Code 2024 roundup and wrap-up: between eras in web development?

Last week was our 10th in person Code conference, and 12th in total, counting the two we held online when in-person conferences weren’t possible.

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

2012, and 2024–two eras of web development?

Now this 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. And yet the program holds up remarkable well.

In 2012, 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 been periods of significant JavaScript innovation.

And 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.

Taking front-end's pulse

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

Performance and Security–work to be done

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 just a free account).

Towards a new way of architecting web apps?

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 not quite 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.

Now, React certainly isn’t going anywhere (then again neither has jQuery), but rather than it being the hammer that turns everything into a nail, a sense emerged at Code that different approaches will increasingly make sense for different types of project.

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

They overall take away? This is not a time of hiatus, but it is a rather unsettled time–perhaps one 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.

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