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Austin Gil
Austin Gil

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My 2020 Predictions & Resolutions for Technology

There are already tons of articles out there predicting which emerging technologies will take over, and which current leaders will be de-throwned. This is not one of those articles. Rather, I am going to focus my predictions around my own use of technology, and how things are looking for me going into 2020.

CSS FTW!

Utility/Functional/Atomic CSS libraries have been growing in popularity, in particular, TailwindCSS. In 2020 I will be joining the ranks of library authors by completing Particles CSS. With this, I think by the end of 2020, most of my projects will be styled primarily with a utility CSS library.

Vue make my dreams come true

I’ve been using Vue.js for a long time now, and I love it. Most of what I’ve used it for is single-page apps, but I’d like to get more into the hybrid app space. Really looking forward to V3, and I think it will change a lot of things for the better. I also am looking forward to playing with things like Gridsome more.

I’ll continue working on Vuetensils and will likely use it in more and more projects. It’s been a fun and useful project, which I hope will continue to gain popularity along with the concept of “naked” components.

Whoever Svelte it, dealt it.

Svelte has been getting a lot of hype. It’s cool, but I’m still not convinced enough to start using it in earnest. Curious to see how its impact on the community will affect the Vue.js team. Will they move more things to the compiler? Who knows. In any case, it will be a fun project to watch.

Server more? Nah, Serverless.

My recent job change has got me using more and more serverless functions, and I have to admit, they’re pretty awesome. It’s likely that I just haven’t hit the point yet where things start getting hard to coordinate, but for now, it’s been good. It’s definitely something that will continue to grow in my toolbelt.

Currently, we use AWS a lot, but I would like to see how other service providers will work into my projects. Particularly things like Netlify functions or Zeit’s Now.

Ode to Node

Speaking of servers, Node.js has been good. I really enjoy using JavaScript on both the client-side and on the server. Go is a good candidate to make an appearance as well, but I bet most of my server code will be in Node.

Oh, GraphQ-L yeah!

GraphQL has been a fun new tool. I’m pretty sure I’m not doing things right all the time, but it’s still a lot of fun to work with. The strong typing is good (and sometimes bad), and the tooling is getting awesome. Apollo is definitely my tool of choice at the moment, and I’m hoping that their data management gets a LITTLE easier as it’s already sort of replaced Vuex.

TypeScript or HypeScript?

I’ve used TypeScript a couple of times in the past, but have mostly been holding out on it. I just don’t get a whole lot of benefit from it, which is ironic considering my opinion on the strongly typed nature of GraphQL. But the issue I have is not that I don’t like strong typing, it’s that I can still get almost all the benefits of TypeScript without all the ceremony simply by using VS Code’s built-in type checking feature and some JS Docs. With that in mind, I’ll probably continue to hold out on TypeScript until someone else forces me.

Do you do any modeling?

My company does a lot with machine learning. It’s been really cool to be around that sort of thing and learn more about it, but to this day, I have not actually done anything. Most of my colleagues working in that space use Python, so it may be that I pick that up, or that I stick with JavaScript and use something like TensorFlow.

Community (sorry, no witty title)

At the end of last year, I joined the Views on Vue podcast, and that’s been really fun. I’ll definitely be continuing that for a while, and maybe do more podcasting on other shows.

In terms of conferences, I’ve already got my ticket for VueConf US (hit me up if you’re going), and I’m hoping my company will support sending me to a few more.

This year I want to spend more time writing good articles. There were a couple last year that I was proud of, and I’d like to keep that going. And in a somewhat related vein, I’m going to be spending less time on Facebook, and probably more on Twitter.

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