Our 2023 Predictions

Welcome to 2023, friends. I swear it was just 2006 when I fell asleep playing Halo 2 at my friend’s house on New Year’s Eve — but when I opened my eyes, I was in my thirties and had a newsletter to write. Smash Mouth was right.

Today, we’ve got our annual predictions for the JS ecosystem, artsy SVG’s, and a lactose-less future.

Welcome to #149.

The Main Thing

Welcome back, old friend.

2023 predictions that are guaranteed to come true or your money back

1. RIP to VC funded open source. In case you haven’t heard, the money spigot broke and no one’s sure how to turn it back on. That means your favorite VC-backed OSS projects that never figured out how to make money will soon be back to asking for donations and selling courses. We’ll never forget you, 2021 fever dream.

2. Remix will go all in on Web Components. In a shocking turn of events, the team that buried Ember at React Conf and went head-to-head with Next.js before Daddy played favorites is going to pivot to Team #UseThePlatform in 2023. Naturally, this also means they’ll declare open war on React and complete their WWE betrayal arc.

3. tRPC will replace GraphQL as the type nerd’s Backend of Choice™️. tRPC is already getting a lot of love from early adopters because of the way it gives developers a type-safe connection between the client and server without all the complexity of GraphQL. In 2023, we’ll see tRPC continue to climb as the thought leader’s favorite thing to Tweet about that no one will actually adopt.

4. Resumability is the word. As all of the React devs are busy figuring out why their app is re-rendering, Qwik and their React The Good Parts API will start to eat up all the non React market share. And speaking of React…

5. React hate will reach an all-time high… and so will React usage. Contrary to what you might have heard on Mastodon, the framework that supplants React has yet to be invented. It’s not going anywhere in 2023, unfortunately.

6. UI framework competitions will turn into toolchain competition.s UI framework wars are so 2000-and-late. The newest competitive frontier looks like Next+Turbo vs. Vite, to see who can deliver the ultimate “end-to-end” experience for developers.

7. Gatsby acquires Astro. While you’ve been reading threads about how The Great Gatsby is dead from tweetle doofus on Twitter, they’ve been stacking that fat enterprise bread. Meanwhile, Gatsby 2.0 Astro will reach the end of their runway in 2023 and like F. Scott predicted, they’ll “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

8. Crypto developers will become AI developers. Who will then pretend they’re better than the rest of us because they’ve mastered the art of typing into an input field.

Our Friends
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The Job Board

	Senior React Native Developer at xDesign
	UK-based Remote React Native
	Do you have experience building complex SPAs? Do you care about writing clean, maintainable and testable code? If so, we've got a great role for you to stretch your wings and see what you're really capable of.
	Powered By:

	Senior Mobile DevOps Engineer at Bumble
	DevOps Remote
	Bumble is looking for a Senior Mobile DevOps Engineer to support, configure, and maintain CI/CD and Development Infrastructure, and help deploy native mobile apps for iOS and Android.
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Spot the Bug

Sponsored by Unlayer’s Embed Tool

Unlayer lets you quickly add an email editor and page builder to your SaaS app, so your users can easily create and modify content. Get tons of new functionality with very little dev time.

const getCapitalizedInitials = (name) =>
  name
    .trim()
    .split(" ")
    .forEach((name) => name.charAt(0))
    .join("")
    .toUpperCase()

Cool Bits

1. Parth Thakkar created Copilot-Explorer and did a deep dive on how the client-side codebase works for everybody’s AI BFF.

2. CarbonQA provides QA services for dev teams. They work in your tools, talk with your team on Slack, and let your devs be devs — so you never have to waste engineering time on testing again 🤯. [sponsored]

3. Stanko wrote a cool post about How to draw an SVG rope using JavaScript. If only Van Gogh had lived to see the art we have in 2023.

4. Mdxjs-rs is a Rust crate that lets you compile MDX to JavaScript in Rust. Coincidentally, “the Rust Crate” was the name of the nasty old fridge my brother and his friends used to lock me inside of when we were playing night games. I guess that’s why they don’t let kids play at the dump anymore.

5. Kevin Schaffter wrote a good comparison piece on Zustand vs. Signals. Two niche state management libraries, both alike in dignity, in fair React-land, where we lay our scene.

6. Serhii Kulykov wrote a review of the Notable improvements to Web Components in 2022. 2023 will be the year of the Web Component Desktop – I can feel it.

7. The Standard Notes team wrote about how React Native is not the future (at least for their app). It’s similar to how I discovered that lactose is also not the future (at least for my body).

8. Superdiff is an OSS library that compares two arrays or objects and returns a complete diff of their differences. It’s also the name of a certain made-up superhero who was never quite strong enough to break himself out of the Rust Crate 🥲.

Spot the Bug: Solution

Sponsored by Unlayer’s Embed Tool

We’re treating forEach as if it returned an array, when it actually returns undefined. Instead, we want to use map, which works similar to forEach, but also creates and returns a new array.

const getCapitalizedInitials = (name) =>
  name
    .trim()
    .split(" ")
    .map((name) => name.charAt(0))
    .join("")
    .toUpperCase()