Future prediction: The so-called modern web will die soon
Published on 2021-01-24.
For many years I have been advocating passionately against the so-called "modern web" because it is a poor excuse of saving money by doing so-called rapid deployment. Many web developers, front-end as well as back-end, haven't got even a basic understanding of the technology or the security involved in the work they do. What is worse is perhaps the fact that a lot of people are doing "modern web development" simply because they are blind followers of hype and trends. Hype and trends that dictate that you have to stuff websites with JavaScript - even though it is mostly unneeded - and slow and crappy frameworks. However, the time has finally come when "modern web development" soon will have to die.
The so-called "modern web" perhaps originated in the wake of the growing complexities of system administration and code management. However, while some people was truly working towards improvements, others simply wanted to make money and perhaps feel important and smart at the same time. They did so by developing hyped up software and frameworks and then telling everyone else to stop "re-inventing the wheel" and instead use their clever solutions. And rather than evaluating the claims of these people objectively, the masses where swayed by all their impressive rhetoric's and their popularity. They have even managed to get the majority of web developers to believe, that if you do anything other than so-called "modern web development", you are outdated and antiquated.
The result has been absolutely mind boggling and ridicules because even though the real advance in technology has made the hardware many many times faster, both in processing power and data transfer speeds, the Internet has become absolutely stupidly slow. The main reason for that is so-called "modern web development" in which all websites are build upon slow frameworks and then stuffed with tons of irrelevant JavaScript.
I have said it before, if you're pushing JavaScript as a dependency for your website to function, you'd better be serving some pretty amazing and special content, otherwise your website is just plain rubbish!
Today data centers around the world are using more electricity than ever. It takes more than 50 power plants, each capable of generating 500 megawatts of electricity, to power all the data centers in operation in the U.S. alone. And this number will increase dramatically over the years if the current development model doesn't improve drastically.
My prediction is that in only a couple of years from now, it will be socially and environmentally unacceptable for any kind of company to have a high carbon footprint. This is not out of true environmental concerns, rather the drive and source of it is political maneuverings because there is a lot of money to be made from environmental issues, such as by using CO2 credits (credits are generally traded in units of 1 tonne of CO2, and it's estimated that credits worth 2 billion tonnes of CO2 will be needed to get to the 2030 target).
This mean that companies need to reduce power consumption as much as possible, and every watt will eventually count.
When it comes to the software industry, then it has long been a "culprit". The software industry is a major contributor to irresponsible power consumption because the popular approach has been to neglect software performance optimization and simply "throw" more hardware at performance problems. As hardware became cheaper than developers, rather than optimizing software, you just add more machines.
However, this approach is no longer viable, and now we have to improve application performance as much as possible. This is especially important with gaming, web applications and other Internet running services such as streaming services.
Furthermore, the world is facing an ever growing issue of technology related security threats. As a web developer, whether front-end or back-end, just like in the past, you need to understand the technology you're working with and cannot simply "push buttons" and do "rapid deployment".
Perhaps in the future, companies will even have to compete with each other for customers in relation to who have the most performant solutions with the smallest CO2 footprint.
Another issue is that even though hardware eventually became cheaper than developers, hardware was never really cheap because the production of hardware and the huge amount of electronic waste have always had a major negative impact on the environment, not only in the form of carbon footprint during production, but also pollution and the thoughtless behavior of simply throwing away fully working machines.
In 2018 electronic waste in America represented about 2% of the trash in landfills, but it equaled 70% of overall toxic waste.
In the near future carbon footprints will become a much larger subject of worldwide scrutiny. Individuals, companies and countries will have to seek the fastest and most affordable ways to achieve a net-zero carbon footprint. This also means that careless use of technology and e.g. "modern web development" will eventually have to be a thing of the past.