let's look at some JS frameworks & the job market

So the results of the state of JavaScript survey came out. We see that Vt, it's super important and Astro as a JavaScript meta framework. If you are a developer right now and you're asking yourself what to learn, I want to make sure that you really get the full picture. And I believe this is widely incomplete and if you only know this, you will still have many troubles going and selling yourself into this market.

And I really wanted to use this video to give you exactly the things that if you invest in them, they give you the highest return on learning. Basically, the things that you learn that make you the most in demand, these things are used in production by real companies that pay you real money if you learn them. Now, if you add this, then you are already invincible. So, the results of the state of JavaScript survey came out and this is pretty much how the 13,000 developers that took the survey rank the frameworks.

And so, a lot of people tried to jump in and kind of prioritize their learning going into 2025 to make sure that you're in the edge and you're learning the latest things and you'll probably follow this road map. We see that Vt, it's super important and Astro as a JavaScript meta framework and then maybe Svelt. So that would be like the best things to learn. And then we have like TypeScript somewhere in the B and then C like angular, you should learn angular or Webpack or Ionic or any of those.

I believe this is very misleading. If you are a developer right now and you're asking yourself what to learn, I want to make sure that you really get the full picture and at the senior dev, we work with developers every day that are interviewing, that are closing offers into this market. And we know exactly what they're being asked on a day to day basis, right? I know, you know, from the live coding interview to the take home task, exactly what employers are kind of looking for.

And it's likely different and I really wanted to use this video to give you exactly the things that if you invest in them, they give you the highest return on learning, basically, the things that you learn that make you the most in demand. So you make sure that you know, not only you are learning and developing yourself, but also that you are increasing your value and that you become more competitive in the job market.

Because at the end of the day, I mean, I love learning to get better and to have more mastery, but I also want to make sure that all my learning it's aligned and that it will actually payback in terms of salary benefits, getting a better job. I know some people they just go to the, you know, they have this shiny object syndrome and they're going to the latest thing. That's not why we're here, we hate to learn things that you actually will use.

So I'm going to go ahead and reorder this image over here and we're going to start with the first one and place them. And so by the end you'll have a full picture of where, you know, what's worth learning. But also what I will do is add some things that I believe are missing and that they are crucial. So let's get going. So let's start with the easy ones, get them out of the way. So Corrivice is kind of HTML, JavaScript to kind of framework and tooling together with Ionic to build mobile apps.

I'm not going to spend too much time on it. I did use it back in the days, I think 2018 or so or it's 2019. I used it to create some mobile app, but I put it in not worded. Like, definitely not worded. Um, it's not that good. There's flutter these days, there's react. React mobile, they're a lot easier to learn and Ionic is pretty much the same. Kind of, you know, build mobile apps with HTML and CSS, not worded.

Selenium, you'll see this in the corporate. It's a testing framework and end to end testing. I used to be the only solution. I do believe, you know, it's written in Java, it got some updates. But it's still not state of the art. And it's not going to really help out. So if you're into end testing, there's better things out there, I'll put it in the not worded. And the same for Expo, which is pretty mobile tool kit to help you out kind of deploy.

Not not worded, I wouldn't invest in those. Now comes the big, which is Svelt kit. And I know a lot of people are talking very well about Svelt. People love Svelt, but the reality is the adoption is very low. We rarely see this one used in production. There are some startups that are risking for it and when you go to looking for a job, the biggest companies haven't moved into it. React, it's still kind of the most supported.

View is good, Angular is good, but felt it's really not. It really didn't, you know, hit the iron yet. And yes, you can say, well, maybe it grows in 2025, but I'm I tend to be quite skeptical. And there's several reasons for for that and AI has to do with that and we'll get to that when we talk about react. But for now, I'll say Svelt, it's kind of great. But again, I would it would be my kind of second part.

I wouldn't like like go ahead and learn Svelt today. I'm even torn to put it somewhere between great and decent. So I'll put it here. But it's it's kind of almost great, right? And the same goes with Astil. It does get some adoption. It does has, you know, the advantage of performance. The whole island architecture was pretty decent and pretty good. But at the end of the day, yeah, the use cases are limited.

And you won't see this, like go on LinkedIn right now and look for job postings. You're not going to see this. You can learn Astil, go to your next interview and you have nothing to say, they won't even ask about it. And so yeah, it's cool for your side project and so on. But if you're busy and you want to maximize your time, your side projects should paint to your main thing. TypeScript, top number one.

If you're going professionally into, looking for a JavaScript job, learn TypeScript as soon as possible. TypeScript, it's a superset of JavaScript. So you're still learning JavaScript and make sure JavaScript better. JavaScript with static typing. I love it, I think it one of the most useful things, especially with AI. Defining types helps you eliminate the hallucinations of, you know, AI tools. So if you define your types usually, the AI is pretty good at defining your logic.

And this goes back to what Linus Torwards said back in the day is that it's that, you know, good programmers care about data structures, where bad programmers care about code. In AI, it's good cable of writing code based on the data structures you define. And so learning about data structures and learning about how to, you know, build interfaces and types and generic types with TypeScript, it's a core skill.

Definitely a must have. Next up, it's Turbo Repo. This is kind of, yeah, it's kind of a mono repo tool. Um for building micro, kind of have a mono repo. It works very well with microfronts, but it allows you to manage, you know, several applications into a single repository. I think it's a great addition to your tech stack. There's different ones that different big companies are using. The reason I put it as a must have is because for most startups, when we go into the second, it's the easiest to learn.

And so, uh mono repos are something that not all companies are doing, but some companies are doing. So maybe at work you don't have a mono repo and there's no opportunity for you to really practice with it. Well, Turbo Repo would allow you to build a small proof of concept for yourself in in very simple steps, very fast. So you can learn about it without spending hours. And that's why I put it as top number one.

Some people would argue that it's not as capable as NX or PMPM workspaces, but it's faster. line. And that I care about that because if I can learn something fast that I can actually add to my skill set and that makes me, you know, at least give me the opportunity to go to someone that's using a different turbo tool and tell them, well, I don't know the exact tool, but I don't know this one. module bundler helps putting all your javascript in single file, kind of decent. I would even put it in a maybe because it's not like it was module used. The single is for roll up. roll up it's actually, you know, Vit, it's based on roll up and Vit is actually pretty good to learn, but these things didn't it doesn't really have too much value beyond that. testing library goes all the way up, okay? You got to learn testing library, it's a way to extend your testing knowledge to, you know, modern JavaScript frameworks. It can be used with different frameworks. I love that because you learn something once you apply to most frameworks, which is just lovely. So that's the kind of things that actually makes you a lot better. Electron, yeah, I mean, if you're building an electron app, if you're going for like a slack or one of those companies, like this code, that maybe they have some runtime and they need to package that, then yes. But to be honest, I wouldn't invest in that unless, you know, like everything you learn about JavaScript can be applied to electron more or less. So just get get good get good at a senior kind of full stack JavaScript. Puppeteer, it's a great tool. I'll put it in maybe. Uh, but it's mostly used internally. So a lot of internal tools allow you to have this Puppeteer as a headless browser. So when you do, for example, you want to test for web performance or you want to test in your CI CD pipeline for accessibility or extract critical CSS, Puppeteer comes in handy, but it's not something that you'll directly work with most of the time. So it'll be somewhere under the hood, so no need to stress about it. Yarn workspace, yeah, again, I mean it's an alternative to NPM and to be honest, I put it in maybe because unless your company is using it, then why bother. And here comes the last of the first year, which is turbo pack. It's the alternative to Web pack. Again, a module bundler. I'll put it in maybe, because unless your company's using it, then why bother? They say it's faster than Web pack, but Web pack might get some rewrite in Rust, which will make it faster and allows us to use the same interface. Web pack it's supported widely. Why learn something that does the same thing as Web pack only faster? It's been inspired in it, a lot of things are pretty much the same, but if your company

you know Webpack and you know what a module bundle is? like go up Vite and so on. They all kind of look the same. So again, we want to focus on the essentials, the things that matter the most. People could actually go and move it into decent, but still like why? Why why bother? NX, again, just another monopo tool. I think it's a good one. It's very good for their use case they uh they actually solve.

But you might not need this in most like when you go out there. Uh because most companies don't have it. The monopo they're moving towards it. I would say it's valuable only if it's used, you know, by your employer, like whether you work now and you have that opportunity to get your hands on it. If not, just tend to it. React, alternative to React that it's more lightweight. Now, the word it. It just doesn't have that option.

So why would I learn uh you know, why would I learn to to use 15 different tools for the same thing? Your value doesn't go as a developer if you just know 15 ways to do one single thing. It, yeah, sure, there's value in it. There's some value in it, but it's very little. So it's much better for you, if you are a front end there, for example, rather than learning Preact to go in and learn HTTP, to go in and learn a bit about the APIs and databases.

That will really expand, right? It will expand your knowledge without really as training you out to teen. Whereas Preact, you know, it's kind of yes, solidifying your component framework knowledge, but it's not really adding anything new to your skill set. It doesn't challenge you. You're learning the same thing, it's like learning, you know, how to write the same scene in a different language. I mean, in a marginal language, right?

Play right? Yes, play right is being replaced. It's kind of replacing Cyprus. people love it. There's different reasons why it's likely better than Cyprus. I think Cyprus is still king, but if I were outside looking into and to testing today, and I would know nothing, I'll start with Playwright. It's very good to write end to end test. I love end to end test. They're one of the best thing you can have in an application, especially like we're adding all this AI written code that nobody really has any control over.

So adding end to end test is probably the safest way to ensure code quality, especially if you're using AI for coding tools. Future, yes. Yeah, it's great. It's the most spread framework after React and so ability will be decently high. Uh I know several people that switch from, you know, people we have in our meeting program that maybe they were view developers and now they're working with React, or they were React developers.

Now with the awaking with Vue, it's extremely easy to move your knowledge between the two of them, they follow very similar philosophies. For me, it's like a open source, like a free React, because React is kind of on my face, you know way. Angular's teeth is decent. Now, people kind of hate Angular and there's been a bunch of releases and it kind of, you know, the hope came back up that Angular is going to be this big thing with you know, services and signals and all that.

It definitely has some really cool features you don't find in any other framework. It's very corporate. And if you're going for more traditional companies, you will find Angular right. It comes with TypeScript. We know traditional companies for fact preferred, corporates, preferred it. And so, what it'll add to your employability, it'll definitely add more to your employability than knowing Astro.

And yes, Astro, it's cooler and it's, you know, the latest stuff. But yeah, Angular will help you out. You can go to an employer and you can get that job because you have Angular. They'd go for someone that knows the tool first. That's unfortunately what they do. It's not maybe the right way to source candidates, but it's how it works. And so I would rather learn Angular. Again, like I kind of put SvelteKit on top of Angular and Astro, so I'm going to rectify that, I put Angular here, uh, because it's actually pace into my employability.

Yeah, I'm thinking about downgraded this too. I will get back to them later. It's built. It's a decent. Like people love it, and it's much faster than Webpack, but it's not as supported. Uh, it does allow the hood and I I'll talk it sounds easier because like you do, you know, this one line config. I do find Webpack to be clear and easier to understand for somebody that's a beginner, just because they, it kind of clarifies a bit, you know, all the processes that your code goes through before it gets code splitted. And I just find it better documented. So, um, most companies would use Webpack in production and that's why

I would invest in in Webpack and this is one of the things where I disagree most with the survey where they placed Webpack as in the very bottom low. I will place it at the very top. So, Angular and Webpack are at the very bottom. I disagree. I think you're employability, if you learn Webpack and Angular, well, uh, will be very high. You know, they're not selling their frameworks as well as everybody else.

But these things are used in production by real companies that pay real money if you learn them. And I would rather learn those, then, you know, so whatever passion project uh the open source Coming in that comes up with Gatsby. Wow, everybody talk this is going to be the next big thing. I remember 2020 we went to Gatsby conferences. And it was the coolest thing ever. And it never kind of picked up.

I mean people used it for the blogs. Some people use it, you know, like it has, you know, if you combine it with the CMS, kind of allows you to do like this, especially static rendering, it's extremely good. A dead, but it kind of like stay there. It's kind of decent. So if your company's using it, learn it. If not, yeah, not really worth it. If you have a developer blog, you might think about migrating to it.

It's a framework for uh for a view, so kind of allows you to build better applications with uh with view. It's the next js of what next js is to react. It's for view JS, so it's decent. Uh but first learn view with all next. Capacitor. Storybook. Storybook, it's actually a great thing to learn. A lot of big companies are using it. You'll find it in job descriptions, people ask you, what do you know about the design system?

Especially bigger companies, they use design systems to build reusable components. And storybook, it's a very easy way to do that. So, storybook, it's a good one. Um, Max Saver updates a decent, right? It's very useful to kind of mock your APIs, and sometimes you don't even need that kind of tool. So, spending your time on a marginal use case, it it won't pay up back. Like MPM, but what's there to learn about MPM?

I mean, yes, yarn is better. But most projects will be set up with MPM and most developers know MPM and most documentation. It's still related to MPM, so I'd say it's kind of here. In terms of great, learn how to package a simple, how do you distribute like a simple package? If you are away to build it, it's a very good exercise for the JavaScript developer. And learn MPM beyond MPM install. Adds also pretty decent tool.

Uh it's much faster than MPM, because of how it's designed and it's kind of an alternative for that turbo repo. But again, it's more complex than Turbo repo, and I would go for Turbo repo as an easy way to move your knowledge into mono repos. Uh Vitest, the same level of view, kind of helps you write unit tests. It came from V. It's strong in the view ecosystem. A lot of people use it for React too.

I think it's decent, even if just it's still the main player there, and that's why it just goes out the very tough. the most used probably testing library. um very simple to use and you know, it's just going to be easy once you know just to learn V testing, to learn Moca. So why not if if they are all the same, then why not learn the most popular one? Because that's the one that you'll get questions in a real life interview. That's the mentality here.

Lena goes into a no, I mean, it's kind of a monoo thingy. Um few people really use it. I can agree here with the JS ranking, not really worried. Vite goes to my second row. A lot of people have been saying, why are you still using webpack when Vite, it's like so much better and so much faster and it's like a one line config. Well, because there's a lot of things that uh webpack could do in the beginning that you cannot really do with Vite. It used to be the case with module federation, now they migrated to Vite. I don't really care which one you use, but to be honest, webpack goes a lot more in depth. A lot of bigger corporates, bigger companies still use more webpack than Vite. They all do the same and it's extremely easy once you know webpack to learn Vite.

It's like if 100 is the effort to learn webpack, five is the effort to go from webpack to Vite. It's just plain simple. So, learn the most used one, learn the one that's going to give you the mental models and then uh switch your knowledge to Vite. So, SvelteKit, I mean, I kind of placed that already. And uh what else do we have? We have Remix. They sold Remix so much and it had so many really cool features and still adoption didn't happen.

Very few companies use Remix in production. I did like the philosophy behind it. I have to be honest. Uh there was nothing too long with it, but next kind of was just better at the market share. And that's why next goes all the way to the top. If you're learning React today, you also want to learn Nextjs and video server side rendering next, it's widely supported. vercel, it's building a lot of the uh infrastructure of the modern web. And of course, it still has a lot to go, but I do believe they are much better player and I would rather invest in Nextjs than in anything else at the moment.

It will be the one that pays most back. Cypress, I already put play right at the top. So Cypress goes lower just because it used to be the best tool to write end-to-end tests, but it kind of stay there. many different reasons. It's just more flexible. It's definitely better, you know, if you start a project, I would use a player like not Cypress. React goes to the top. I know people is going to be hating on React, they've been hating on it for years.

React was hated since the first time it came out. And I still believe it's one of the best UI frameworks. Some people would say, you don't even need React, you could do everything with Vanilla JS. I do not believe that. I believe they solved a very big problems that web dev had, and I still believe it's one of the greatest uh front end framework. It's definitely top player when it comes for you looking the market uh and getting to know a job and it's extremely easy if you know React to learn things like Vue and even angular.

I mean, angular, okay, it has a bit more than React in it, but once you get your head around components and state in React, that's extremely easy to uh to extrapolate it. It still has around 70% of the market, 60%. So you need React. If you have React in your uh CV and you are you're reasonable full stack and you're decent at it, you're pretty good, you know, like there's memo, you know, hooks, you know, state management.

You know the web very well, you won't have a problem even in today crazy market. So learn React, get as good as you can. I'll put React Native as decent because like do you really need to uh build a native application? Yes, we have that worked with React Native, I had to work with it at back at Cl, we're building the banking app and we had React Native. And it was, you know, there were certain event disadvantages and advantages to it.

It was so easy for all the JavaScript developers, it was so easy to hire React Native people. Flutter, it's likely better these days, it's more performance, state management is better in Flutter. I did not add it Flutter here. React Native, it's a very easy step from a React dev to go and work on mobile. So, definitely kind of decent, kind of worded. As we see, trust tooling, uh a test transpiler, if you want, I'll put it here, it's kind of under the hood of many things that V does, but it's nothing that you necessarily have to dive in.

And then uh yeah, React, it's again. Yes. I'll put it react twice, so you can uh hate on me in the comments, but uh I think React is the best framework. Right now, to learn, still the best one. Most code bases are written in React, it's an easy to work with AI on it, you're going to get the best suggestions. Just because And so it's still maintains the advantages of of being the one and lonely framework and everything that came after uh kind of failed to to help. Now, there's a lot of things I don't like about React. Some of the direction is going right now. it gets the job done and if you go on LinkedIn and you look for jobs, you'll find that React is one of the best thing to add to your skill set in terms of possibilities and options you get. Now, there are a lot of things that I also added that are not here, and I'm going to go very quickly over them because I do believe this is widely incomplete. And if you only know this, you will still have many troubles going and selling yourself into today's market. And the number one thing is Babel, which is the uh the transpiler. It transforms JavaScript, modern JavaScript to anything else you need. I think it's uh core. It's kind of core to your understanding of webpack and transpiling, and you need to know Babel and how we transpiles JavaScript and polyfilling. So I'll add it into the goat list. There's React query, which I'm not a fan of libraries, as per, but it does make things super easy, especially caching and data fetching. It's kind of combination of state and fetching data. And it's amazing because you don't need to put your state anymore in like a global store when you're just fetching data. You just solve it at a component level, and on top of that, so many features that would be so hard to build if you do it yourself. So I do believe React Query went in the right direction. And it's just a great thing to have. GraphQL. Now, you know, this every I added here looks like front end, but if you don't know how to fetch data or how data looks at data layer level, you won't know much. I know your front end dev, why would they care about APIs? Well, because employers want a senior front end dev that can actually extend API sometimes. Because you will be working on the back and for front then already have they need to have an opinion on APIs. And so, yes, you, you know, if you can get your hands on graph skill, if you're just consuming data. Understand, you know, how uh resolvers, how schema work, get your head around how to organize data in an efficient way in a big front application. You will be in a very good spot. We have Docker, Docker is a react application, uh run it with Docker locally, understand how it works. It's the industry standard for deployment, but you do need Docker nowadays. If you don't have it, it just looks like you're just, you know, middle level front end.

all right so I know it's kind of a private this better than it is nowadays to have, but I added it here because it's one of the easiest to set up. It gives you web performance and error monitoring. Monitoring is very important. It's not only about building things, we're here to deliver industry level software, has to be well operated. You have to be able to deploy it, and you have to be able to monitor it. That's the job of a developer.

It's not just, you know, collecting logos of of libraries in your package Jason. So, Sentry, it's a must have. Tailwind CSS, I'm not a fan of CSS frameworks, learn CSS yourself and ideally a little bit about how to make things look good. Color theory, composition, they all help to have an eye for things, but Tailwind it's kind of a shortcut and it's widely adopted now. So people do mention that and and it's it's uh it's kind of a nice to have in a job. Git lab, uh you want to learn how to build the pipeline, deploy your next JS app.

Uh I know next JS has cell and it's all happened magically under the hood, most companies won't use that. They'll use Git lab and you're going to need to to learn how to operate that, even if you're just working mostly on the front end. Amplify, it's AWS answer to cell and Netlify. It's a one click deployment on AWS. Is the easiest way to start on AWS. There are errors and sometimes it just doesn't work, but they made it quite easy uh to start with it.

And I would go ahead and deploy a small project on AWS, amplify, get an AWS account and get yourself into the cloud, play with the cloud, figure out that it is not as intimidating as it seems. That would really boost your value. And so if you look at a developer here, like let's imagine you only know this stuff, right? You are very valuable in the front end, but you would not be highly ever be considered for senior roles. Now if you add this, that's what makes like the top row now.

It's perfect for a senior, right? For and if you add the second row, uh then you are already invincible and everything else kind of gives you diminishing results. So the 820 rule, don't invest in things that don't pay back. This is what I would focus on in 2025. I know there's a myriad of frameworks and libraries out there, but the ones that I most use and I usually see a lot of stuff, kind of stays the same and consolidated.

But there's some new upcoming tools that actually made it out a couple of years. So going back to our title point, you see it looks like very very different from how this to be. And I promise you, if I will start looking for something in 2025, this is where I would start. If you're wondering where you are staying in terms of technical skills, take a free assessment. A lot of the questions you'll see there are fundamental questions, particularly around, you know, mental models.

And what some of them are, you know, regarding things you usually use in webpack or in play react or in react. So, it will give you an insight of where your skills are right now and what to invest and what what's the biggest gap, the biggest opportunity for you to get some return on learning as with the return on investment. I'll see you in the next one.