Every now and again, I type up a short list of thoughts on front-end development, and it's become a yearly affair despite my best intentions. Here are my thoughts in 2015, 2016 and 2017. Year after year, it's interesting to collect my thoughts and pen them down.

  • 2018 is the year FireFox became good again, it's live inspection of React states, accessibility view and JS map support is nice, but more so it's the consumery features like containers for FaceBook that has me using it more and more.
  • Once you go ES6+ you can't go back.
  • Chrome's CSS / JS coverage makes you feel bad.
  • Anyone remember post-CSS? Does anyone use it for anything outside of browser prefixing? Does anyone use CSSNext?
  • I've more or less abandoned grunt for gulp and webpack. I still occassionally use CodeKit 3.
  • I don't like Bootstrap 4.
  • Flutter looks like Google being Google. Consider me unexcited.
  • I've finally had to grow up and start learning software design.
  • WILL WE EVER GET CSSGRIDS?
  • Cordova WebView apps are pretty much past-tensed in the era of the React Native, Native Script, Flutter and so on...
  • IE11 still haunts us.
  • CSS Typed Object Model looks great. Too bad we won't be able to use for years or at least until there's polyfills...
  • Google Pagespeed lacks commonsense and is irrelevant. At least we now have Google Chrome Audits via Lighthouse which still spits out some irreverent bullshit.
  • Vue JS looks fun.
  • The term front-end developer is probably going to fracture. I've been saying this for four years. UI Developer has arisen over the years although that term is problematic since we do not have a "web" UI developer. Generally, this applies more to application design.