2022 Front-end Development Report: TypeScript becomes the "favorite" of 84% of web developers | Accessibility, edge rendering become major trends

Recently, The Software House released a "2022 front-end development market state survey report".

In this report, a total of more than 3,700+ front-end development professionals from 125 countries/regions around the world filled out the survey, and also integrated the views and sharing of 19 experts from the field of front-end technology development, and gave a positive feedback on the front-end 2020 and 2022. Years of data were presented side-by-side for comparison and a survey conclusion was finally drawn.

Survey results show that a whopping 56% of respondents are working remotely, with only 5% working in an office. The concept of mass remote work is indeed relatively new, so much so that the 2020 survey didn't even examine this data.

As you can see, most engineers clearly prefer to work remotely, as there is no need to commute, the embarrassment of being distracted by someone tapping you on the shoulder all the time, etc. However, in the remote working state, issues such as real-time sharing of information, duplicating group messages and spontaneous discussions are still a challenge.

Front-end development is easier to "get started"

In the results of this survey, a very interesting phenomenon was found: a person who is a front-end developer is not just a front-end engineer himself. According to the data, some of the front-end development jobs shared in the "Other" option include:

• A training class student who just started learning frontend,
• A self-taught developer studying at a non-technical university fell in love with frontend,
• Product managers who sometimes push code to production,
• A developer advocate who helps the front-end team from time to time,
• Front-end development architect,
• Design System Leader,
• A designer who can code at the same time,
• Graphic Designers and Developers,
• Global leader: a developer store in charge of a single person, who does everything by himself, including front-end development.

While this finding may seem unsurprising, it's a good indication that front-end technology is an easy field to get into, even if you don't have much of a front-end background before, you can still get involved after a quick learning curve.

Developers working on larger front-end teams are the norm

According to the survey data, 27% of respondents said they work for a company with more than 50 front-end engineers. Meanwhile, 30% of developers share how 5 or fewer front-end developers work at their company. 50% of respondents work for companies with 10 or more front-end engineers.

This statistic also shows an interesting phenomenon: there are almost as many front-end engineers working in companies with a large front-end team as there are in companies with a small number of teams or working alone. Of course, these companies have vastly different developer experience and expectations: larger companies will have more developer experience and front-end platform teams. Mentorship is more common; in smaller companies, each developer has greater responsibility and fewer options for getting feedback.

82% of front-end engineers come from tech companies

The data also showed that 82% of respondents identified as working in software development companies, development agencies, or technology- or digital-focused companies. Additionally, only 18% of respondents said they work for a non-tech company.

Among them, engineers from software development companies/development institutions accounted for 41.6%, and engineers from technology-based/digital-based companies accounted for 41.2%. Engineers from non-technical companies accounted for 12.3%, another 2.9% came from other fields, and 1.9% came from government agencies.

63% of developers focus on front-end "accessibility"

According to the survey data, the "accessibility" of front-end development is a common focus of respondents this year: 63% predict that it will become more popular in the next few years. And frameworks are tending to provide different ways to solve this problem, including Next/Nuxt Image, HTML validator and WebHint.

At the same time, component-driven development is also embraced by most developers, which makes sense considering the popularity of React, Vue, Svelte, and even web components (such as this year's standalone success story - Wordle).

Progressive Web Apps are also gaining popularity, with developers eager to take advantage of cross-platform development using the same core codebase. Also, Headless CMS (headless CMS) is also progressing with increasing adoption and more integration into frameworks.

Front-end "edge rendering" solution will become a major trend

After comparing the survey data in 2020 with the survey data in 2022 this year, an important trend was also found: the front-end performance optimization solution-edge rendering.

Edge rendering was originally powered by CloudFlare and its worker platform. During the survey period, the majority of deployment targets released or implemented their own serverless or edge capabilities that users will soon adopt, so this trend is not accidental.

It is reported that frameworks such as Nuxt 3, Remix or Sveltekit are moving in this direction, supporting on-demand rendering directly at the CDN level. With the corresponding gains in reduced latency and lower costs for server-rendered applications, this can be predicted to be a big focus in 2023.

Front-end developers are moving from "Moment.js" to "Date-FNS"

The survey results also show that today's front-end developers are moving from "Moment.js" to "Date-FNS" when it comes to date handling libraries.

Meanwhile, more than 40% of people still use Moment in their projects, even though the library has lost support, and even its official website has a creator comment saying "If you're considering using Moment, you should probably look for an alternative". With only 5% of respondents wanting to continue using the library, it appears that Moment is indeed on the decline.

In the survey results, the Axios network request library entered the stable stage with a high "vote rate" of more than 60%. The library has been in the front-end market for a long time, and it's clear that it's more of a "standard" than a "trend".

Also, because Apollo is used for seamless connection to GraphQL, it also has higher votes in the "used and liked" category: 40% of developers want to learn Apollo in the future, which means the Apollo community is steadily growing .

TypeScript is the "favorite" of 84% of web developers

According to the survey data, compared to 2030, the number of people using TypeScript in 2022, which is this year, has risen by more than 7 percentage points, reaching an astonishing 84%!

It seems that as we all know, TypeScript is now universally popular among developers, and people often praise "how TypeScript prevents a whole class of bugs before they happen", which in turn makes development faster and applications better reliable.

So, what makes so many developers love TypeScript?

After years of web development, front-end developers long ago didn't want to repeat the experience of switching back and forth between code editors and browsers and guessing why "undefined is not a feature".

So, TypeScript has not only won the hearts of developers, but has also worked hard to become a front-end industry standard, it makes the way web development less frustrating than it used to be.

More details on the findings of this survey can be found in the full report.
Reference link: https://tsh.io/state-of-frontend/#report