Technologies I Am Investing in 2023

So Ben Awad on Youtube makes a video every year to list out the technologies he is interested in learning and also how his past year went. You can see his last video from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCCaYEG5KeA

This makes so much sense. As a developer we see new and shiny new technologies everywhere and as moths to light, we are drawn to them. But time is finite unlike the amount of shiny new stacks that comes out every year :) By writing couple of them down I think I can anchor myself down and keep track better.

This will be a good record after couple of years as well, so here it goes;

NeoVim

I think the best thing happened to me in 2022 is NeoVim. As a vim user for almost 2 decades, neovim is the most I love using my editor. LSP is amazing, Lua is amazing. Overall it’s just super duper enjoyable for me to use my editor.

Laravel

Laravel is my go to framework for testing ideas. It has pretty much everything to make an MVP for a web app or api. It works well, scales well and I feel very comfortable using it. The most important part about using Laravel is I can focus on what I am building instead of how I am building it. And I will planning on keeping it in my toolbelt in 2023 as well.

Tailwind

Tailwind is kind of the best thing that I invested in 2022 and I can’t be more happier about it. As a backend developer, I never had fun when I had to write CSS. But with tailwind it’s weirdly satisfying.

I am buying everything that the creators releasae like the tailwindui which makes everything 10x easier.

NextJS

In 2022 I didn’t like NextJS that much. For Poltio frontend stuff, we decided to use Remix. That is not going well. Nothing specificially bad about remix but if it’s not a hobby project, you want your framework to have best practices, documentation and examples for every case and that is not the case for remix since it’s so new.

In 2023 I am planning on investing on NextJS more since it is more mature ecosystem.

Github Actions

I was using Github Actions for some pipelines but most of the mission critical pipelines were still on Google Cloud Build and AWS CodeDeploy and CodeBuild. In 2023 I am planning on moving ALL of my pipelines to Github Actions and packaging up my random JavaScript code containing yaml files as official action packages. I think pipelines should be more connected to Pull Requests and github actions fits so well.

Kubernetes

In 2020 while we were migrating to Google Cloud from AWS for Poltio, I migrated pretty much all of our workloads to kuberenetes. 2 years later, I can’t love kubernetes more. It makes so much sense, it works pretty much how you expect all of the time and Google Cloud is making working with k8s so easy.

This year I am planning on investing on more and improving our reporting and logging stacks more.

Playwright

I have a pretty good relationship with k6.io and stress/load tests. This year I am planning on learning to use e2e better to improve our CI pipelines and among all the options playwright seems most interesting.

Cassandra

TBH, I was planning to actively use Cassandra almost 4 years now :) But Redis + a traditional DB like MySQL or PostgreSQL was still pretty good for me so I am hoping this year I will have a chance to use Cassandra since we are starting to play with bigger but more temporary data sets that has different schemas.

Echo

Although the last 3 services I wrote used Gin, Echo is still my go to framework for creating Go microservices. If the service has a single file I just can’t bring myself to use a framework but if we have more files, I will pick Echo everytime and plan on using it on 2 new services this year.

TypeScript

Since I don’t get to write that much JS code on day to day basis, I wasn’t succesful on convincing my team mates to switch to TS in 2022 but we are finally working on the PR to move our new remix stack to typescript and I am very hopeful that 2023 will be the year of TS for our frontend stack.

Rust

During 2022 most of my most used Gnome applications switched to Rust as their backend. I was planning on investing more time and learning to use Rust more efficiently but after switching back to macos since the 14" macbook pro is simply the best hardware that kind of took a back seat. Hopefully in 2023 I can invent a reason to dive back in :)

SwiftUI

I was planning on developing a duo finder for LoL to teach myself SwiftUI. I made couple of example apps locally with SwiftUI, in 2023 I am planning on finishing and releasing the app in app store just to keep my muscle memory fresh since my last mobile project was back in 2019 :/

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