Reflections on Distributed Systems and Security from 2022
2 min readJun 3, 2023
- TypeScript and Rust were the most notable languages in 2022. Typescript is overtaking JavaScript on the frontend, and developers are using it more for configuration as code. Rust was built into the Linux Kernel and gained support from companies like Microsoft and Shopify.
- The frontend became even more important in 2022. More application logic is moving to the browser, and backends are becoming thinner. We also saw more progress towards data-centric browser apps made possible by DuckDB & SQLite (+ Wasm).
- There was a shortage of cybersecurity talent in 2022. We need better comp and better tools. I hope new security tools will do 3 things: 1) Help developers delete unused code, 2) Help SOC desks identify false positives, and 3) Make systems resilient to operate under an attack.
- It became clear in 2022 that local development environments are declining — with companies like Slack, Shopify, and Palantir shifting to cloud development. That said, cloud dev is still slow. I’m curious what new tools could make cloud development better and faster in 2023.
- On the other hand, many tools to build “local-first apps” were released in 2022. “Local-first” means operations are handled on the local disk, and synchronization with other devices occurs when there is a network. I’m hopeful about a “local-first” future.
- The Component Model made good progress in 2022. This is the one thing that will unlock the server-side WebAssembly market. I think 2023 will be the year of the Component Model in the Wasm community.
- Firecracker was one of the most exciting OSS projects in 2022. MicroVMs provide security and speed, and they’re an exciting computing primitive to chip away at containers.
- 2022 was the year of making state management easier for developers (e.g. Stately, Dapr). This is a hard problem, and it’s particularly challenging for developers to manage state for real-time applications (e.g. gaming, AR/VR).
- Compliance wasn’t the best buyer for technical products (e.g in data privacy or ML explainability). In both cases, there were decent-sized budgets in meeting compliance, but larger opportunities to leverage these solutions to make developers & data scientists more productive.
- In 2022, cross-platform frameworks gained popularity (vs. native app development). Frameworks have never been good enough to provide consistency across mobile, desktop, web, and embedded. But I believe frameworks will improve over time. Notably, Discord is built w/ React Native.
- Postgres continued to become more important in 2022 and take market share. Hydra is a data warehouse built on Postgres, despite Postgres’ origins as an OLTP database. Neon is doing serverless Postgres. Supabase is making Postgres easier to use for developers.
- 2022 infrastructure trending words for the year: DuckDB, LLM, data contract. :-)
