There's no doubt that front-end development will be one of the hottest disciplines in tech in 2021.

It was previously sufficient for developers in the front-end space to know some HTML, CSS, and maybe jQuery to create interactive websites, but today they're faced with a broad and constantly changing ecosystem of skills to develop; tools, libraries, and frameworks to master; and a need to constantly invest in personal education.

The last couple of years brought us awesome new libraries and frameworks, like ReactJS, VueJS, and Svelte, utilizing JavaScript to power major web applications.
This piece aims to give you some guidance on what you should focus on in 2020 as a front-end developer to level up your game, whether you're just starting with programming or already have some experience.

1. Frameworks

In 2021, we'll probably see a duel between Facebook's ReactJS and the community-driven VueJS. React currently has 159,000 stars on GitHub, while Vue has been starred even more - 175,000 stars. Angular, for example, has only 67,500 stars.
The search volume in 2019 for React (blue line), Vue (red line), Angular (yellow line), and Svelte (green line) supports this assumption - with Vue being slightly above React. Angular cannot keep up in terms of search volume, and Svelte plays absolutely no role in this comparison.




 Building scalable software is a challenging task. When we think about scalability in front-end applications, we can think of increasing complexity, more and more business rules, a growing amount of data loaded into the application and large teams often distributed around the world. In order to deal with mentioned factors to maintain a high quality of delivery and prevent technical debt, robust and well-grounded architecture is necessary. Angular itself is a quite opinionated framework, forcing developers to do things the proper way, yet there are a lot of places where things can go wrong. In this article, I will present high-level recommendations of well-designed Angular application architecture based on best practices and battle-proven patterns. Our ultimate goal in this article is to learn how to design Angular application in order to maintain sustainable development speed and ease of adding new features in the long run. To achieve these goals, we will apply:
  • proper abstractions between application layers,
  • unidirectional data flow,
  • reactive state management,
  • modular design,
  • smart and dumb components pattern.