Happy New Year! I hope you enjoyed the holidays and had some time off to re-energize for the new year.

It’s been a while since my last update, but hey: it’s 2025 now. New year, new me etc. etc. So this seemed like the perfect time to get back to writing these articles - and what better way to start than with a look ahead at what 2025 might have in store for front-end developers. Both in terms of libraries and frameworks, but also the job market and how AI will continue to impact our field. Let’s get into it!

Tech

It’s been a running joke for years that a new JS framework pops up every week. But if we think about it, there’s still really only 3 major players if you’re building a large production app:

• React + NextJS / Remix

• Vue + NuxtJS

• Angular

Of course there’s plenty of other options that are cool in their own ways: Svelte, Astro, Qwik, Solid, TanStack Start etc. But they all have yet to gain real mainstream adoption, making them slightly more risky to bet on if your goal is to land a job ASAP.

What I think is both cool and scary (and will continue to happen in 2025) is the standardization on React + NextJS + Tailwind + ShadCN UI. Maybe I’m slightly Twitter-pilled here, but it seems like this is the preferred stack for the vast majority of people in the online tech community.

On one hand, I think that’s great. I’ve been a fan and advocate of Tailwind for years, and I love how ShadCN UI makes it super easy to implement slick and accessible UI components with the perfect layer of abstraction (copy/paste + customize instead of installing from a package). I also think React and NextJS is in a much better place now with the release of React 19 and NextJS 15. It feels like the App router and Server Components have largely been adopted now and most of the rough edges have been sorted out - compared to when the App router came out in early 2023. That was… not good 😅

At the same time, competition pushes all our tools to be better. And I’m personally a little worried that other great frameworks I love working with, like Vue and Svelte, might get pushed further away if companies continue to prefer React for their front-end needs. Time will tell!

I also want to make a few predictions for 2025:

• Astro will continue to grow and have a much bigger impact (because it’s designed from the ground-up to focus on building websites rather than webapps)

• Vite / Rolldown (the upcoming underlying Vite bundler currently in beta) will be the preferred build tool for developers. Man I wish NextJS would just suck it up and use Vite instead of building their own turbopack, but oh well 🤷‍♂️

• Playwright and Vitest will become the de-facto way to test front-end apps on both the unit and end-to-end level. These tools are sick. Seriously, give them a try if you haven’t already because they actually make testing not suck.

One thing is for sure: there’s never been this many awesome tools to build great front-end sites and apps, and 2025 will only continue to improve that fact 🔥

The job market and AI

The front-end job market is in a tricky state. Let’s start with the negatives:

• AI / LLM’s allow non-developers to produce and deploy simple websites using tools like v0. I say “simple”, because I think developers are still needed to build anything remotely complex or to fix when the AI goes off-track and gets itself stuck. But it’s hard to say exactly how much better LLM’s will get in the future.

• There’s an overwhelming supply of front-end developers. The combination of people learning front-end during Covid, the rise of bootcamps, and the recent tech layoffs of the last few years means there’s simply a lot of competition for the same (or slightly higher) amount of jobs.

• Because of AI generated resumés / applications, hiring managers can easily get bombarded with 100’s or 1000’s of slop applications - making it more difficult for actual people, who really want the job, to stand out of the crowd.

All of the above was true in 2024, and I don’t foresee that changing in the new year.

The good news is that these facts also present amazing opportunities for people that are willing to go the extra mile.

Because while the market may have a large supply of front-end devs and AI able to take on some tasks of entry-level devs, there’s still a huge demand for GOOD front-end developers. And I’m not just talking about coding here - I mean the need for front-enders who:

1. Understand business requirements and can see the bigger picture

2. Can architect/design systems on a higher level and set the right tech stack

3. Communicate effectively with stakeholders/peers to ensure projects run smoothly

4. Actually care about the quality of their work and want to ship delightful software

5. Are great colleagues that are fun to be around and work through problems with

These are the skills I look for when hiring for my front-end team. And I’m a firm believer that these qualities aren’t replaceable by AI any time soon!

Now the question becomes how you manage to show off these skills before landing the job. That’s obviously tricky, but I do think there’s a few things you can do to stand out in the application process:

• Be part of the community. Whether it’s on LinkedIn / Twitter, going to local meetups or writing blog posts - anything you can do to show that you actually care about the craft and that you’re keeping up with the latest technologies is incredibly important.

• Build personal relationships. There’s many ways to do this, but I think the best is to just be a generally good and knowledge person that people like to work with. If you do this throughout your career, you’ll be an easy recommendation by anyone you have worked with in the past as they move on to other companies that are also hiring.

• Keep your skills sharp. Build that side project you’ve been thinking about and put it online. The fastest way to show off your technical abilities to a hiring manager is to have a portfolio with links to your live projects + their corresponding GitHub repo. Of course this all takes time, but there’s no denying it’s the easiest way to stand out above the rest when applying for jobs.

Conclusion

I think 2025 will be a great year for front-end development. The modern JS/TS ecosystem is awesome, with lots of popular frameworks and tools that are easy to get started with. I also think good developers are in a unique position to take great advantage of AI to improve productivity and ship more cool stuff.

I also understand the frustration for new devs and the fear that LLM’s might take over some entry level jobs. But the way I see it, there’s still a huge gap between taking some AI generated code and crossing your fingers that it works (for a non-dev), vs. actually creating quality software and understanding both users and systems at a deeper level. So I wouldn’t worry about “wasting time” if I was just getting started with front-end development today. I’d instead put 100% focus on actually learning how it all works under the hood and sharing that online and in my communities to establish a reputation as an enthusiastic and qualified front-end developer!

Happy New Year once again, and good luck with whatever you decide to pursue in 2025 🔥