Grading our 2022 predictions

I hope you’re enjoying a nice break from work and also some nice breaks from family too (love them, but it’s for the best).

Today we’ve got MTV dating shows, us breaking our Vercel friendship necklace, and a great deal on CocoMelonJS themes.

Welcome to #147.

The Main Thing

Us returning to our hot takes

Grading our 2022 predictions

World champion bodybuilder and philosopher, Ronnie Coleman famously said, “Everybody wants to be a JavaScript thought leader, but nobody wants to give those heavy-a** takes.”

Well, we take our craft seriously around here — so as we approach the end of another blessed year, let’s review our predictions from last January and see how we did.

Prediction #1: Next.js will become less of a React meta-framework and more of a *web* meta-framework.

Grade: D-. If anything, Next.js became more synonymous with React in 2022. We even had Andrew Clark from the React team say that “Next.js 13 is the real React 18 release.” Vercel is certainly cozying up to other frontend frameworks, but Next itself is doubling down on its commitment to React (and reaping the benefits of being Daddy’s favorite).

Prediction #2: Venture Capital will “solve” OSS funding… for a little while.

Grade: A-. It turns out that giving pre-revenue OSS companies millions of dollars because they have a lot of GitHub stars might not have been the most sustainable investment strategy. I guess OSS authors can always go back to selling backlinks to online casinos and weed dispensaries? RIP in peace to the good times.

Prediction #3: Remix will get acquired by Netlify.

Grade: B+. We were so close. Soooo close. But if you close your eyes and do a quick prediction.replaceAll("Netl", "Shop"), we totally nailed it.

Prediction #4: Babel and Webpack will be largely replaced by newer tools.

Grade: A. We’re living through a next-gen build tool renaissance that’s changing the game even faster than we imagined. We’ve got Tobias Koppers (Webpack’s creator) working full time on Turbopack, “the Rust-powered successor to Webpack.” Vite busted into the mainstream and grew to 2.5 million weekly downloads. And other tools like esbuild, Bun, and Rome are growing fast too.

Prediction #5: Meta will give up control of React and put it in the care of a third-party foundation, like it did with GraphQL.

Grade: F+. Did this happen? No. Did it come close to happening? Also no. But could one argue that Meta is outsourcing some of React’s more practical DX development to Next.js and Vercel, and thus is giving up some control of React? Sure you could, especially if you were looking for any possible way to spin an incorrect prediction you made 11 months ago.

Prediction #6: Serverless will help front-end developers become real full-stack developers and (hopefully) get paid accordingly.

Grade: B-. Metaframeworks like Next, SvelteKit, Astro, and Remix seamlessly integrated serverless into our applications, giving us fullstack superpowers. But did we all get paid more? Not exactly. (Damn you, Jerome Powell.)

Prediction #7: React 18 will *launch* in 2022.

Grade: A+, 10/10, 💯. We had our doubts at times, but it was nice to see one of our *boldest* predictions come true.

Bottom Line: Will holding ourselves accountable like this make our 2023 predictions even better? There’s only one way to find out.

Our Friends
(With Benefits)

That's one powerful back (end)

Appwrite can write your backend for you

Congrats! Your team’s app made it to the top of Hacker News, and now you’ve got traffic coming out your eyeballs 🎉. There’s only one problem…

You went with a “usage-based” pricing plan for your hosting — and all that traffic just ate up the rest of the cash in your company bank account (RIP in peace).

Should’ve used Appwrite.

Appwrite is a self-hosted BAAS (backend as a service) platform that gives you a collection of easy-to-use REST APIs that abstract away all the complex and repetitive parts of building a secure backend.

And since it’s packaged as a set of (open-source) Docker microservices, you can host it however you want and not have to worry about getting burned by usage-based pricing.

It handles all of hairy stuff for you, so you can easily integrate your app with multiple user auth methods, set up a DB for storing and querying user data, and a lot more.

I guess that’s why they called it Appwrite. Finally makes sense now.

Check it out.

The Job Board

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	Senior React Native Developer at xDesign
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Cool Bits

1. Our video about The Story of Next.js is about to hit 450,000 views on YouTube. Our ex-friends at Vercel still haven’t acknowledged its presence. It’s fine, I’ve had 32 years of trying to gain my Father’s love so I’m used to it. It was probably this clip, wasn’t it?

2. MelonJS 2 is a newly modernized version of the popular JS game engine. Not to be confused with CocoMelonJS — a static site generator that comes with a bunch of prebuilt CocoMelon themes for your blog. The JJ and YoYo themes are free, but the rest cost $9.99 (remember to use our affiliate code, COCOBYTES).

3. OpenNext is an open-source serverless adapter for Next.js, which also sounds like the perfect title for a problematic mid-2000’s dating show on MTV.

4. The React Team is renaming the experimental useEvent to useEffectEvent and is reducing its scope. This is fun. We’re all having fun.

5. Dan Christofi wrote about A Few Times CSS Container Queries Would Have Helped Me Out. The queries would’ve helped you if you had just let them help you, Dan.

6. TkDodo wrote about his experiences Working with Zustand since 2018, way before alternative state management libs got all cool and trendy.

7. Jake Lazaroff wrote about His First Take on Solid as a longtime React Developer. It’s a helpful entry point into Solid if you’ve been curious.

8. NextAuth (the popular auth library for Next.js) is going framework agnostic, starting with experimental support for SvelteKit. Wake me up when they drop CocoMelonAuth.