Back in 2022, I wrote Web technology optimism hour, highlighting the things I thought were cool about the state of technology. Time flies. Let's do it again.
It's still easy to be pessimistic, but it's nice to mine your feelings for the positive ones. The elephant in the room is AI, but I don't feel like throwing another post into the gravity field of that topic.
Without further adieu:
TypeScript 7
It's here, finally, and it's faster. In the last edition, one of the headings was "Rust and Go based tools are making TypeScript development faster." At that point we had a few upstart projects for minifying, transpiling, and bundling TypeScript. Those tools have become standard-issue.
But TypeScript, the actual type-checking of the language and the language tooling in editors, was still a bottleneck. There was exactly one implementation of the TypeScript type checker, and it was implemented in TypeScript, so it ran at JavaScript speeds and had limited ability to become multi-threaded.
Unfortunately there's still only one game in town for TypeScript type checkers: it's still just Microsoft. But they rewrote TypeScript in Go for TypeScript 7 and it's much, much faster. This is one of the most noticeable changes to my day-to-day coding in a while.
Plus, even better: TypeScript 7 supports the Language Server Protocol! As I wrote about in 2024, Microsoft invented TypeScript and also the Language Server Protocol, but TypeScript never implemented the Language Server Protocol. So there was no standard way for other editors, other than Microsoft's VS Code, to provide language tooling for TypeScript. This was suspicious behavior because of the company's history.
But now: it just works. Neovim can support TypeScript 7 with its built-in Language Server support instead of someone wrapping the VSCode extension in an LS-protocol shell.
So: a big win. Hooray for the new TypeScript: it's faster, it supports open standards, and now there are two TypeScript implementations. Now all we need is one that's made by someone who doesn't work at Microsoft.
The Effect ecosystem is exciting
I've been writing little development logs about Effect over the last year or two. I'm excited about Effect. It's a big, all-encompassing system, but I think it has a lot of potential and is arriving at exactly the right time.
This is an era of supply-chain risk and I think there is, and should be, a swing away from the tiny module ecosystems in NPM. Software that's composed of hundreds of little modules from hundreds of authors is a lovely idea that doesn't work with malicious actors. The swing is toward larger, buttoned-up libraries, and Effect is really well-positioned for that. It has type validation, observability, state management, fancy data types, and lots of functional programming helpers all under one roof, in one package that's pretty well-maintained and heavily tested.
It's also very, very typed, which makes it safer to use at scale. And it makes limits a lot easier: you can just stick an Effect.timeout on anything and prevent network requests or database queries or anything else from taking too long. The same with concurrency, it's very easy to limit concurrency. It's ready for a very uncertain world where you have to validate and be careful about everything. But at the same time, it's fun to use, if you're that kind of person, which I am.
Bluesky and Mastodon are successful, meaningfully decentralized systems
I use Bluesky and Mastodon all the time and both just work. They don't feel like tech demos, it's not all nerds using them. The uptime is pretty good, the featureset doesn't seem limited by the technology choices.
And yet both are legitimately decentralized (in different ways) networks, with really interesting ideas about security, privacy, and community systems. Bluesky is aggressively building out its protocol as an independent technology from the social network, and as I learned at their conference, there are lots of creative people building on the technology.
There's a big gap between a cool tech demo and a user-friendly popular service, and both of these have bridged it. It's exciting, and shows that you don't have to accept a bad set of tradeoffs to make tech that's both principled and popular.
Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, and RCS are meaningfully secure messaging platforms
I want to just celebrate the end of a technology: SMS. It's so good that people don't use SMS anymore: it was needlessly expensive and extremely insecure. My texts with friends are almost exclusively on Signal & iMessage, and occasionally WhatsApp.
Now, WhatsApp is a mixed bag and nothing's perfect, but it's cool that the secure options recommended by the EFF and other sources are also popular options that people use every day. That's also pretty important from a privacy standard: having Signal installed on your phone is normal because it has a wide userbase, but the same would not be true if it was only used by people attending protests and being wary of government surveillance.
Hardware update cycles are slowing
People are hanging on to their phones and computers for longer. I'm part of this trend - my iPhone hit its fourth birthday, and I have no reason to even think about replacing this computer. With the exception of their batteries, modern laptops and phones are robust: they're water-resistant, made of durable materials, and basically just work.
You could read the same data differently: maybe people are upgrading slower because they have less disposable income. I'm not sure that's true. But either way, it's good that upgrade cycles are longer: it means less e-waste, less pollution, less churn overall.