2024 outlook: WTF is going on?

2024 outlook: WTF is going on?


2022 - 2023/Spring

This is a story: I was so happy with my last project in 2022. Working remotely from my own sailing boat in the Caribbean, then from Morocco, New York, Bali — well-paid and happy!

That's why, in the spring, I decided to launch SpiralCoder to help others achieve the same.
I naively thought that the situation would remain and that the Angular path was still suitable for remote roles. I dived into learning about video production, course-building businesses, web-builders, email marketing, and so on. Meanwhile, the world changed.

2023/Autumn

I tried to get hired again and hit the ground. The market has changed. Companies have laid off staff. Budgets have been cut. Angular is still a good fit for enterprises, but they now prefer onsite and permanent roles over remote contractors. There are twice as many React offers as Angular, but the competition is intense, and the salaries aren't what they used to be (still okay, but we've seen better!).

So I realized, yes, the world has changed, and I needed to educate myself — a lot. I dived in and then came another WTF moment. So much was new!

The good news: JavaScript, HTML, and CSS still rule the app world, both backend and frontend. The backend can now be handled with tools like Firebase, but MERN seems to be the favorite stack. MERN/MEAN stack hasn't changed much since I remember it from 2016. But the frontend — that's a different story. Angular itself has undergone revolutionary changes, and then came new libraries: Svelte is the emerging hero! Not quite ready yet, but it's gaining popularity. Server-side rendering is becoming a necessity — Next.js is almost a new standard for SEO needs. And the revolution in CSS? The way Tailwind handles styling is incredible, and that's not the end. Just a week ago, Facebook released a new StyleX library to write UI purely in JavaScript.

Well, as I said, all these libraries are just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript at the end, but the mindset is different, and we need to keep pace. Autopilots and AI are a huge help - indeed, but first of all, we need to learn how to use them effectively and second, all developers have access to them so the competition is still the same. Only the way of work has changed. 

2024

For the New Year, I'm prepping a project to build a simple CRM as SaaS.
Looking forward to collaborate! It's always better to go along with a team. 
So far, the stack will be:

  • Express
  • MongoDB with Mongoose
  • Redux and RTK Query
  • TypeScript
  • Tailwind for UI
  • Cyclic/Netlify/Atlas for deployment
  • GitHub, VSCode, Insomnia



As a summary, I'm sending you a great video from my new favorite channel, "Fireship":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyQv563Y-fk
(check out his other videos — I love his style of presenting topics in 100 seconds)



The video is titled "You probably won’t survive 2024." But I don't agree.
You will survive; there's no other option. We just need to adapt and be present.


Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!  
Thank you all for your support, collaboration, and feedback.
See you in 2024.

Miki Stec,
SpiralCoder