So there’s only TypeScript Link to heading

When I finished university and was developing my passion for open source software, there came a point where I started feeling disillusioned about the job market and wrote something like “So there’s only HTML” complaining that all I could see in the future in terms of job prospects was developing CRUD web apps. That must have been about 20 years ago now.

Fast forward 20 years and I now look back on that time with fondness. Where “the Web” (even with its tacked on JS interactivity) was still an open, valid, useful and interesting platform. These days it feels like all the developer time, attention and effort is being spent on closed platforms (e.g. the app stores) and more and more, the Web is becoming just a dumping ground for AI crap and paywalled sites/platforms.

The arc that we as an industry have travelled over the last 20 years makes my prediction look quite trivial. The full journey is something like:

• The Web becomes the dominant platform
• JavaScript becomes more and more useful as a result, commanding more engineering effort and complexity
• The browser makers respond to this complexity (and its performance impacts) by introducing hyper-optimised JS runtimes
• Those runtimes, originally created for faster browsing, become their own “backend” runtime platforms
• A new language, TypeScript, is “layered” over the top of JavaScript in order to try and make it more maintainable to write JavaScript code
• Cloud providers commoditise Linux and make Function as a Service (built on top of Linux) extremely popular
• Microservice architecture becomes very popular
• Everyone needs to learn TypeScript for backend development

There’s more to each of those points, but it’s a rough idea of what has sort of happened.

So, here we are. 2025. And it seems more and more that the future is TypeScript everywhere and we all need to get on board.

Day 1 of trying to write every day for 30 days