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For the first time in a while, I didn’t send a newsletter last week. I was in Melbourne for our 10th in person Code conference, and 12th in total, counting the two we held online when in-person conferences weren’t possible.

If you do the math (as our American friends would say) that means we started Code in 2012. A brief look at the 2012 program (on Conffab you can watch all those presentations with a free account) gives a sense of both how much has changed, and what has stayed the same.

The 2012 program holds up remarkable well, and yet it was pre-React (though Tim Oxley talked about Reactive UIs), pre PWAs (which have a close connection to Code, Alex Russell first talking about them anywhere on stage in his opening 2015 keynote), and before much the modern CSS we’ve been showered with in recent years.

Dave Johnson from the team that brought us PhoneGap (ask your parents) talked about the slew of device APIs we had access to in our web apps. Well the more things change as they say (it sounds more sophisticated in French)… in 2024 we had Julian Burr talk about Device APIs–not the same ones mind you, well not for the most part (contact pickers got a mention in both), but it was an excellent reminder as to how capable the web platform is for application development.

Curiously, 2012’s conference was probably more JavaScript heavy than this years. Why? Partly JavaScript is simply so much more widely adopted and used in 2024 than 2012. Partly because so much of that use is somewhat hidden behind frameworks and libraries.Partly too because we’re in a bit of a hiatus between periods of significant JavaScript innovation.

A couple of things that were almost entirely absent from the 2012 program were security and performance, two things that have become much more central to the practice of Front End development than they were a decade ago.

So if we were to take the pulse of front end development from this years conference, what things should be on your radar?

We’ve still got a lot of work to do on the security and performance fronts.

 I’ve definitely got some homework to do, with webdirections.org having been savaged onstage by Stephen Rees-Carter for our woeful security headers report card (try your own site!) What was great about Stephen’s talk is he went step by the through the different points of failure with fixes for each.

Similarly Ben Schwarz spoke about the current state of front end performance, and Core Web Vitals. And how poorly many, even very prominent sites and apps, do. This has been a recurring theme for years in almost every web performance focused talk at our conferences (there are dozens at Conffab, again most available with a free account). We all still have work to do here.

Web Components, meanwhile, not only had their own focussed presentation from Keith Cirkle, but got name checked numerous times. They’re something we’ve covered numerous times at Code and other conferences (the first time at Code 2013, so very nearly from the start).

But coupled with View Transitions, and something we’ll cover in detail later in the year Speculation Rules, perhaps the venerable SPA architecture we’ve relied so heavily on (and which Jake Ginnivan provided some critical insights into at Code) will somewhat wane in dominance.
My instinct is new architectural patterns will emerge (perhaps the Islands Architecture we covered at Code 2023 will become increasingly prominent?).

Now, React certainly isn’t going anywhere, but rather than it being the hammer that turns everything into a nail, the sense that emerged at Code is that different approaches will increasingly make sense for different types of project.

Code 2024 covered so much more, including a lot of CSS, particularly focussed on grid, flex and container queries, and where each is best suited.

The overall take away? This is not a time of hiatus, but rather a somewhat unsettled time–perhaps between Eras (a metaphor several speakers adopted with a nod to the cultural phenomenon that is the current Taylor Swift tour).

As opening speaker Ben Buchanan summarised it, we’re in the SPA era, as we have been perhaps for a decade. But the overwhelming dominance of that architecture may be coming to a close.
As always with web technology the only constant has been change, since the beginning.