One theme of web dev just keeps coming at me: server-side React. Last time, it was an excellent article from Christoffer Artmann. His argument about closing frontend/backend gap is so on point.

And this single argument connects to Gergely Orosz's What is Old is New Again in my mind.

You see, everybody is talking about layoffs, hiring freezes and difficulty for (even senior) software engineers to land a new job. I instead hear a strong signal from companies that it's time for function over art.

What do I mean by that? Until relatively recently it was so easy to convince exec team that we need that microservice architecture. Or we must try that new ORM lib before it is cool.

Ties have changed. Budgets are limited. We don't have time to play with new toys anymore. One guy who is "old-fashioned", yet able to deliver end-to-end is suddenly more valuable than all those specialists combined.

In Gergely's words: Fullstack is in full swing.

Not a good time for client-side UI libs. Unless... you go fullstack!

There are two points that pop in my head:

1. Big pro: I am a big fan of single-language stack, so server-side TS gets my approval.
2. Big con: React, even with server capabilities, is still just a UI library. We need Laravel-like framework to be able to beat that "old-fashioned" guy!

And so I am sure React team had great intuition with this decision. But we are still waiting for community to respond with a game-changing framework.

I will soon publish an article about my vision of Laravel-like React framework. If it got your attention, follow me!