Bridging the gap for small teams - Why JavaScript is key

You might have followed that I focus more and more on small-to-medium-sized companies. The reason is quite simple: smaller businesses often don't progress as well as large companies, which is odd in the IT sector because it's often different in other professions or areas.

It's getting harder every month to keep up with modern software technologies or methods to work.?Staying up-to-date is literally a full-time job, next to actually working as a developer.?And this is not a thing for everyone.

I recommend?stopping being a generalist?these days

What can an SME company do to stay on top of the game?

First of all, I recommend?stopping being a generalist?these days. It's just too hard to master many things at the same time. Instead, focus on specific technologies and develop more profound knowledge and skills there.

One of the most fundamental things in a tech-driven company is the tech stack, including programming languages. A programming language defines a lot more than just how your developers will write code.

A programming language defines a lot more than just how your developers will write code.

It's about environmental problems which need to be solved. Next, you will have an ecosystem where your code lives and runs in different stages, like development, staging, and production. Finally, your code will run somewhere on a server or device; this is a whole discipline on its own.

The more languages you have in your company, the more complex it will get, and the hard it gets to stay on top of the game. Worse, you will inevitably fall into unnecessary technical debts and recruiting problems.

Many companies still derive from a PHP/jQuery background.

I was one of them, and it was widespread. If it wasn't PHP, it was Ruby or c#. But the pattern was the same; the backend language was different than the frontend.

Is this still possible? - yes, of course, it is.?

Is this recommendable? I say no. Here's my opinion.

Why is JavaScript in the backend and frontend a good choice for SMEs?

Simply because you avoid many problems before they can appear and create technical debt and headaches, you will have?one language, which will be TypeScript; you will have?one environment, which will most likely be NodeJS, and you will reduce to?one ecosystem, which is treated very similarly for every NodeJS application, microservice, microfrontend, or web app.

Regarding recruitment, you only need to look for?one general type of developer. Some may specialize in some areas, and some are JS generalists. But recruiting and onboarding is a hell of a lot easier. Switching developers between teams becomes easily possible.

There's no limit to what you can build with JavaScript.

Ok, that's not 100% true, but we are in the context of small-to-medium-sized companies. Most of the time, it's about web apps, MVPs, e-commerce shops, or landing pages.

Even the vast majority of use-cases of native apps are possible to make with modern JS and webview-based technologies like Progressive-Web-Apps.?In fact, many of the major apps you use today are already PWAs, and you don't see the difference.?For example, I was part of a team that created B2B apps with heavy storage usage and photo editing and management. Those web apps were considered impossible in 2020 with existing web technologies. We proved that wrong; those apps are successfully productive today.

On the backend side, the teams I work with are pleased about how NodeJS applications, like NestJS, perform due to their scalability and maintainability.

JavaScript is a first-class citizen in the cloud-native sector.

Many cloud-native providers just offer to attach your JS application repository and take care of the CI/CD Pipeline.?I don't say this is a great idea and wouldn't recommend it, but I want to clarify how important JavaScript has become to everyone. This trend will continue for sure.

Cloud-Functions or Lambda Functions are becoming more essential as well. They are mainly based on JavaScript, easy to deploy, and vital tools in the serverless sector.

JavaScript is not a first-class citizen on Safari (yet).

This was true for the last years, but especially this year, WebKit put a lot of effort into keeping up with current specifications. Regarding the PWA topic, we saw a lot of improvement in 2022 and will see a significant step in 2023 with iOS 16.

If you ask me, 2023 will be a massive year for JavaScript-based user-faced apps

If you ask me, 2023 will be a massive year for JavaScript-based user-faced apps. Google, Apple, and Firefox are all aiming in the direction to push more into this direction.?

WebView, aka Browser, will become the dominant platform for apps in the coming years, so?it makes sense to consider JavaScript, the primary language in your company.

What's the point of other languages then, like GoLang or Rust?

They are essential and have their own advantages. We consider them as well, but it's a matter of use-case. Since we discuss what is suitable for SMEs, I urge you to consider JS your primary language, which doesn't exclude other languages at all.

NodeJS feels at home in a microservices architecture, and if you need a special microservice written in GoLang for a high-performance use case, why not use that language for that? Of course, combining languages in modern architectures are technically possible, but my message for SMEs is simple:?

Consider JavaScript as your primary way to develop, not the only one.