Were We Wrong? 2022 Predictions Revisited

You're listening to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Strap yourself in and get ready. Here is Scott Talinski and Wes Bos.

Welcome to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. We are Going to take a look at our 2022 predictions and see were we wrong, were we right, or almost always right on this podcast. So, I imagine they're all gonna be right. Some kind of interesting stuff and and looking at serverless and edge functions and developer tooling and typescript, GraphQL, all kinds of good stuff. Rid we are sponsored by 3 awesome companies today. Sentry, the error exception and performance tracking tool.

Sanity, They are the place to put all of your content for your application website, you name it. And Auth0, they provide multi factor authentication, rid And biometrics to log in to your application. Actually, kinda cool thing. Chat GPT is log in with auth 0. I noticed that when I was logging in the other day. So they and they handled that like a champ. I'm sure they were getting millions and millions of sign ups in, like, one day.

We'll talk about all of them partway through the episode. My name is Wes Bos. I'm a developer from Canada. With me, as always, is mister Scott Talinski. How are you doing today, Scott? Ready. Hey. I'm doing good. We've had just a number of technical issues today, and I am

I'm struggling in that regard. I'm sick. I'm hitting a bunch of technical issues. I'm not my best.

I'm doing great. How yeah. I'm I'm feeling I'm feeling very happy, Especially because we just went over some of, when we were prepping for the show, we went over some of our predictions from last year's episode of the same type of episode, and it was really fun to do. So I'm excited to hash this stuff out with you on this episode and talk about some new predictions. This is honestly stuff that I I really like and really enjoy. So I know. Me too.

Yeah. But let's get into these, 2022 predictions.

So one of our first off the bat is that SvelteKit and Svelte would continue to gain in popularity of which I would have to say we're right. And the fact that, SvelteKit just dropped their version one release, you know, right now before the end of the year is is fantastic. You know, I maybe thought it would have happened a little bit sooner, but, you know, I'm very happy with where the end result came out of here. So I think Svelte has definitely taken a bit of people's, caught people's attention in a positive way. Yeah. I was,

I I was part of the Not part of it, but I was watching this Svelte launch party just kinda seeing everything. And I read through the entire docs of SvelteKit, and I was like, this is This is awesome. Like, this is really nice, really straightforward. The the basically, how you approach writing a component, rid. Writing a component that needs to be server side rendered, writing a, handler, like a serverless a function, basically, that We'll load in data or fetch data or handle in the request writing middleware.

They're called hooks.

It's fucking I was like, oh, this this kind of has rid Everything I want, and it's all just in this, like, very simple, beautiful API. Like, it's like I got to the end of the SvelteKit docs, and I was like, that's it? And then I was like, well, like, what else do I want? And I couldn't think of anything. You know? Well, it's also I and it's funny because you say that's it

Because the docs are pretty succinct. But Yeah. When I was doing my my course, which if you're out there and you want a course for Svelte rid. It's on level up that video right now. A little shameless plug early in the episode. Get it? Get it? Yeah. I I I did this course, and I I've been working on it for so long, but, rid. When I was recording, I was just like, holy cow.

I I'm gonna do, like, a 1000000000 videos for this because the feature set does keep going.

It's one of those icebergs where, like, to sink the Titanic or to, I guess that's not a good metaphor.

It's one of those things where all of the stuff that you'll need is at the top. It's easy. It's small. And then if you need to get into more intense things. It's all there available to you as well. So okay. Yeah. I I think that's, just a fantastic API overall. Our next one is Next. Js. Our prediction was that, rid. Next. Js will roll out some sort of data layer.

I don't believe they did that. They did roll out, which is one thing we've been asking for forever, nested routing, and, That is really, really nice. You can use it with the file based routing, and it's rid Pretty neat how they approach that. They did not roll out a data layer. They're still agnostic on that type of thing. But one thing that kinda did happen is we started to see, rid like Tanner Lindsey's React query is now just 10 stack query, and then there's adapters for all of them. The one thing we're seeing a lot If people are just writing libraries in JavaScript and then exposing those libraries for different frameworks, which is really neat. It's really neat, especially because

you shouldn't have to abandon all of your tools when you're switching to another framework.

No. That's just One of those things. We also said that, web components would get more shine, things like OpenUI.

Now I haven't heard a ton from OpenUI, but I did use more web components in 2022 myself, personally. Our our video player is now a web component. I'm I'm trying to think we have we have a few web components in our code base, and they all are great. I like them. Yeah. Yeah. The I just checked the open UI,

GitHub, and it looks rid like it is very active. So if for those who don't know, Open UI is not a framework or UI framework or something like that. Basically, what They are doing is, they are figuring out what built in UI Elements are needed in the browser. So they they look at all the frameworks out there and say, okay. Well, they all have a, a multi select dropdown.

And they all have a card. They all have a date picker where you can pick a start and end date.

And Ideally, who knows how long if this will ever happen, we will have these primitives in the browser that are ideally styleable as well. And, I could see them being implemented as, like, web components with their own Shadow DOM. Yeah. Better default elements, essentially.

We also talked quite a bit about, Rust's popularity, which has really, really, I think, continued to blow up in terms of everybody.

You know, everybody at the start of the year might have been hearing the words rust or whatever. A couple years ago, rust was even starting to get some shine here and there. But now it's, like, almost a ubiquitous joke that whenever anything happens, it's like, oh, are they rewriting it in Rust? Or during the the Svelte, Oh, Suck hit launch. That was, like, one of the big questions asked. Oh, is Suck going to be rewritten in Rust? Is that going to happen? Is this Suck? And it's funny because, like, that just is now the the thing to to present.

Okay. We're doing a new version, whatever. Well, it's gonna be written in Rust, Obviously, and it's going you know? So, you know, I I think this was dead on here. Rust has just continued to evolve.

Now Rome, we also talked a little bit about Rome, which is like a formatter and intentionally trying to be a whole bunch of things. And I actually rid. Had tried the Rome formatter in my code base, and, unfortunately, it was crashing all the time. And I don't I don't I don't wanna blame that on Rome. It could have been any number of things. But, yeah, Rome is still a thing, you know, written by the the creator of Babel. It's A formatter and linter for TypeScript and JavaScript and, eventually, JSON, HTML, markdown, and CSS as well. It's a tent you know, going to become a pilot, a compiler, and a bundler, and a testing library as well.

I Just think by the time any of these things actually launch now, we'll probably have something else that we're using or other things. Yeah. Feels a little

Tough there. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's hard to say. Like, I don't know if they they missed the boat on that or or maybe we will once it's all done. But, like like, Dino is Also rolling out all of these things themselves. Node is launching their own type testing Yeah. Yeah. Tools. Node has It has it now. They have their own test runner built right into node. Yep. So kind of kind of interesting, and it's it makes more sense for me at least to use the one that's built into the The framework that you're using. Totes.

So I ended up writing my first couple lines of Rust just a couple days ago. You did. I'm so proud of you. Yeah. I know it. And I like it. It's it's the syntax is very JavaScripty. It's it isn't. It isn't. That's actually I was always saying that, like so I I picked up Rust right around the same time that I was learning TypeScript.

And Rust made me so much better at writing TypeScript because the types in Rust are very TypeScript esque, you know, usage of generics and things like that, but it forces you to do it. If your if your code isn't typed correctly, you can't use it. We're like, JavaScript, it it's just like, hey. Stop. Don't go any further, and you could just walk right by the security guard. Right? Having that actual blocker there made me look way better, I think. Rid. I I love following Jared from Bun because he's tweeting

tweeting about what he's building on. And one thing he posted the other day was we try to implement rid. All low level APIs in Rust. Meaning that, like, if if you go to your your browser in your console and you write console dot log, It will say or there's a couple of them. And, basically, if you ever see the square brackets native code in your console, that means the past that, rid The implementation is in a different language that is low level. It's no more JavaScript. And he said, we try to write all of our low level APIs in Rust because then there is no parse time and whatnot in JavaScript.

I thought that was really interesting. So I bet We will oh, this is not predictions, but, yeah, Rust definitely definitely popped up much more. Our next one was, Serverless and cloud functions become much more popular. Absolutely with this, all of the frameworks out there have some sort of Integration with both serverless functions and edge functions.

Next. Js, their middleware is written with edge, Meaning that it's a kind of a we have a whole show on what hedge functions are. You go back and listen to it. But that has become extremely popular, especially with the Uptick of Dino and Bun, get getting really popular and being meant to be run on the edge. Next one is rid. Tailwind won crease in popularity. That is definitely true. I was just taking a look at their installs, rid. In January, we're at, 1,750,000.

And as of today, They're at 4,500,000, so over doubled in popularity according to NPM Trends.

Definitely becoming popular. We talked about open props rid About a year ago. Mhmm.

And, professor Adam Argo, we've had him on the show before. I I rid. Seems really, really nice, but I haven't heard too many people. Maybe it just needs a little bit more time. Definitely a big fan of this. Yeah. I haven't heard,

heard, too many people picking this up, but I I wrote something with it. So, I, you know, I did the Gquery docs So I was working on gquery in this, and I I really liked it. Basically, you know what Open Props is. If you haven't heard of it, it's It's just like a a ton of preset CSS variables, and therefore, it's doing less than maybe, like, an atomic CSS framework like Tailwind would be doing, but you have all of these preset CSS variables that are super easy to drop into your your page rid. Your your your site at any given point with a single import statement, and all of a sudden you just have shadows. You don't have to worry about Having to code out your own shadows and and those types of things or even colors.

Yeah. And I actually really did like working in it, but I haven't I haven't picked it up for too many things because I did my own version of this essentially for level up.

The one thing that kills me about Tailwind is, rid Like, Tailwind is is divisive and you either absolutely love it or you don't like the approach to it. And Mhmm. That's Fine. To to like it or to not like it or to use it or to not use it. But there there is very, you see, like, at least rid. Every week, there's 1 person who takes a screenshot of it and says that this is ugly. How maintainable is this? And, like, it's just this never ending rid. Circle argument of it, and it's it's kind of exhausting at this point because, people just write the same thing over and over again.

Yeah. Tailwind's tough because it is. It's you have, like, haters of it, and then you have the big fans, and both of them are very loud. You know, I I've even said something, not positive about Tailwind at some point, and that they came for me. Oh, yeah. I I had pitchforks At the doors, and I you know, it's not even, like, saying that negative things about it. So it is, like, one of those things where the the fans and the anti fans, Just like with so many things online is what makes me like text too. Yeah. It makes me, like, not wanna go anywhere near it because I don't wanna be.

I I just I don't even wanna talk about it because Yeah. If if you say anything critical, you get hammered. And if and likewise, if you say anything positive, people are like, It stinks.

You know, I Yeah. I have that with, Wyze products as well. Anytime I post Anything about my end? Any Anything about Wyze, you get you get or or really any technical stuff. You get the worst people coming out on both sides to, like Like, I am my personality is not based on me using a Wyze camera. I do not care if you do not like it. And then these guys find this, like, Article from 8 years ago where there was a minor security issue and they dealt with it. And, it has nothing to do with any of the products that all of us use, and it's just it's so Exhausting that now and whenever I'm like, do I really need to tweet about this? Is that guy gonna come out of the woodwork? You know?

I I know. And I had tweeted something about one of Elon Musk's dumb choices lately, and I, like, regretted it immediately because You get the people who, like nobody's thinking about it logically. You get the people who who just are angry at the situation. You get the people who are gonna defend it every Yeah. Decision no matter what. It's like, why did I even bother? Like, what?

I was having beers with a buddy the other day, and we're talking about all of our friends that, rid. Went nuts during the pandemic because every there was a couple like a while during the pandemic that everybody became, like, an Instagram warrior For or against all closures, vaccines, everything that happened in the pandemic, and and, we're just laughing at that because of how rid Like, a lot of people have ruined a lot of friendships, and, like, I was having beers with a buddy who I don't agree with, and we I we We're laughing because we're like, you're both idiots. You're both way too obnoxious. You're both so hard on either side of this type of thing that, like, you're not you're not convincing anybody of anything being this obnoxious.

Yeah. You know, there is some I you know, I don't wanna get into any divisive topics into this, But there is something that is, like, very true about oftentimes the people who are yelling about this stuff online.

Rid. I don't know if they really think that what they're yelling about has the opportunity to convince anyone Yes. Otherwise.

And maybe they're just venting. And, like, they're that's valid. Right? You can just vent. That's something you can do. But, like, I do think it is important to say, like, are you trying To get people on your side or not and and maybe, like, take a look at your approach that way. I'm not really one to talk here because I'm like, rid. I'm I'm definitely more of, like, an emotional type of person where I will make tweets or or things like that based on, like, emotional, how I'm feeling rather than, like, if it's a smart decision or not at the time. So Yeah. Yeah. We'll find something there. Event. Yeah. Totally.

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What were they? Rid I don't think we have anything about

Copilot in the predictions. When did Copilot come out? Yeah. That is interesting. You know what? Copilot might Been one of those ones that October 29,

2021.

So very I don't I don't know that I had rid to it until the beginning of this year. I'm curious.

I don't remember when I got access to it, but if if it didn't make it into that episode, then rid And that was like a major thing of this year. What else? Warp became super popular. I'm I'm full time on Warp now. Rid AI integration.

I guess we're not talking about our yeah. I I it's become huge. Fig, Very, very popular integration to it.

A couple people are using Starship as a alternative rid.

Prompt? So Yeah. It's it's is that a sage alternative? Yep. I was using that. So big gear for dev tools.

Rust, there you go. Big tool for Rust, big tool for for dev tools.

And I think these things, like you You mentioned are gonna continue to grow.

I guess we'll we'll cover that in our predictions episode.

Yeah. But, yeah, these these types of tools for so long have just been Sitting in their own pool of, like, stagnant water where nothing was changing at all.

I I'd used the basically, the same Iterm two setup forever, and I rid So that hasn't changed, but you'd think that terminals at some point would start to get smarter, and I I think we're finally at that price of this year.

Next up, we had a prediction for CSS container queries, layers, and more, a bunch of new CSS filters or features. And this one largely, I think, was maybe a little bit early considering Firefox still has not launched CSS container queries. Although, I did see that the issue is moving along, so I don't know if there's, like, a a release date at this point or anything like that. But I guess it's not To oh, yeah. It looks like get this, Wes. Can I use has been updated? Container queries are in Firefox 109.

Alright.

I think it's safe to say that container queries coming in just in the nick of time here Has meant that we were dead on with this prediction.

Let's use this container.

I don't know if we said that everybody we'll watch. I we go back and listen to the episodes like contain everyone We'll use container queries all the time for everything, but I doubt I said that.

So, yeah, container queries, you know, they became a thing.

No. I haven't used them in production yet personally, which is shocking to many of you, I know.

But I I have not used them in production just yet. You know, predictions aside, I I I think that their growth will be huge. Mhmm.

But what kind of new things did we get in CSS Over this past year.

Has is everywhere but Firefox. So almost there with has.

Rid. Firefox has an implementation of it, but it's an old one that is behind a flag. So it it doesn't even work, so it's not Not in there. I don't know if we talked about aspect ratio, but that's something that really became

easy to use this year, something you didn't have to think about using. It feels like CSS features have been coming like crazy, but at the same regard, if I'm trying to think of, like, what actual new CSS features came in 2022 itself, rid I guess it's just container queries, like, really starting to drop, but it it took just about all year for that to happen. Next one we have here, GraphQL.

Rid. I think GraphQL kinda just stayed where it was.

We saw I think what we saw was people some people having exhaustion with GraphQL, realizing rid. Maybe I don't necessarily need all of this overhead for the type of app we're using.

And then we also saw tRPC get rid. Much more popular kind of alongside that sort of exhaustion around it. And we we we talked about GraphQL with The sanity folks, go back to that episode because I thought they had some really good,

insights as to is GraphQL it for fetching data? Yeah. And you know what? I don't think tRPC I don't think those letters were even in our radar at all at this point last year. Rid So tRPC being one of those things that popped up without us seeing it. So, like, you know, maybe that is one of those things where we have typed API set a little bit better. I went rid. Listen to this part of the episode because I was curious about what we said about GraphQL. And I was talking a lot about, like, scalars being an issue in GraphQL Where, you have to import custom scalars to do dates or any special types of types that are not the the basic built in ones, and and that hasn't changed at all.

Rid. And I think one of the things that happened, I you know, the guild has released more and more tools and and things around GraphQL like I mentioned. But I do think, like you said, that people have gotten a little exhausted with it, and that's largely probably from people implementing Graph rid in projects that didn't need it, where they you see all the the fat the fancy folks talking about GraphQL.

But at the end of the day, you know, GraphQL functions best and interfaces with multiple UIs, multiple, You know, APIs may be even being federated into them, but it it functions in in my brain as, like, a much bigger ecosystem In those types of scenarios where bigger sites are using, the more people are consuming your API and those types of things. And everybody else Who didn't have those things or or looking at their code. And I myself included because our API was GraphQL and saying like, hey.

I'm doing a whole lot of stuff, and I don't know if the benefits to me are really as powerful as they would be to someone else. And that's reason why we're largely moving away from GraphQL in our side, not because GraphQL is bad in any regard, But because, specifically, I just don't think a site of my my size or level of tutorial size benefits From GraphQL in the same sort of way that other sites would. I'm just looking at the so GraphQL is a spec, obviously.

And the thing with rid. Is that if the spec is never updated, then you are kind of either sit on your hands or people just make another spec, back, which is which is what happened with markdown.

So now we have Node at some point with io. Js. Yeah. Happened with with d n o. I io. Js is not a Back though. Like like a spec is just like text. This is how it should work. You have to implement it in JavaScript and Rust and whatever. So JSON is a rid and now people have invented JSON five, which gives us comments and trailing commas and, all kinds of rid. Helpful stuff. And people are now we have this problem where, like, node won't move to JSON five because of backwards compatibility. And we were kinda like, You know, like now we have 2 specs. That's the xkcd. So I was looking at the qspec and there was 2, rid.

RFC is accepted into the spec this year. Yeah.

Allow deprecation of input values. So you tag something as deprecated rid and allow full Unicode range.

So Yeah. Not much. Not much. Yeah. Right. Those are your big updates for the year. You know? Like, there's so many, I think, quality of life things that in GraphQL, like, man, how about sharing Input types with types.

You know, there are, like, being able to extend or use fragments in an input type.

I guess you can't really use fragments and types anyways in in GraphQL.

I don't know. There there's a lot of, like, double definitions in GraphQL And some, like, really, like, kind of obnoxious little things that eventually get, pop their head up in every single GraphQL project. Either way, I you know, I I think GraphQL hasn't really evolved in any sort of way over the year, but I think people are evolving the way that they're looking at GraphQL. Instead of rid. Looking at it as like, oh, this is the future of all APIs. What we're looking at is here is, like, this is a useful tool for specific types of APIs.

Well put, Dino. We said Dino's get it's funny because 2 years ago, we said or maybe 3 years ago, we said Dino is gonna explode. And in our review, like, I know much happened. I didn't hear anything about Dino. And then like like a month later, we started hearing all kinds of stuff. So, like, this year, We predict Deno will pop. It popped. It popped. I'm using Deno I'm using Deno in lots of places now because rid. They have NPM support, fantastic editor integration. You could just use TypeScript right up.

They're involved in the winter CG group. We'll talk about rid in a bit. So big year for Dino. We definitely hit the nail on the head there. Oh, Netlify Netlify is using Dino for their edge functions.

So it's it's literally being used in production.

There's a couple other places where Dino is being used as well.

So big year. Big year. And I would love to see some statistics on this. I'm trying to Google around it right now to see if there I can find anything specifically about, like, How much, Dino has grown in the year? Yeah. But I I think Dino was one of those ones that, like, alright. It was announced. People are excited about it. It wasn't necessarily, you know, super I wanna say usable because it was usable to do things, but it wasn't, like, The mature tool that everyone's gonna reach for when I came out, and then it's had enough time to be baking. It's been it's been baking, and it's it's I think it's it's very usable right now, and it's very neat. I'm I'm super excited. In fact, I'll be talking in our predictions for next year's episode about Do you know front end frameworks and types of things like that? But I I just think, Do you know now is to to the point where I'm very excited about it, And I I'm starting to have the FOMO of, like, oh, I'm not using it. I have to rewrite my whole stack in it. So, But

the the thing about Deno is that rid. If you know JavaScript, you know Deno. And you can even and I'm I'm almost at a spot now where, like, if I have to write a file, do I rid. Do I use the node API? Because then it will work everywhere. Or do I use the Deno API and and lock myself just into Deno? I'm I'm kinda like, well, the node API, since it works everywhere.

Fun node, whatever the Cloudflare workers version is.

So now I'm like, is the node spec the spec? You know? We just said node was not a spec. We just said that 2 seconds ago. Maybe it is. Yeah.

Maybe it is.

While looking for some sort of statistics, I did find a really great, blog post here. I'm not going to Name the person who wrote it, but the name of the blog post is is Dino Already Dead. No way. It's already diss the already disappeared hype, and it's like Talking. This is from the year 2020.

So it's funny because, like, I would love for Dino to become, like, the v thing at some point And then to check out because I'm sure I said some things at first, like, myself as well. We're like, oh, yeah. Everyone's talking about Deno, and now no one's talking about Deno. What happened? Of it. Positive. I said something exactly to that regard.

But just to to see it evolve and to continue to grow has been really inspiring. And talking to Brian on this podcast made me feel super confident with the future of Deno.

Totally. Totally.

We also said TypeScript will become more popular.

I agree. Don't you think you agree?

I think TypeScript has just about, you know, become The way to go nowadays. It went from you know, we've we've often talked on this podcast about waiting just long enough to to see the winner of things. And you'll remember, like, Wes and I saying, alright, between I don't even remember the other words of flow. Was flow it's competitor? Or is that a GraphQL thing?

Rid I'm I'm mixing it up with Relay, which is the Facebook GraphQL. Yeah. No. It was Flow, and then you had, like, JS doc, which is And you had ReasonML.

What's reason ML?

Reason ML was basically, another it's like an OCaml type of It's like a type Compile to JavaScript.

Yeah. But its its intention was to solve the same issues that TypeScript was solving. Yeah. I mean, the reason it existed rid. The reason reason existed was to give you type safety, and the syntax, I think, was just too far for some people. It was too different, rid. Too weird.

You had to do a little bit a little bit extra here and there. And you know what? I have no idea why Flow didn't went over Type rid. I if if you were asking me personally besides the fact that I only ever really use TypeScript, I think TypeScript kinda had The branding, a little bit better. It's the it it's it's funny to say that that would be any sort of actual reason, and I don't I'm not saying that it is, but, like, They had the same JavaScript logo, but it's blue, and it says t s. And it's it's, like, so similar to JS that You can easily say, oh, yeah. This is basically JavaScript. Right? You're not thinking about like, I I wonder if TypeScript's logo was, like, Microsoft logo and it was Microsoft Script if it would gotten anywhere near the same. Yeah. Or if it was like,

like, one like a Windows icon with a little folder like a folded edge on the side and it was pixelated.

I don't think it would. But that that's another big thing is Microsoft is very cool. Like like, aside from my computer, literally everything else, Not everything on my browser is not Microsoft, but a lot of the other stuff I'm using is is Microsoft, which is amazing to think. Rid. Yeah. Microsoft has really wormed its way into our lives.

Yeah. Yeah. They they've done good. I I also bet that one of the reasons why TypeScript one is, rid Like, v s code integration is just it just worked. You don't have to install anything.

Even you're just writing plain JavaScript, rid. You start getting like, if for those who don't know, Versus code will run typescripts, against your JavaScript. That's how you get a lot of this really nice rid. Autocomplete, and then when you don't get the autocomplete, you're like, where is that? And then you're like, oh, maybe I should be writing everything in in TypeScript.

I know it's man, It's wild. TypeScript won.

It definitively won. And, you know, it is funny that we both said, sat back. I'll sit back and wait and see which one wins. Rid. And then there was a definitive winner, and now we're all using it. So 1 question is, all year, did you ever

like, how many times do you think you've had to go install

Separate types for a library. So npm install at types forward slash. And how many times did you how use a library that wasn't typed at all? I'm gonna go ahead and actually tell you because I basically I don't wanna say I only. I basically have 1 project that I work on, and that is the only project that I would install, like, with LevelUp rid Let's see how many types I have installed in here. Okay. The repo is just forward slash types. I have types for Lodash. I have no idea if they still need those.

I have types for marked types for Prism JS, and that's it.

Marked, Prism JS, And Lodash. And honestly, I don't even know if I still need all of them. Lodash doesn't ship. So the difference there for people who don't know is that

if an NPM package ships types, You don't need to go ahead and install types for it, but sometimes packages don't. And they have they're separately typed in another repo.

Lodash is an example of that. So I I probably did a couple of those separate types. That's sometimes just a preference if the library is not willing to ship types rid Or is not written in TypeScript. And I don't think I ran into a single library this year that did not have types rid Available for it. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Which is amazing, like, in in some way, one or another. And and before that, the year before that, maybe a couple times, I had to rid. Write my own types for for some specific methods and whatnot or extend extend the window to type something, but, No. I don't think that this happened this year, which is amazing. Yeah. TypeScript is

as as much as some people have resisted it, it's really truly become the thing. Rid. Yeah. Let's talk about one of our sponsors, which is Sanity at sanity.io.

We had them on the podcast the other day. They just released Their Sanity Studio version 3. That is the UI that you can use to edit your content. So Sanity itself is a host service, But the UI Sanity Studio, that can do custom workflows.

You can see who edited something. You can see what was re change to time releases, all of that good stuff.

That stuff is insanity studio, and you can edit that code directly at work. You can Plop it right into a React application if you want. The whole thing is built in React. You're gonna wanna check it out. Sanity.i0forward/ syntax for double the free usage tier. Rid. Thank you, Sanity, for sponsoring.

Server comeback was our next thing. Definitely, we see all kinds of people, rid. Going back to the server, whether it's through JavaScript sprinkles, we have Caleb Porzio from Alpine coming on in the New Year. Excited about that. Rid. We also see a lot of stuff happening with server side rendering in React world, whether it is rid Regular server side were rendering or whether it's React server components, all the other of the ones all the other libraries rid. Are implementing server rendering, and we're starting to see a lot of people just, like, default to the server, and then go on the client as you need it. So Very popular.

Very popular.

Yeah. Absolutely.

And, honestly, I'm here for it because it has made working in A lot of these, like, ice I guess they call them isomorphic context, a lot easier where you're working on the server and on the client. Yeah. And that to me has gotten easier this year whether or not It actually has or if I just feel that it has. It it definitely feels like it's gotten easier for me to to work on the client and on the server. There's more resources available. Things just kind of work a little bit better. Check out the payment processors. I don't think there was a whole lot

That changed in that this world? I know Yeah. There hasn't really. One big thing that Stripe just rolled out a couple weeks ago was the ability to rid. Fund the blockchain wallets with a credit card without having a third party processor in there.

That is not the opposite, which it is not pay with Bitcoin or whatever. They they revoked that years ago, but it's the opposite, which is, like, I need to get some credits in whatever rid. Currency this is, but I only have a credit card. How do I do that? So they they sort of stepped into that space, but Not not a whole lot. I I was hoping to see a lot more in terms of, like, autofill becoming more popular, you know, but we're still in a place where there's you still have to do a lot to do custom checkouts. I feel like I probably

predicted that rid. I don't I don't wanna listen. I haven't listened to this, but I think I have a faint recognition of me predicting that Braintree wouldn't do a single thing, and, they have not.

So, yeah, Braintree has not improved.

They have this, like, GraphQL API that they're rolling out, but it it's not as I I don't wanna say it's not as nice to use as the other one because the other API is also not nice to use, but, it's yeah. It it certainly hasn't become like the The thing, and I I don't think their GraphQL API is fixing any of their big issues.

So, yeah, that that's how that is. I saw yesterday Gumroad, Which is a a tool a lot of people use to sell their, like, digital products. Yeah. They changed their, like, cut from, like, 2.7% plus credit card fees To 10%.

Oh.

And they're I they're basically I I think they're probably just gonna ride that horse into the sunset. Rid. Oh, yeah. Right? They probably have a couple just mega mega people who sell stuff on there. And then can't afford to leave it, Like, right away or whatever. I I've been in that position many times.

Vimeo came, said, hey. You gotta start paying much more Mhmm. For this. And I was just like, let's squeeze you. You gotta pay the man because I got all time to switch this right now. You know? It maybe it's a recession thing too. Right? The recession's hitting, so they're Losing customers, their bottom line's dropping, and they're probably just like, let's squeeze this thing we got. Yeah. You got a tire on it. Yeah. Yep. That's

Yeah. Oh, you know what? The the Gumroad people have always and I don't I don't know them personally, but they've made some questionable decisions a lot of times. You know? We we're giving this we we have this promotion. Anyone can do it. And then you go to do the promotion, and they're like, oh, by the way, it's only for Brand new customers, but we didn't say that upfront.

There there's a lot of, like, really, like, anti consumer kind of, like, rid. Shady things that have kind of gone around in the Gumroad world that have always turned me off from Gumroad as using it as a service myself. But yeah. I saw, Nathan Barry, who runs ConvertKit.

Yeah. He basically said, hey. Just you could just go on ConvertKit just instead. We don't take that much.

And then someone's like, hey. What about PayPal support? And he's like, absolutely not.

Not worth it. He's like API, and we're not doing it. And it's it's it's the reason why a lot of people will not Switch to ConvertKit because PayPal is as much as I hate it, it's probably 37% of my, income, comes from PayPal, so I'm I'm gonna keep supporting it.

Bro, I I, you know, went with Braintree Because of PayPal support, and, you know, it's one of those things where I had enough people really, really want the The PayPal support. And at the end of the day, I put that pain on me to to use this API instead of Stripe's API. And I'm I'm sure enough I'm paying for it on the dev side, But we do have a fair amount of PayPal customers. And Yeah. I you you gotta wonder if those same people would be here if you didn't offer PayPal and and whatever. So it it's a tough call In that regard, you know, there was, I was seeing a bunch of people what they were migrating to from Gumroad. Did you do you Man, what is this app? Was it Paddle? No. Squeeze Lemon. I just googled how to squeeze a lemon. No. Yeah. Okay. So here it is. So this is the one that I I saw people migrating to. It's called Lemon Squeezy, an all in one platform for running your SaaS business. Payment subscription, global tax Compliance fraud prevention, multicurrency support, failed payment recovery, PayPal integration.

Oh, yeah. So, basically, everything and a fancy nice design. And guess what? They even, get to drop in the words AI into their marketing with AI fraud prevention.

So, Man, this is actually looks really sweet.

That looks good.

5% plus 50¢.

So

They they take 5% of the cuts way bigger. Yeah. Do they does that include the credit card fee? Usually, this they don't. Yeah. Right. Usually, they don't. And then that's the whole thing. People wonder, like, why you would go with your own version of any of this. But at the end of the day, like, if I would have gone with Recurly or Lemon Squeezy or any of these that rid front of the processor and the merchant, and then they they take a cut on top of a cut that's already being taken. And I'm I'm running a business here. You know? I I'd like to If we have people who are willing to give me money to put out content, I would like to be able to use that money to reinvest into the business and not have it all go to merchant rid and then subscription fees and whatever. Yeah. You gotta think,

a lot of these businesses that run on these platforms, they probably do the math at the end of the year. You're like, well, we could either Hire a full time developer Engineer for a 100 and 30,000 dollars a year

or continue to pay this app That is doing that for us. I've had that crisis myself in my own internal thinking. Like, did I make the totally wrong decision here by not Just eating the cost. Yeah. It's it's the constant maybe that's a show there is

buy it or build it. Buy it or build it. Oh, man. I like it. Great. Yeah. Let's can we can we put that on the books right now? Let me just open up a tab in Notion. I can do it. It's so much easier now.

Do we predict Notion would get tabs? Is that something that we know? I had zero hope Notion would ever get tabs, and they they shipped it. It's it's not amazing, but, it it works. It can't work. The right click anything and open in a new tab. You have to just open a new tab and go to the thing you want. The thing that bums me the most about it, you know, it's like, Thank you for giving us tabs, but now they reassigned

the shortcut for changing spaces, and I'm constantly doing their own shortcut for changing spaces. Oh. So I have, like, I have, like, 3 different Notion workspaces.

And, unfortunately, like, now the the the command 123 It's for changing tabs rather than changing your workspace. So fun to see you a little bit. But

Let's talk about one of our sponsors, Auth0. Auth0 is Handles the authentication and permissions for your application. So it's a service that you can hook into your application, and that will do all of the rid Hard stuff around adding authentication into your application. They have they support literally everything. Let's talk about one kind of cool thing that they do rid is they are the login provider for OpenAI, which is all the chat g p GPT stuff.

And you better believe They got hammered, by both traffic, and I probably bought as well when all that stuff was blowing up a couple of weeks ago and kind of still is.

Rid. Because it's it's all branded as OpenAI.

But if you kinda know what to look for, inspect elements, or or look at the right things, you say, oh, they are using auth Xero to handle this. They run it on a subdomain, kick you off to the subdomain. You log in. They do the captchas for you. They do log in with Google, log in with Twitter, log in with rid. Microsoft, all those things, they kick you back and give you all the tokens and everything that you need to to authenticate in your application. You know, check it on out at rid. A0.t0forward/syntax, to get some really good examples. Thank you, Auth0, for sponsoring.

Last 1 we oh, no. Last couple ones we had here, a temporal API that went nowhere.

There's a couple of polyfills for it. Temporal API is the new API that will entirely replace date in JavaScript.

And it's amazing. It has features for literally everything, time zones, formatting dates, all of that good stuff. It's very exciting. It's a huge spec though, so, I don't expect that. I don't even know if we we can expect it this coming year either. You know you know what? It's Funny that I use temporal in,

quote, unquote, production. And the reason why I say, quote, unquote, is because it's only in the admin side of our site. We're not shipping the polyfilthy users. We're only shipping it to anybody who manages to go to the admin site to to look at our dashboards and stuff.

And I really, really, really, really like it.

It's fantastic.

And it's one of those ones where I'm just like, I'd be really, really psyched if this thing could come to everyone sooner rather than later because this is the way I want to do dates. I I have a bunch of, like, little helper functions already built for it. I can quickly and easily get exactly what I want to get out of it, and I'm never having to second guess myself.

There was, like, something I did recently with the temporal API, and it was like, oh, man. It was like a formatting thing. And I just remember thinking, Wow. This is so great. I'm not doing this with the library.

Granted, I am shipping a polyfill to the admin side, so I guess that's technically a library. But I would love it if temporal moved to just a little bit further. I would love to see this thing hit browsers. I would I would be very happy to use temporal, rid. In my day to day work. It's it's stage 3, which is one short of, like, being done. So I bet

We will start to see it in some browsers. Usually, what happens is around stage 3, Chrome, Firefox will they will ship it either behind a usually behind a flag, and then you can just start playing with actually using it.

But, like, stage 3 is is pretty much done. Like, they've been working on it for a couple years now, and we're we're almost there. That's exciting.

I I think okay. Maybe we will see it. Well, maybe we can, maybe we could talk about that in our predictions episode. Yeah. Maybe that's our,

our last prediction last week was Remote dev thin client will become more popular and that this happened to me, but not in the way that I expected it. I expected it to be I'm gonna start using my editor in the browser instead of as a app, and that did not happen. But what did happen is I started leaning on 2 things, both on GitHub.

GitHub's new file layout, where on the left you have your rid A file tree. In the middle, you have the code. And on the right, it will show you types and instances.

I've been using that a lot I was I was rooting through the v s code code base looking for some sort of API to to get a list of extensions for for some project I was working on. And I clicked on something, and it shows you where that has been used throughout in this file and in the rest of it. And I was, like, This is a fantastic tool for me to root around and figure out how things work. And basically, like, I found, like, a console log And I traced it, like, 14 classes back and very quickly to find out where that thing has been Instantiate it. And I was like, this is this is a full on dev tool to be able to use it. And GitHub's code search also uses that. Rid. So I often I I a couple times in the last 6 months, I ran into an API I didn't know how to use.

And instead of go to the docs, I just searched on GitHub code search for people using it, and then I'll find a couple projects of people using it, and I'll use that UI.

Mhmm. I don't know if this is I was part of like a did do does everybody have this? Do you have if you go to cs.github.com, do you rid. See? Well, bless. You know I am a GitHub star. So Oh, so you probably do have access to it. So I I don't know. They they I'm not a star, but they added it of me, and I've been using it like nuts. Yeah. I have not used this, and I do have access to it.

Of course, they've they're gonna give the stars access of these things. That's just how they how it goes. Yes. That's how stars are treated. That's how stars are treated here. We get to have GitHub code search. So no. I I have not used this, and it's interesting that, you found so much value out of it.

Maybe it's just because I I've been kind of My head in a hole. I've dug a hole in the sand, and I've put my head in into it to finish this level up redesign. Yeah. Like, I I haven't been getting to Really get out and explore as much as I you know, I'm a big explorer, and I'm not getting to do that. So I'm gonna have to create a whole bunch of list of things Over the Christmas break here that when I have some fun downtime that I could just have fun with. You know? Yeah. Leisure time.

Man, that was a long review. Do we do we wanna do our predictions in, in the next one, or or what do you think? Yeah. We should definitely do our predictions in the next one because we have a lot of Predictions. And, honestly,

I'm thinking that this year, you know, we were pretty much a 100% correct every time, all the time without fail.

I'm thinking that we're all we're gonna be, like, a 110%.

We're gonna we're gonna do a downtown job with their predictions. I'm I'm stoked for it. Alright. Let's move into some sick Pix, you got a sick pick for me? Boy, do I ever have a sick pick for you today, Wes. We had, I think, offline, a little conversation going about organization and stuff. And Yeah.

We both simultaneously found these, like, little printers, and we we found them in different brands.

So you were like, oh, I I really think the Nimbot is the way to go, and I had found a different one, but it turns out they're all the same. In fact, the software that you use is the Nimbot software. So I picked 1 up. I picked the Oh, you can't label maker. The one that I got is the Jaden's. It's not the Nimbot For no reason in particular. They're all very similar, and it's a mini label maker.

And, man, Words cannot state just how cool this thing is for the price. It's $23.

So $23 for this little printer. You can get them in pink. You can get them with a little duck cartoon on the side. Who knows what you can but it's a little tiny and maybe about Half a foot by a quarter of a foot.

So so none none none Americans out there. I don't really know. I'm sorry. In meters, what to what to say for this? But it's it's a meter. It's We're not using we're not using meters to describe half a foot.

Centimeters? You're using centimeters or what? Centimeters. Yeah. Centimeters.

Do you know how many meters are they like Americans use for little things? Like, oh, I wanna measure a worm, I'm gonna Centimeters. Okay. That a worm would be a great thing to actually, you probably would use millimeters for that because you Millimeter. Yeah. Generally, like, with, like, bolts, rid. You you use millimeters. Although we don't we mostly use imperial bolts up here. But if you go get, like, an IKEA bolt, you have to talk about millimeters until you get past, like, rid.

1500 millimeters or 150 millimeters. Sorry.

So okay. Well, needless to say, this thing is about from thumb to pinky big. It's small, and And it's a little label maker. You connect it to your phone, so there's no, like, you know, historically, label makers, like, emboss onto They do, like, emboss onto plastic, and they have little keyboards on them, and they're just, like, old kind of tech.

This connects to your phone via Bluetooth.

You have, like, a full on editing suite in there where you can make make text bigger or smaller.

You can use emojis on here, And it uses, I believe it's it's a heat for the printing. Right? It uses let me see. Yeah. It's thermal.

Rid. It's thermal printer, but it looks it doesn't look like ink, and it doesn't necessarily look like thermal in the same way that you'd see, like, a a receipt to load. Because it's like it's like Laminated. Right? It's laminated. Yeah.

And there's these little tiny stickers, and like I said, you can use emoji on them. You can do you can get, like, Fancy ones that are different colors with patterns or little like fun little stickers or whatever on them. And, man, I I started rid labeling our tubs in the basement. I did a bunch of, I took Wes's I need I need those little tip to do little plastic bins for all my cables. And guess what? All my bins with all my cables have little logos on them. The the Apple specific one has a little apple on it. The thunderbolt has a lightning bolt on it. I have an obsolete that has, like, a a gravestone on it. These are my obsolete old cables, and I I I got a pumpkin on the the Halloween decorations.

But, yeah, this little label maker is so cute. When I told Courtney I was buying a label maker, she was like, This is one of those things that is you're gonna use it, like, once, and then it's going to disappear forever.

And then when it came, I kid you not, within 5 of this thing arriving and me showing her how it works. She was like, can I take this to work and use it? Like, she went from being a hater to being rid. A serious like, oh, that's really neat in just about no time. So, label makers apparently had a glow up in 2022. I had no idea. That's amazing. And you can buy, rid. Like,

if you go on AliExpress, you can buy, like, cutesy ones that are good for putting on your kid's lunch pail and cup and things like that. Rid. Totally. And Tons of different. Apparently, they're like they they hold up to, like, the dishwasher and stuff. So I man, I gotta get one of these. That's it seems so good. And I'm so sick Am I, like, regular label maker, because it connects to your phone. Right? Yeah. Connects to your phone. And and honestly, Wes, the app is exquisite.

If we're talking like apps for this type of thing, the app is really good. And the you get the little drag and drag tools. You can make templates.

You can, Oh, man. I could not tell you just how nice and efficient this thing has been to use.

For a label maker that connects to your phone, It's actually very awesome. Jaden. Wow.

I'm going to pick, the Chipolo one spot.

These are something that I I just found by accident, and they are basically air tags, but third party. And I had no idea.

But Apple has opened up the Find My app.

They did.

Yeah. To third party vendors. So you can buy I don't know. Like, they have to be made for iPhone or whatever, like approved. So Apple still takes their cut.

But rid. You can buy third party AirTags essentially that are much cheaper than regular AirTags. So I found rid. They were on sale. I don't know that these make sense to buy if they're a full price, but I bought them. They were $12 a piece, which It's about 9 American, and I think, like, a regular AirTag is about $35.

Oh. So Yeah. Let's see how much.

Rid. I'm seeing a 29.

Okay.

So at least a third of the cost.

And they they work awesome. And they have a hole in it for you can put a key ring in.

So so far, they've been they've been working working amazing.

Rid. I put them in 4 or 5 of my things. I put 1 in the car. I put them in the kids' backpacks. I put 1 in my backpack, 1 of my keys, And there's they're louder than the Air k AirTags. So if you lose something, you can make it super loud. The only thing that is not the same as AirTag is it doesn't have the If you an air tag, if you're near it, it will tell you where to turn.

Oh, yeah. It'll give you the the arrow.

These don't have that. It'll just show you on a map where it was last pinged. I do have to say that arrow only shows up, like, after you're already in the same, like, 5 feet of it. Oh. I like getting to I get to, like, 5 feet of the air attack, and it's like, oh, it's right in front of you. I'm like, yeah. Thank you. I I But when you when I'm in my house, and let's say my AirTag is in my office, and I'm in the house, and I say find my keys, Yeah. And, like, we'll say, you're too far away to to get the directions. And at that point, I'm, like, why even, you know, why even bother with this if it's I have it on my I have my AirPods and it never works properly. So I was like, I don't care about that. What I do care about is it being loud as hell so I can find Like, if if you make it start ringing, then you can just follow the ring. Right? Yeah. Unless, of course, when you press the ring button, your dogs both freak out, so So then you can't hear the ring because your dogs are both barking because they hear it,

which is, like, actually something that happens to me. My yeah. My doggies don't like. You have To get the one spot, the Chipolo one is their own app, which is like I'm not relying on other people having the Chipolo app installed at, rid. I don't know. At the fair or something like that if I'm looking for something. So Fair. I the the benefit of Find My on Apple is that Every single iPhone and MacBook out there, iPad, acts as a transmitter. So I can I just opened it up right now, And I can see where in the school my kids are or where their backpacks are at least, because

probably some teachers at the school have iPhones? You gotta know. I you know what? I was at the airport.

We are coming back from, I think, our Hawaii trip. And Some lady was I was, like, waiting for the bags and some some random lady who was honestly And and I don't wanna, like, say anything that could sound like I'm age shaming here, but she was, like, 60 years old. So she's not, like, the type of person you just Back to be, like, upon the latest tech type of deal. Yeah. And she was like, I have an AirTag in my luggage, and it says that they're still in this part of the thing So you can track it. She was just, like, watching where our luggage was on the map in the airport, and I was thinking this is the smartest thing ever. She I'm sitting here like a chump waiting for all my luggage to be like, I wonder when it's gonna pop out of here, and she's, like, watching in real time as it's approaching the the

The baggage pickup. I was thinking that is such a dang smart call. Yeah. The AirTag in the luggage is a must have, I think. Yeah. It's it just rid. Resolve so many so many problems that that are out there.

Alright. Shameless plugs. Westboss.comforward/courses for All my JavaScript and CSS courses. If you wanna learn a thing or 2, check them on out.

Shamelessly plug level up Dot video, and I'm going to plug very specifically our SvelteKit course that just dropped. And, honestly, Wes, we've had a huge response to this course. We did, a drop party, and a lot of people showed up. A lot of people are really excited and curious about Svelte. And one of the big barriers has always been Svelte kit not being version 1. So SvelteKit is version 1, and we released a course on it the day it was released.

And let me tell you, I've built an entire ecommerce and subscription video platform on SvelteKit.

I I know a little bit about the ins and outs and the types of things that you'll hit when you're running into practical projects. So we cover Every type of thing that you would hit if you were working in any sort of real project on this course. So level up that video. I'll link to the course specifically as our SvelteKit course. You can use the coupon code SYNTAX and get 30% off the annual subscription to level up. So give that a try. Use the coupon code

syntax again for 30% off the annual subscription. Alright. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. Catch you on Friday. Peace.

Head on over to syntax.fm for a full archive of all of our shows, rid. And don't forget to subscribe in your podcast player or drop a review if you like this show.