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What 2021 software trends are going to fade away in 2022?

Ben Halpern on December 27, 2021

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Sherry Day

People are going to forget about a lot of "Web3" stuff.

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Anton Melnyk

That feeling when I haven't even started looking into it.

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Drew Ronsman

I fricken hate web3 and all the blockchain nft crap

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vorsprung

It's wishful thinking to believe that the web3/blockchain/NFT will completely collapse and fade away next year, it has too much momentum

As long as it continues making rich people richer it will keep going, regardless of it's lack of utility

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Max Ong Zong Bao

Metaverse

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Adam Davis

Yeah, metaverse reminds me of when companies tried really hard to push 3D TVs. It was all over the news and inevitably some people bought them, but at the end of the day most people don't want to wear something extra on their face to interact with content they can already access.

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Max Ong Zong Bao

Yeah to be fair, I'm looking forward to the innovation like three.js, webassembly, theatre.js that we use to put 3D into websites or mobile apps without compromising on performance and being lock down into tools/ecosystems to deliver landing pages or stories on a browser.

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Eljay-Adobe

Reminds me of Second Life from 2003. Which is still around, but isn't VR.

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Alison Haire

They did make a VR version - samsara or something. But I don't think anyone uses it

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scottshipp

"Serverless" will not be a trend anymore. Not that people will stop going "serverless" but when they do they won't talk so much about it or think that it's anything special. It will be like when people were all talking about "reactive" programming. That was a big trend. Now it's just the air some of us breathe.

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Shaiju T

I take Serverless as a tool instead of a trend. Because we cant make all APIs to serverless, if you try to make everything serverless then your cloud bills can increase. :)

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Matthew Daly

I'd really like it if people stopped saying "There's no such thing as serverless, it's just somebody else's servers" too.

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🧸 🏳️‍🌈 cooper-codes 💻 🎮

Can it please be the blockchain and imaginary web3.

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Jon Randy 🎖️

Was gonna say "Metaverse" and "web3" - but they've been said already. Worth saying again though. Some good stuff will come from them, sure... but they're mainly BS

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Joanfihu

Native apps. They make no sense unless you're making games. Devs don't like the Apple and Google tax. Mobile Web is gaining momentum.

Google should have focused Stadia on web based mobile gaming instead of AAA games. It would have been a death sentence for native apps. Browsers will soon have APIs to give better access to client's GPUs.

FB is moving away from mobile as a platform. Their bet on Oculus~Metaverse is paying off. Best year so far. Got one for Xmas and its an exciting new platform.

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manu • Edited
  • jQuery for sure
  • Homepage sliders, yes, carousels on home pages
  • Stock images ig
  • Scrolling text, (marquee)
  • Bootstrap!!!!!
    • Tailwindcss is a way better alternative, although it doesnt have components and you need to use react for headlessUI
  • werird color schemes
  • cPanel retro theme: How to change cPanel style - Hosting - Namecheap.com
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Ingo Steinke • Edited

While jQuery has been anything but a "trend" for many years now (thanks to the many updates to ECMAScript, thanks to frameworks like Angular, Vue, and React, and last but not least thanks to Babel making it possible to actually use the current JavaScript / ECMAScript core language features without having to care much about browser compatibility), it is still widely used according to the 2021 Web Almanac: "jQuery remains the most popular library, used by a staggering 84% of mobile pages. React usage has jumped from 4% to 8% since last year."

Retro themes like your cPanel screenshot spark some kind of nostalgia in me. I am far from glorifying "good old days" (mostly everything is better about web development than it used to be then, and I don't even miss coding in Perl) but I had been younger and the emerging possibilities of the web still seemed newer and more exiting to me.

Another retro example is the backend of Shopware 5, an e-commerce software / framework based on Symfony. Besides their current version, Shopware 5 is still officially supported and widely used, but they never changed the backend design:

Screenshot of Shopware 5 backend

Last (and least!) homepage slideshow carousels seem to polarize for years. I don't know any web developers who like them, there have been many articles and studies about bad usability and useless marketing effects, but still customers, and even more so, design agencies seem to love carousels. I just finished an article where I reviewed a carousel component with the same feeling like when will designers finally stop requiring carousel sliders?! 🤷😆

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geraldew

Seems to beg the question of whether TDD will fade, is fading or has already faded. I notice I'm not seeing as many articles about it as I used to - although perhaps only a finite number were ever required and the quota has been reached.

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Edward Tam

This is interesting. TDD is still a very useful concept. The methodology might not be the most comfortable to everyone, the result is very desirable. While I don't necessarily write my tests first before my code, I always make sure I cover my code with the same coverage and simplicity, and I encourage people to do so.

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Sergiy Yevtushenko

People started realizing that TDD is suitable only in limited number of cases. For example, there is no way to invent anything algorithmically non-trivial using TDD.

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Rohith Gilla

Most of the trends I think started or caught up in 2021, so maybe 2023 will be year of fade away of few

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zakwillis

Hi Ben, hopefully, companies will start waking up to how unproductive Agile is as a methodology for building robust reliable software.

When people say how successful Agile is in major companies. I say - look at the Market Cap of Bitcoin - not a project manager or scrum master in sight. :)

Certainly, I notice a lot more criticism of the process by developers than previously. An example is here.

quora.com/I-dont-want-to-be-a-soft...

I see Agile useful for;

  • Prototyping/RAD.
  • Business As Usual (BAU).
  • Rolling out a platform instance. For example, with my Web Data Platform, if I have a client it would make sense to have sprints.
  • Training staff to be more communicative.
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PNS11

Work from home. Pointy haired bosses have an easier time doing their surveillance and whatnot when they have physical access to workers, in part because a corridor contact leaves very little trace, unlike chat and video conferencing software.

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Wilson Bright

Centralized and privacy invading tech.

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cvshealthsurveyblog • Edited

Individuals began understanding that TDD is reasonable just in set number of cases. For instance, it is basically impossible to imagine anything algorithmically non-minor utilizing TDD. cvshealthsurvey.blog helps a lot to take part in the survey.

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Developer Nation Survey

We are actually running our 2022 Q1 Developer Nation Survey to capture likes, dislikes and understand what has become mainstream and what is still an emerging trends. If anyone wants to add their view, this is it.
(P.S there are prizes, vouchers and swag draws as a thank you to survey respondents)