2022 had me working with AWS Lambda, Micro-frontends, React Native and React. I had my first stint as a tech lead for a large insurance company as well. 2023 is a return to development, in the previous year as a lead, I wasn’t able to get nearly as much code done as I would have liked. Not because of the lead position, but because of the company that position was at. This year I have moved back to a senior developer, which means much more code to be done. It’s quite a nice change honestly, there is plenty of time for deep work, very few distractions and zero emergencies. This allows me to think about what technologies might be worth learning, that could directly improve my day-to-day life, or be applicable to a project at hand. When you’re a senior developer, you have those nagging code issues, or a task that requires some deep diving in a topic you might not have done before. You might have a problem to solve, with no idea how to solve it, and thus you get to learn something new. In 2022 as a lead, it was very rare to do anything apart from sit in meetings.

This leads me to the wonder that is 2023 and what it might bring! Frankly, I don’t know what I will be learning this year. I have a hankering for some AI/machine learning, I’ve never attempted it before but have a passing interest. I certainly know I’ll be trying out Storybook 7 when it’s released, plenty of cool things there. Furthermore, I’ve also seen some great things from the Tauri library/framework. Tauri is a tool, similar to Electron, that allows you to build desktop applications using JS. What it brings to the table over Electron, is use the native browser of the system to keep bundle sizes drastically smaller. Electron will bundle Chromium along with the program you are installing, since it’s simply a Chromium window under the hood. Furthermore, it’s built on Rust, as well as recently having added support for mobile devices. This quite possibly could be a competitor to React Native, which would be fascinating. I will certainly be trying this out at some stage.

As AI tools such as ChatGPT become more mainstream, more accessible and more useful, it raises the questions around what will development be like in the future. Will developers be needed if anyone can ask an AI to spit out an application. Even further to that point, if an AI can create works of art, poems, stories, what is left for people to do? These are all topics that have caught my attention lately, and it’s something that I will be exploring in 2023. Hopefully, this also means I learn some AI/machine learning to accompany the research. I’ve always been fascinated by the YouTube videos of people training an AI in some game. My favourite was one in which an AI learnt to drive around a very complicated racetrack. It’s extraordinary how each evolution of the AI gets better and better. How the algorithms slowly improve the AI, until finally, it can reach the end of the track.

All in all, I only have a few things so far I want to look into, but there is an exciting thing being released on my part further in the year, so watch out for that!

Here’s to an interesting, wonderful and happy 2023.