time, you got Next. Js. Got more features.

You know, there's every every view. There's a lot of different view competition out there. And, again, people are hitting those limitations where they're saying, you know, actually, I need user accounts or I need this or that where a static site is not gonna necessarily work work for me in that way.

Or they were hit like you and hitting issues where the build times would take too long with a gazillion images or whatever.

And I think that that was really just it. I mean, no competition plus, you know,

issues with what it means to be a static site generator kind of probably. Totally. Yeah. Rid Caught up to it. And I also like, people are like, oh, maybe we don't need to prerender the entire website. We can just render it on demand and and cache that, and that's rid. That's exactly what, Next. Js does. That's exactly what, Remix does.

So it's kinda interesting people are like, oh, maybe we swung a little bit too hard rid. On the static site,

generation train. We could really do a whole show on that because, like, if you think about it, like Like, the best of both worlds. Right? We're talking best of both worlds here would be a tool that easily does server side rendering with caching when you want it, But also for, like, very specific pages that are never gonna change, the about page, the those types of things, the home page, statically statically prerender Those pages as well, cache them, all that stuff. And in the server the framework that does that the easiest is probably the one, that works the best. Totally. Rid

what is also interesting to me here I should stop saying things are interesting. But, Express staying pretty consistent. Satisfaction, interest going down a little, rid. Usage going up a little, but a whole bunch of frameworks kinda pegging above, rid Express sort of that they're brand new to the scene. Astro remix, felt kit, it's Fastify, which is rid. I I really like to see that as well. Everyone loves Express, but if something can be a little bit easier

or or a little bit better, a little bit more integrated than people are reaching for those things as well. Yeah. I'm happy to see Fastify on this list. That's what we use for our API. I tend to really like it. I think it's a nice framework to use. But, again, yeah, a lot of these things that are taking maybe a little bit more interest here are just Easier unless, you have to do a little bit less than what you're doing with Express. But, hey, that's the way it is. Right? Totally.

Let's move to build tools. You wanna do that? Before we do that, we talked about the happy with the front end tools. Let's talk about happy with the back end tools because the back end tools, 1% for very unhappy, 3.3 for unhappy, 27% for neutral, and then 36 for happy, and 13 for very happy. It it feels like they're not as happy with the back end framework. No. I tend to agree with that myself. Although, let me tell you, if you're using, like, Remix Yeah.

I have been to the edge and back. I have seen what the way the back of my work should be. I love Remix. So yeah. Rid. I I don't know. I think this this is I think this will will change next year. I think we're gonna start seeing a lot a lot less neutral, I think, in the back end space because I think people are interesting? Rid. Yeah. That like like, if you think about it, like, yeah, like, GraphQL is kind of bumbly and caching is kind of bumbly. And, rid. And, like, we kind of slam dunk the frameworks, the front end frameworks. Like, everyone's really happy there. And it does feel like

rid. Everything is now swinging not necessarily back, but a lot of our focus is moving towards server side frameworks That can help us. So I bet, yeah, we should do, like, some predictions next year. People will be much more happy with the back end of things. Yeah.

We all gotta we all gotta work on the back end, and that's cool.

Yeah. Gotta work your back end. Work it. Work it.

Okay. Let's get into build tools. Build tools. This one's really interesting to me, because, you know, what the The interesting thing about build tools is that we've we've kind of constantly seen this this, like, a march of build Tools will then come out and they'll be I mean, this is the same with anything. But in build tools, it almost feels like even more extreme where, like, you're either hot or you're not. You're in, you're out. And, some of these trains, I'm really happy that I miss, like, web Webpack. I don't know how to Webpack get a 95 Percent satisfaction rate. I don't know how that happened. I've never been a fan of it myself. Yeah. I've always been a fan of something that sits on top of Webpack, so I don't have to touch Webpack. I I you know? Oh, back in rid. 2017. But you gotta think, like, we were coming

in 2017, we're all using Gulp, and all of a sudden, you didn't have to rid. We had to configure it, but you could just, like, import images and CSS into your JavaScript files and especially if it was set up for you. It's funny that rid. Over the years, Webpack has gotten way better, but the satisfaction has gone down. Totally. And that's not the that's not because Webpack has gotten worse. It's because rid. People are exhausted with figuring it out and stuff way better stuff has hit the scene in terms of, Like, uses. Rollup was better than Webpack in 2017.

And here you Was it? It's yeah. I thought I thought well, I mean, in terms of API.

But yeah. I mean, like any of this stuff, like, it is interesting because so Webpack, Gulp, rid. Browserify? I'm surprised Browserify is even still at 33% satisfaction or 26% interest or Who's still using Browserify? 4% usage. Yeah. Who is still using Browserify?

Yeah. Obviously, like, a a third of, all JavaScript devs are. So That's wild. Probably just offended a third of the people listen to this podcast. But, like, again, I think That's that just goes to show that people get stuff set up, and they're like, don't Don't touch it. Don't don't move my cheese. Yeah. Don't move my cheese. They're not like Scott, where they freaking rip it out every every 6 months and put the new thing in. Quiet.

Yeah. What how many how many different build tools did I did I try out last year? I tried lot, but, yeah, it's kind of my job, I guess. Yeah. I like, what I'm trying to think, like, my own course platform started on Gulp,

then moved to Gulp and Browserify, rid. Then move to, Webpack shortly, then move to parcel 1, and then move to parcel 2. So that's 5 in maybe 8 years, I've done 5 moves. Oh.

I've done I've done 2 3 22ndrobes.

No. Because it my my platform started on on on Meteor, and it was on Meteor up until, like, 2020.

And then I moved it to Snowpack, and then I moved it to Vite.

And then it's still on Vite. So there. Whatever. Yeah. And, honestly, that's That's the that's how you get not scared of these things. Just to give you another example, talk about the snowblower. I was always very scared of the belt on that snowblower breaking ready. Because it is very intricate. It's wound around 7 or 8 pulleys. It has to go in a certain order. And I was always very scared. I was like, I should probably replace that, but I didn't. Rid. And now that I've spent an hour on my back looking at the thing, I'm very comfortable with it, and I'm I'm not scared about it anymore. And, Maybe you should do things that scare you is is the what? Anyways, what else do we have here? Veet coming out of nowhere.

83% interest.

What is the 30% usage, 1st year. So be just sorta,

like, man, coming out of nowhere. You know what? We are really like to so, like, you gotta give gotta give credit to snowpack for, like, coming out initially, I think, with that initial flavor. And then was kind of like, what if we did what Snowpack was doing, but just slightly different? And then it kind of, like, scooped up a lot of that market share. It's it was interesting. Yeah. Rid. 89%

webpack usage, which is still super high.

And and if you look at awareness, it goes webpack, rid. Tsc CLI, that's TypeScript CLI.

Gulp, still 90% awareness. What is the usage of Gulp? 63%.

So, again, these tools, they don't go slowly.

Once once they are replaced by other things, people don't Go out at Rome. 34%

awareness of Rome. What is the usage of 1%. And also 1% 1%. 1% in 2020. Heard of it. Nobody's using it. 1% in 2020 and 1% in 2021, 1% of you are lying who took the survey because ain't nobody using that thing yet because it's not it's not ready. It's not done. What are you No. Who what are you using?

Wow. Man, I love I love seeing all these these types of things. I know I could dive into this for so long. Yeah. I think we should do another show on this. We haven't even hit it. Let's rid. Let's scroll down to the happiness of build tools.

If you look at percentage of people who responded to this question, it is 60% are either happy or very happy, with the build tools. Again, I'm gonna say that's gonna drop jump at least 15% rid Next year, just because build tools, if you take a look at most people are still using Webpack or Gulp or things like that. And you take a look at, rid. Vite, Parcel 2, a lot of the new ES build stuff.

Man, it's stuff's getting good. It only takes, like, one time of seeing just how fast the VIT is to say, like, I don't need to use anything else ever again. You know? Like, it's too fast. Rid. It's it's it's it is honestly, it's too fast. I don't have that, like, sit and wait time. None that's honestly so good because you save something, you tab over it or whatever. It's just there.

And even at, like, a large site or whatever, it doesn't get any slower where we all know that, like, a slow build tool can just disrupt your productivity so much. So for me, having Vite here, having ES build, having those types of tools where the the emphasis rid. As as I'm just pure let's go fast speed,

I gotta love it. One funny thing, you're talking about you don't have to wait anymore, is that, like, I used to go rid. The washroom or grab a coffee when I did a NPM install, but now I'm using PMPM on a couple of my projects. There's no time for the bathroom when you use rid.

There's no p break with a p NPM. They added the p directly to the NPM, so now you don't have to do it yourself.

Rid. Where should we go to now? Talk about monorepo tools? Do we have time? Who do we have right now? Yeah. Oh my goodness. We're 50 minutes in. No. We'll we'll have to do a 2nd episode on this. We will have to catch you next next week to talk about monorepo tools. We still have to talk about one of our sponsors, which is FreshBooks.

Rid. FreshBooks is really gonna start to come in handy now because it's getting into tax time. That's right. It is. I,

Already sent all of my stuff over to my account, and I'm on it this year. For your personal taxes or your biz? For for my business taxes. My business taxes are, rid. I put them year like, they end on December 31st.

So it's kinda nice because I my personal and my business is all at one time, and, rid. You don't have to wait for donation receipts or anything like that as a as a corporation. So, I got it rolling, like, 1st week of January, And it's great because you just you can add your accountant directly into your FreshBooks. They can see all of your different currencies, all the in my case, I've got lots of HST That I've collected and that I've paid out, and those need to be, zeroed out or if if the government needs to give me interest here or if I have to pay some out.

Rid really, really nice. You can see all of your expenses, all of your income in your invoices, what's not paid. You can follow those up automatically.

It's the best way to run your business, rid. For your books. Check it out. Freshbooks.comforward/syntax.

You're gonna get a 30 day, no credit card required free trial.

Guarantee you are gonna like it. Check it out. FreshBooks.comforward/andax.

Thank you, FreshBooks.

Sick. Cool. Well, yeah. That is really it for right now. We have so much more to talk about.

It's huge survey.

Lot of stuff to dive into still. Yeah. So we'll be covering the rest of the survey in the next Episode.

I like I said, I could talk about this stuff all day just because even though, you know, this survey is surveying only the people who answered the survey. And we we know it's like a it's rid. The results of the stove, it's still extremely interesting stuff to to get a a visibility into what's going on in our industry or how people are feeling, what they're using.

Ready. So, tune in next week when we will finish it up. We got monorepo tools. We have resources. What's the best podcast, to listen to in web development.

Did you see that one, Scott? I didn't. No. I didn't see who the best podcast was, Wes. I didn't even look at it. I wouldn't even think to look at that one. The thing I took away from that is 90%

of people don't listen to our podcast, so we've got a lot of work to do. We do. Yeah. What's up with that? Rid 90% of you? Yeah. Well, not 90% of you. You're listening. We gotta talk about the 90% people are are not listening. Anyways, let's, let's wrap it up here. We'll move into some sick pics, and we'll pick it up on the next show. Do you have any sick pics for me today? Sick pics. Yes. I do.

I have a sick pick at another Netflix show. Man, I've been Netflixing. You know me? Netflixing and and, yeah, all that stuff.

So what I you know, we you know, me, I love a good scam, swindle, those types of things.

There was, like, a a podcast a little while ago about this, rid. The influencer girl who, basically went through New York spending and stealing a bunch of money and stuff, And they turned it into a which is funny. It's called Inventing Anna. And they turned it into a TV drama, which I was Kind of weary about the decision to make it a drama instead of a documentary kind of thing because her story is very good. Is her rid is very interesting and one of those things where it's, like, very gripping.

I I definitely don't feel that way after watching this anymore because the The series is great. So it's a TV drama about a a fake German heiress who is, like, going through New York kind of, like, scamming her way through things And just leaving, a wake of financial ruin in her her wake or whatever.

I found this to be very good. I already knew the story and still really loved it.

My wife, Courtney, just devoured the show. So Inventing Anna is very good, well produced, well made.

Very good. Awesome. I am going to sick pick I sick pick this Or as part of our I think part of our, Christmas show a couple years ago. And this is the Everlane uniform sweater.

And Everlane has A line of stuff that's called the uniform line, and it is, like, super tough and super high quality.

And I got the crewneck sweater from them, I don't know, maybe 2 years ago, and I wear all the time, and it is still in Such good shape. And my wife just got me the black version for my birthday as well because I apparently has rid. 365 day guarantee on it so you can they could you could wear it as a uniform. And if anything comes apart After heavy wear, they'll replace it, which is kinda cool.

But I just just appreciate the high quality of it. Because I wear a lot of, like, hoodies and and crewnecks and stuff. And Some of the cheap ones, they get all stretched out and they look sloppy after a while, and this one does not. So if you're looking for a nice quality sweater, check out the Everlane, rid. 365 crew neck. I'll I'll put a link in the show notes.

Sick.

I am going to shamelessly plug level up tutorials .com.

That's right.

For the first time ever, I'm shamelessly plugging level up tutorials .com, which is the tutorial site that I own and operate, And we have a new tutorial course every single month. The latest course is on Keystone with Amy Dutton, and she does such an awesome job. She's infectious. She's so Much fun to listen to, and she's a great teacher. And the course that I am going to be releasing, and, we're doing actually this new thing, Wes, rid. In in so today's March 2nd.

Funny that the day after my birthday that this show will be released.

And we, on March 3rd, on level up tutorials YouTube. So if you're listening to this right now, I'll include a link to the show notes. We're gonna be doing our 1st ever course drop Where I live announce the course that I've already done, but I'm in a live a live show off the new course that we're going to be releasing on The end of that day. So it's so cool. I'm very excited. And, it's on 3 d in Svelte. So I will post the link to that. It's gonna be on YouTube. You can check it out. It'll be a part of that course drop. It's gonna be fun.

Caitlin Bloom will be interviewing me about the course, and it's just gonna be a blast. So, check it out. Rid. I'm going to shamelessly plug all my courses. Check it out. Westboss.comforward/courses.

I'll specifically zero in on beginner JavaScript if you wanna rid. Get better at JavaScript. If you wanna learn about all the stuff that we talked about today, you can do that. It's for absolute beginners all the way up to intermediate brush ups. Somewhere you're like, I I know JavaScript, but, like, I don't feel a 100% confident in it. If you wanna check that out, go to beginner javascript.com.

Use coupon code syntax. That'll get you $10 rid. Off.

Alright. That's it for today. Thanks for tuning in. Let us know what you thought about the state of JS. Alright. Tweet us at Syndax FM, And we will catch you on Monday. Cool. Peace. Peace.

Head on over to syntax.fm for a full archive of all of our shows.

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