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# Web development: where are we, and where are we going?

The fundamentals are a myth. The future of frontend development is purely visual abstraction. Adapt to assembling apps without typing code, or get left behind.

- **Speakers:** Laurie Voss
- **Event:** World Congress 2022
- **Published:** June 15, 2022
- **Duration:** 32:56
- **URL:** https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/524-web-development-where-are-we-and-where-are-we-going

## Summary

Web development evolves through a predictable, unbreakable cycle of abstraction, transitioning from wild experimentation to standardized best practices, and ultimately to commoditization. As technologies like hardware, operating systems, and servers become abstracted into cloud computing and serverless architectures, the industry consistently consolidates around a few dominant frameworks. A recurring theme in this evolution is the inevitable resistance from veteran developers "whining about the fundamentals"—a phenomenon that ignores the reality that the technology stack is merely a "layer cake of the things that developers used to have to care about and no longer do."

Today, the industry is experiencing intense competition and consolidation in serverless deployments and the jamstack ecosystem, with platforms leading the charge to automate CI/CD and hosting. Concurrently, React has achieved massive adoption, mirroring the historical dominance of jQuery. This massive scale proves that "the fundamentals" are a myth; if developers can accomplish their goals without understanding the underlying layers, gatekeeping based on legacy knowledge becomes irrelevant. Economics heavily drive this consolidation, as standardized tools lower training costs and make hiring significantly easier across the industry.

Looking ahead, the next logical turn in the cycle involves abstracting away frontend code entirely. Driven by the massive demand for web applications and a chronic shortage of software engineers, the future points toward visual, drag-and-drop editors that assemble pre-built React components. Just as machine learning tools like GitHub Copilot predict boilerplate code, the next logical step is eliminating the need to type predictable code altogether. While veteran developers might hate the idea of building web applications without writing raw HTML, this commoditization is essential to scale output. Developers will face a distinct choice: specialize deeply in building the underlying framework components, or adapt to assembling applications using these highly abstracted visual tools.

**Keywords:** web development technology cycles, framework consolidation economics, abstracting web infrastructure, serverless architecture adoption, jamstack deployment platforms, react component commoditization, visual drag-and-drop editors, myth of web fundamentals, developer knowledge gatekeeping, cloud computing evolution, github copilot code prediction, web application layer cake, legacy technology migration, frontend framework adoption

## Chapters

1. **Predicting technology cycles in the web development industry** (01:10) — Analyzing decades of survey data reveals a cyclic model of how web development technologies evolve over time.
1. **From wild experimentation to platform commoditization and consolidation** (02:25) — Economics drives the evolution of custom solutions into generalized frameworks and consolidated platforms.
1. **Why whining about forgetting fundamental principles is inevitable** (05:51) — As new frameworks gain mass adoption, veteran developers inevitably complain that newcomers ignore underlying foundational concepts.
1. **Migration strategies and changing the web technology stack** (07:18) — Developers must choose to either specialize in foundational tools or migrate to building applications using higher-level abstractions.
1. **Historical context of web servers and dynamic scripting** (10:10) — The evolution from static HTML files to dynamic applications using CGI and PHP exemplifies the technology cycle.
1. **Moving from physical hardware to standardized open stacks** (12:47) — Web hosting transitioned from local servers to co-located facilities and standardized configurations governed by simple economics.
1. **Content management competition and the dominance of WordPress** (14:53) — Thousands of similar blogging platforms fiercely competed until WordPress emerged as the primary framework for building websites.
1. **Abstracting complex browser standardizations from Rails to jQuery** (16:13) — Foundational frameworks smoothed over difficult APIs until their most useful implementations were natively integrated into modern browsers.
1. **Abstracting physical underlying hardware through cloud computing platforms** (18:12) — Cloud providers replaced physical server constraints with virtualized instances, making detailed hardware knowledge largely irrelevant for developers.
1. **Examining extreme package management volume through the npm ecosystem** (20:00) — The massive surge in download volume observed through registry usage reveals how ubiquitous centralized dependencies have become.
1. **Consolidating internet infrastructure through serverless architectures and Jamstack** (21:26) — Platform competition now centers on unifying continuous integration and deployment operations into single cohesive hosting solutions.
1. **Assessing React dominance and the potential of web components** (23:55) — Popular encapsulated UI patterns challenge early conventions, potentially leading to native component standards that run directly in the browser.
1. **Predicting a fully visual component driven web development lifecycle** (26:13) — Abstracting components into intuitive visual editors could enable complex application development without manually authoring any source code.
1. **Solving the global engineering shortage by automating code generation** (29:53) — Machine learning tools that accurately predict implementation patterns suggest a future where repetitive manual authoring disappears entirely.

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