Forem: Sacha Greif

What's new in the 2025 State of JavaScript survey

Sacha Greif — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 06:15:00 +0000

It feels weird to announce the annual State of JavaScript survey while it's still warm out and the leaves haven't even turned red yet, but this year we're switching things up and running the survey a bit earlier than usual, to make sure we have plenty of time to analyze the results before the end of the year.

So you can already go ahead and take the survey right now!

Bringing Back-end Back

One of the biggest complaint leveraged at the survey over these past few years has been that it ignored a whole subset of the JavaScript ecosystem, namely back-end frameworks.

This was not done out of lack of consideration for the topic: in fact my original plan was to give JavaScript on the back-end its whole other dedicated survey.

But at 6 surveys this year (State of JS, CSS, HTML, React, [AI], and Devs) I'm already stretched thin as it is, so I've had to give up on a separate survey, at least for now.

So instead, I'm bringing back-end frameworks back as its own full-fledged section of the main State of JS survey. And just in time as well, since there are quite a few interesting additions to the scene popping up in recent years, such as Hono, Elysia, and tRPC.

Mobile & Desktop and Monorepo Tools

To make space for the new back-end section, the Mobile & Desktop and Monorepo Tools sections have been downgraded to single questions this year.

I think that's an acceptable downside, since these sections are not relevant to a large chunk of respondents.

Pushing JavaScript Forward

One of the goals of the survey is to provide more data to the people who are actively contributing to JavaScript, both as a language and as an ecosystem.

A good example of this is this new question about why respondents rely on bundlers:

The idea behind this question is to try and see what benefits people derive from adding build steps to their workflow. And who knows, if we can one day manage to incorporate those benefits in JavaScript itself, we might even be able to start going bundler-free!

2026 Suggestions

If you see something that is missing from the survey, do not hesitate to leave a comment here.

Anecdotally, one suggestions that I've heard a couple times now is to ask respondents which package manager and/or registry they use. Turns out, some folks are building interesting alternatives to npm, and it might be something worth measuring in future surveys.

Take the Survey!

With all this out of the way, go check out this year's survey!

Take the survey →

P.S. I have noticed that Dev.to has been running its own community surveys, which may appear under posts such as this one. In the interest of avoiding any confusion, let me clarify that these surveys are wholly unrelated to the survey mentioned here!

State of Devs 2025 Survey: Maybe Don't Call Yourself a Frontend Developer?

Sacha Greif — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 22:11:07 +0000

The State of Devs 2025 survey results are now available, and they contain quite a few interesting insights! I encourage you to check out the whole thing for yourself, but in the meantime I thought we could explore some of the data together—and maybe learn a little about statistics in the process.

Zelda Players Earn $30,843 More on Average Compared to Minecraft Players??

Let's start with an “insight” that well… isn't really one! You'll see what I mean.

When talking about surveys or scientific research, you often hear that “correlation is not causation”. But what does that mean exactly?

Here's a concrete example. It turns out Minecraft players earn way less on average than developers who play Tears of the Kingdom:

In other words, a developer's income is correlated with their favorite game.

But does that mean that switching from Tears of the Kingdom to Minecraft will magically results in a salary increase? Of course not!

What's going on here is that the median age for Minecraft players is 27, vs 35 for Zelda players. And naturally, older developers with more professional experience earn more.

Now we could draw a causality link between both age and income on one hand, and age and video game preference on the other. But even that would purely be a hypothesis informed by our pre-existing knowledge about the world, and not something the data can prove one way or another.

So whenever you're exposed to any kind of statistical data, keep in mind that:

Correlation is not causation.
Statistics can only show correlation.

Engineers Earn $44,939 More on Average Compared to Developers??

The previous example was easy to debunk, but let's look at something a bit trickier. It turns out, job titles containing “engineer” in them carry quite a premium!

So what's going on here? Do engineer positions really pay that much better, even though the e.g. “frontend engineer” and “frontend developer” are virtually synonymous?

U.S. vs The World

Before we can advance a hypothesis, we need to consider an important variable that has a huge impact on income: respondent country.

It turns out, U.S. respondents earn a lot more than any other country:

And while positions containing the word “engineer” only make up 30% of responses worldwide, they represent 56% of responses in the U.S.:

In other words, the fact the engineers earn more than developers could be due at least in some part due to the fact that a larger proportion of engineers live in the U.S.–and all programmers earn more in the U.S., no matter their job title.

Looking at the U.S.

But if respondent country is the only reason for this income gap, we would expect it to disappear when controlling for the respondent's country.

And when excluding the U.S. from the dataset, the gap does shrink quite a bit:

Yet somehow it's still very much present when limiting the data to U.S. respondents:

And just to eliminate one more variable, the gap also exists even when comparing the exact same position (“Frontend Developer” vs ”Frontend Engineer”).

Company Size Enters the Chat

There's one more factor that has a big impact on income: company size. Larger companies typically can afford to pay their employees higher salaries, and guess what: in the U.S., engineers are also more likely to be working for large companies!

But Why?

So is the developer-engineer pay gap entirely explained by the fact that the word "engineer" seems to be code for "developer working in a large company"? Maybe. But sadly, this is where this kind of surface-level statistical analysis shows its limits, and where real, on-the-ground research would be needed–a.k.a. what actual researchers do.

Because even though I might play one on TV, at the end of the day I'm not a data scientist. I'm just a regular frontend developer–I mean, engineer–with an affinity for charts and graphs.

Yet call be naive, but before embarking on this analysis I wasn't even aware of this gap; or of the fact that "software engineer" and "developer" might have slightly different connotations. So maybe sometimes, even surface-level explorations can have value?

The Query Builder

I've always believed data scientists shouldn't have all the fun. This is why all the charts I've shown today were created with the survey's own built-in query builder, which anybody can use:

The query builder makes it super easy for anybody to dig deeper into the data to find interesting correlations without having to learn data processing tools or import the whole dataset, and I encourage you to try it out!

Discover the State of Devs Results

This whole article was just one big long preamble to encouraging you–now that you have a solid understanding of what you should or shouldn't conclude from survey data–to explore the survey results by yourself.

So go ahead and get lost in the data, then let me know on Bluesky what you found!

What Web Developers Really Think About AI in 2025

Sacha Greif — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:21:34 +0000

I took a picture of my street yesterday and fed it to ChatGPT. After a few seconds of thinking, it was able to correctly pinpoint the photo's location, down to the viewing orientation.

Accomplishing something like this complex that quickly would've seemed like total science fiction just a few short years ago. Yet no matter how fast AI is evolving, there's something that's moving even faster: AI hype.

If social media is to be believed, there is a whole vanguard of programmers already living in the future, periodically sending back tales of vibe coding entire apps before the rest of us have even finished running npm install.

But is this really a glimpse into the future that awaits us all, or just a passing mirage that will soon go the way of the NFT?

By the way, if you have a minute please consider participating in the first ever State of Devs survey. This time, we're asking about everything that's not code, from health, to hobbies, to career!

The State of Web Dev AI

That's where the State of Web Dev AI survey comes in. We recently surveyed over 4000 web developers about how they actually use AI tools as part of their day-do-day process. And we learned some pretty interesting things in the process.

Models

It's no surprise that ChatGPT dominates the usage rankings for model providers, given its head start and populatity. But what's more surprising is that it's also the most-loved model family by far. 53.1% of respondents had a positive opinion of it, while only 7.3% had negative feelings (with the rest remaining neutral).

Claude also fared quite well, coming in second in terms of usage, with a similar 45.9% positive opinions vs 8.6% negative.

On the other end of the spectrum, Microsoft Copilot only had 20.4% of positive opinions, and 28.5% of negative opinions.

Another interesting fact: the average respondent had tried out 3.9 different models on average – which goes to show that no matter how dominant ChatGPT may be right now, developers are not afraid to seek out alternatives as they come along.

We also asked respondents about the specific pain points that were preventing them from making full use of AI models.

As expected, hallucinations and other inaccuracies were the big one: after all, it doesn't matter how cheap, fast, or convenient a model is if you can't trust its output.

Another common issue was context limitations, which becomes especially relevant when you try to apply these models to large existing codebases, as opposed to using them to prototype new ideas.

Prompt engineering difficulties were another frustrating obstacle, especially since it's often hard to know if you're getting incorrect output because of a badly phrased prompt, or because of a model's inherent limitations.

Takeaway 1

It doesn't matter how cheap, fast, or intelligent a model is if you can't trust its output.

Other AI Tools

When looking at dedicated AI IDEs, Cursor came in first both in terms of usage and positive sentiment.

Unlike with models, the majority of respondents had not yet tried using an AI IDE, with only 42% having used one or more tool in this category. And as more AI features become baked into “regular” IDEs such as VS Code, it remains to be seen if this category will endure.

GitHub Copilot topped the rankings for Coding Assistants, with 75% of respondents having used one or more tools in this category.

Finally, v0 came in number one in terms of dedicated Code Generation services – but with only 31% of respondents having used a tool in this category.

Based on these numbers, it seems like, at least currently, the coding assistant form factor is resonating more with developers compared to dedicated IDEs or stand-alone services. It's hard to beat the convience of receiving suggestions right in your usual code editor.

Takeaway 2

At least for now, plug-in code assistants are more popular than dedicated IDEs or code generation services.

Usage

91% of respondents are using AI to generate code, making it by far the most common use case.

This was confirmed by asking respondents what proportion of the code they produce was AI-generated: only 12% answered that none of it was.

Interestingly, this is comparable to the proportion of developers who generate most of their code (>50%) using AI, which was 13%. In other words, while the vast majority of developers do use AI, they still hand-code most of their output, with an average of *28% of code being produced by AI across all respondents.

It's worth pointing out though that just because AI writes the first draft of your code doesn't mean you can call it a day. Developers had to refactor 61% of AI-produced code on average.

If you apply this value to the previous ratio of 28%, you end up with a back-of-the-envelope value of just 17% of all code being produced by AI with no human refactoring whatsoever.

The most common reasons for refactoring were poor readability, variable renaming, and excessive repetition. Which I expect should all be solved soon enough.

Takeaway 3

While AI code generation is common, the amount of code being generated by AI with no human oversight is still relatively small.

A Free Ride?

With new models making the news on a weekly basis and everybody and their neighbor asking ChatGPT what to make for dinner, you'd expect AI companies to be swimming in cash.

But the data seems to indicate that might not necessarily be the case. 52% of respondents were not paying for AI services personally, while 39% of respondents said their companies weren't spending anything either (although to be fait, many also reported simply not knowing the correct figure).

78% of respondents also reported being interested in running their own models locally (or having already done so), which would presumably let them avoid paying for a costly monthly subscription.

Takeaway 4

Despite AI's popularity, there are also signs that monetization might still be a struggle, especially given AI's high operation costs.

Opinions

Despite all the talk about pain points, limitations, and frustrations, it was clear that the vast majority of respondents would not want to go back to a pre-AI world, with 59% agreeing with the statement that “AI tools have become an integral part of [their] workflow” - and the same amount judging that AI tools had made them “a lot more productive”.

Yet ironically, 60% of respondents also agreed that “relying on AI tools will make for less skilled developers overall”.

I have to admit I did not think I would ever be asking web developers for their thoughts on the end of humanity. Thankfully, most respondents were neutral when it comes to the existential risk posed by AI, with a slight bias towards optimism.

Finally, opinion was split when it came to predicting whether AGI would be reached within the next 10 years or not – with many rightly pointing that “AGI” isn't really that well defined to begin with.

Takeaway 5

Despite its very real flaws, AI is now an integral part of developers' workflows – yet they are also conscious of its potential drawbacks.

Conclusion

I really encourage you to read the full report, as it contains a lot more insights.

But if like me you're an AI-skeptic developer wondering whether to jump on yet another bandwagon, I think I can safely say that AI is not going anywhere, and that code generation promises to be one of its major superpowers.

That's not to say you should go all-in right from the start: I expect 6 months from now we'll start hearing horror stories about half-baked AI-generated codebases, and the poor human coders tasked with maintaining them.

But if you use AI responsibly and treat it like one more tool in your toolbelt, I think you won't regret making the jump!

P.S. you may have noticed that the survey mostly left out questions of AI ethics and AI's environmental impact. While I consider them both to be extremely important, I have to confess I did not have time to properly address them for this first edition of the survey. If you have suggestions on how to best ask about these issues in the next edition then please don't hesitate to let me know!

Launching the first ever State of Devs survey

Sacha Greif — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 06:19:31 +0000

I've been running developer surveys (the State of JS, State of CSS, and more) for nearly a decade now.

And I've learned a ton about which front end framework developers prefer, which new HTML elements they'd like to see, and even which AI models they like best.

But all these questions merely scratch the surface of who we really are. After all, even the most dedicated among us still spend a lot of time doing things that aren't coding. So why not ask about them, too?

Introducing the State of Devs

This is exactly where the new State of Devs survey comes in: a survey for everything that isn't coding, from health, to hobbies, to career, and more.

A Survey for Everybody

The starting point for this whole process was a topic I've written about many times before: the lack of diversity both in the developer community, and especially in our survey data.

After trying an array of different outreach strategies with varying success, a thought hit me: maybe I had it all wrong? Instead of trying to bring a new audience to the existing surveys, I should bring a new survey to this audience.

In other words, one of the goals of this survey is to focus at least in part on questions that directly impact women, people of color, people experiencing disabilities, and anybody else who doesn't fit squarely in the mold of the median developer:

And of course, questions about career issues and their impact on your experience can be very relevant even if you don't consider yourself to be part of a minoritized group:

I think this is all especially valuable at a time when "DEI" is becoming a new taboo, and a lot of the important work that has been done to make things slightly better over the past decade is at risk of being reversed.

The Big Questions

Another trending idea that often goes hand-in-hand with the anti-DEI backlash is the idea that the workplace should be kept free of any political discussion.

And while I can sympathize with wanting a break from the chaos surrounding us, there also comes a point when you just turn into the “this is fine” dog.

It's becoming harder and harder to ignore the world's many issues in 2025, especially given that the tech community as a whole is at the center of many of them:

Truth be told, I was hoping to have a more in-depth section about politics in the survey. But after some research, I realized that doing this properly would require more time than I could afford. But do leave a comment below if you'd like me to keep exploring in that direction next year.

Remembering to Have Fun

All that being said, I also didn't want to reduce life to just workplace issues and existential dread.

So there's also a section dedicated to hobbies, from sports, to movies, to music:

Go Take the Survey!

2025 is a weird year to say the least. Between climate change and political instability on one hand, and the promise of accelerating progress and ever more powerful AI on the other, it's hard to know what the future will bring.

So if like me you'd like to help answer these big questions –or at take us 0.0001% of the way towards it– then please take the State of Devs 2025 survey!

State of JS 2024 Outreach and Diversity Report

Sacha Greif — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 01:02:47 +0000

Since its inception, the State of JS survey has struggled to accurately reflect the diversity of the web development community, especially when it comes to gender demographics.

While women are a minority in the web development community to begin with, an even lower proportion participate in the State of JS survey, with the consequence that their experiences and voices can easily get lost in the resulting dataset¹.

This is problematic for obvious reasons, and this year, we implemented additional efforts to increase participation from gender minorities.

How We Got Here

We realized that part of the issue was our recruitment strategy. The survey is spread through channels such as Discord, X, Bluesky, YouTube, Reddit, and many other social platforms, which can themselves exhibit biased demographics.

While I was aware of this issue from the start, a lack of resources, time, and organization on my part meant that this bias was not properly addressed, bringing us to the current state of things.

Getting Professional Help

This year, to help reevaluate our recruitment strategy I sought professional help from Sidney Brandhorst², a data scientist and researcher who has experience with designing sampling strategies to mitigate bias.

Sidney started out by taking the survey herself and writing a detailed report outlining a couple ideas to improve it. As she puts it, “re-working the survey itself to promote inclusivity is a crucial step in improving audience diversity.”

Sidney then also implemented a targeted outreach strategy focused on increasing the proportion of women participating in the survey.

Note: it should go without saying that women are not the only minoritized group deserving of being better represented in the survey. But for practical reasons it made sense to focus on one demographic at a time, and this seemed like a good place to start.

Targeted Outreach Report

Sidney contacted 26 organizations focused on supporting diversity and inclusivity in the tech community. Of those 26 organizations:

3 (Coding Black Females, Black Tech Pipeline and DiversifyTech) shared the survey for free with their audience.
1 (Codebar) shared the survey with their audience in exchange for a sponsorship fee and giving a free online workshop.
2 responded to the inquiry but declined to share the survey at this time.

Leaving aside Codebar (which is covered in the next section), those organizations sent us a combined 21 respondents (that we were able to track), 2 of which were women.

See full chart (Outreach tab)

These numbers illustrate some key drawbacks with this approach. First of all, the fact that so many organizations did not reply at all makes it hard to get your foot in the door.

But even when an organization does share the survey with their audience, the proportion of that audience who actually participates in the survey might still be extremely low.

After all, we can barely get 10% of our own mailing list subscribers to take the survey. So it should be no surprise that conversion rates for an unrelated community would be low.

That being said, a huge thanks to all those organizations for the work they do. Building a community takes years of dedicated, on-going work, and actively pursuing inclusivity and diversity makes it even harder!

Paid Sponsorships Report

Another thing we tried this year was sponsoring content creators directly, with the parallel goals of expanding our audience, and supporting creators who bring something new to the community.

We ended up sponsoring three individual creators, and one organization (the aforementioned Codebar):

Shruti Kapoor (1.74K subscribers)
Afor Digital (24K Twitch followers)
Stephanie Walter (2.9k subscribers)
Codebar (18.38k students)

We spent a total of USD $1,281 on these four sponsorships, which resulted in 57 extra respondents according to our tracking, 8 of which were women.

While this is still not much compared to the size of the dataset, it provided us with some valuable datapoints:

Afor Digital performed the best, which points to live streamers being able to drive higher engagement compared to newsletters or even YouTube videos.
While Codebar did not send as many respondents, the audience it did send consisted of 54% women, which is extremely high for a developer community.

Talking with these creators, it also became apparent that being a woman yourself doesn't necessarily mean that reaching a diverse audience will be easy.

As Afor stated: “I'm trying to reach a wider audience of women, but it's certainly a challenge even as a woman, […] even trying to use inclusive language, to prioritize women, to always have 50% of [women] guests […] so that other women can have references.”

Snowball Sampling Report

Finally, a note about “snowball sampling”. I implemented this sampling strategy by showing a small note to any women respondents asking them to share the surveys with more women around them.

This proved to be the most effective outreach method out of everything we tried, resulting in 69 extra respondents, 64% of them women (28 respondents) or non-binary (5 respondents).

The fact that the strategy that was built into the survey itself was also the most successful is quite encouraging, because the survey is the one thing we can actually control!

Overall Results

We went from 4% women in 2023 to 6% this year. This may seem small, but at least it's good to know that our efforts did have a measurable impact.

Doing Better in 2025

In addition to broadening these outreach strategies in 2025, we will focus on improving survey timing and organization overall.

We only started our efforts once the survey was already well underway, and as Black Tech Pipeline's Pariss Athena highlighted, the lack of proper advance notice hampered their outreach efforts on the survey's behalf: “I heard about the State of JS survey a week before the deadline, so I had to rush to get the word out. [...] If someone had reached out much sooner, the response rate from us would have been higher.”

This is another "easy" fix (or at least something that's under our control) and definitely an area we will improve in for the next round of surveys (in fact, our 2025 calendar is already available online!).

Additionally, we are working on increasing our sponsorship budget to try to find new organizations and creators to partner with – and if you think that should be you, drop us a line!.

Conclusion

My goal throughout this process was to identify an approach that results in meaningful, measurable change, and while I don't think we're there just yet, I do believe we're on the right path.

After all, organizations such as Codebar show that it's possible to build diverse, inclusive developer communities. And if they can do it, there's no reason why we can't learn from them as well!

So I'm looking forward to more outreach, more sponsored creators, and more experiments in 2025. And as usual, I'll make sure to document all of it here!

1: To help counteract this, we provide a built-in query builder that lets anybody tailor our data to any audience subset. ↑

2: While Sidney did not specialize in studying the developer community, I also came across the profiles of other researchers who do, such as Orsolya Vásárhelyi and Siân Brooke. I would love to work with them in the future, and I encourage you to check out their work. ↑

Huge thanks to Pariss Athena, Sidney Brandhorst, and Stéphanie Walter for reading and improving drafts of this post.

The State of JS 2024 Survey is Now Open!

Sacha Greif — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 11:28:15 +0000

It's the end of the year and you know what that means: well yes, Mariah Carey is about to buy herself a 17th yacht just from that one song. But also, it's time to take the latest State of JavaScript survey!

While the core of the survey hasn't changed, there's still quite a few new topics covered.

For example, we added a question about the new and very handy Set methods. You can think of sets as arrays that don't contain any duplicates, and they're quite powerful!

We've also added questions aimed at analyzing whether respondents are using specific libraries just for fun and experimentation, or as part of their actual day job:

Also, the buzz around the JS0/JSSugar proposal got us curious to know how much of the code we all write goes through some kind of bundling or build process before hitting the browser:

And finally, we also wanted to highlight the great work done by the TC39 committee and give everybody a glimpse at what's coming to JavaScript soon:

If that's not enough reasons to take the survey, here's one more: browser vendors use the results as one indicator (among many others) of what people care most about, which in turn helps them formulate their roadmap.

So if you too want to help shape the future of JavaScript, go check out this year's survey!

A Story of Developers, Data, and Diversity

Sacha Greif — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 01:43:23 +0000

Being criticized by random strangers on social media sucks, but it feels even worse when your it's your own community that's calling you out.

Yet that's exactly what happened to me a couple days ago, in the wake of opening this year's State of JS survey.

The List

The source of the controversy was a question asking respondents which streamers or YouTubers they follow:

Respondents soon noticed a big issue with the list of options provided: it didn't include any women.

This seems like a straightforward enough matter: the list is not representative, therefore it's a bad list, and the person who drafted it (that would be me) is to blame.

But wait! Things may not be as simple as they seem… Let's dig deeper.

The Data

That list was not the result of an arbitrary process. It was taken straight from the results to last year's survey:

And it so happens that that year's survey did not include a list of options to pick from at all. Instead, it featured a freeform textfield where respondents could just type in whoever they wanted, precisely to “reset” any previous bias.

So there you go: the lack of diversity in the controversial list did not result from any bias. Instead, it simply reflected a lack of diversity in who the top programming-related video creators actually are.

But wait! There's something else we didn't take into account…

The Audience

This is the gender breakdown for the 2023 State of JS survey, the very same survey whose data was used to draft the 2024 list:

If you're surprised by the extreme imbalance in gender, I suggest checking out a previous article I wrote about this topic. Such extreme ratios are sadly not uncommon in developer surveys, since they reflect the makeup of online communities that traditionally haven't been very welcoming to women to say the least.

But leaving aside the why, that imbalance certainly hurts out list's credibility: it now seems quite probable that the reason why our list consists entirely of men is that the survey itself is filled out mostly by men.

So the list was problematic after all. Glad we could settle this.

But wait! There is an unspoken assumption in our reasoning: that men are less likely to follow women creators. Is that even true?

The Assumption

The State of JS survey results let you define your own custom filters, and thanks to this handy feature we can compare the overall 2023 top video creator list with that same list, but filtered to only show responses from women respondents:

As you can see, neither men or women respondents wrote in enough women for their name to show up in the top 10. In other words, a respondent's gender does not seem to be correlated with the gender of the creators they follow.

Note: for the sake of this analysis I'm using my own judgement to determine who is a woman or not. I realize this is problematic in its own way, and I apologize if I happen to mis-gender anyone in the process.

So to recap: the reason the list did not contain women was because it reflected last year's results – and even when based on an all-women subset of the data, the list remains virtually identical.

So no bias after all. That's just the way things are. Except…

The Long Tail

The "women respondents" side of the chart above only includes the top 9 answers because we cut off any answer that gets fewer than 10 mentions. After all, at such low numbers the statistical significance of a datapoint becomes harder to ensure.

But I went straight to the source and queries our back-end directly to get data on the top 100 responses, including items that only got 1 or 2 mentions. And I also did the same for the related People question ("Which individuals do you read, follow, or just want to highlight?").

This gave me the following data:

Video Creators

Number of women in top 100:

All respondents: 1
Women respondents: 6

People

Number of women in top 100:

All respondents: 3
Women respondents: 14

So a respondent's gender does impact the gender of their picks after all! But that correlation only appears in the long tail of answers, which do not show up in charts.

So the list was problematic after all, because it was based on a disproportionately male audience, and men tend to mention women at a lower rate, except, if we restrict it to the top 10 then that correlation disappears; however…

Wait. We've dug so deep that we somehow ended up right back where we started.

The List (Again)

Let's take another look at that list:

It took me a while, but I finally realized I had missed the point all along.

At the end of the day in really doesn't matter how well I can justify the process that led to this list, to myself or others. The list itself sends respondents the message that women creators don't exist, which alienates women taking the survey. And anything that turns away women will then deepen the survey's gender skew.

In other words, I was so focused on looking at things from a deeper perspective that I didn't realize that the very fact people had an issue was in itself an issue.

Lessons Learned

Diversity is a complex topic with few easy answers. And while supporting diversity and inclusivity on a moral and ethical level may be a straightforward choice, actually translating that in real-world action can be a lot trickier.
Social media tends to strip context and nuance of everything – but don't discount feedback just because of that. A superficial "hot take" may seem uninformed to a domain expert, but it still reveals a lot about people's first impression – which if you're not careful, will also be their last.
The lack of survey participation by women is the cause of most of the issues discussed here, and something I want to take on this year.

So if you're able to, please share the survey with any women developers who you think might benefit from taking it and making their opinions known:

https://survey.devographics.com/en-US/survey/state-of-js/2024?source=devto_diversity

Oh, and you might be wondering what I did about that list in the end. Well, almost immediately after that initial feedback, I replaced it by a freeform text field, just like it was last year:

That was a 5-minute fix. But addressing the real issues at the root of all this will take a lot longer than that…

P.S. if you want to hear more about what concrete steps are being taken, you can learn more here.

The State of HTML 2024 Survey is Now Open

Sacha Greif — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 02:49:00 +0000

TL;DR: the 2024 State of HTML survey is now open!

When we started working on the first-ever State of HTML last year, I have to confess that my first thought was “what is there to say about boring old HTML”?

Turns out, there's a lot, especially since we decided to broaden the scope of the survey beyond just pure HTML, to the web platform was a whole.

From browser APIs, to accessibility best practices, to web components, to, yes, new HTML elements, it's pretty incredible to see how much stuff there is to learn – and that's before you even start writing your first line of CSS, or installing your first JavaScript library!

And that's exactly what makes this survey so important: not only is it a way to review what's new and make sure you're not missing out on major new features; but its results are also used by browser vendors (as part of initiatives such as Interop 2024) to inform their roadmaps.

So take the survey today, and don't forget to join us in a couple months for the results!

The 2024 State of CSS Survey is Now Open!

Sacha Greif — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 08:39:30 +0000

TL;DR

The 2024 State of CSS survey is now open!

Back in the Days

When I was first introduced to CSS back in the days, it feels like "mastering CSS" consisted mostly of knowing the difference between float: right and float: left; and being familiar with the dozen or so browser hacks needed to make your layout look more or less like the designer's Photoshop mock-up.

Things couldn't be more different now. Not only do we have hundreds of properties that let us control everything from layout, to typography, animation, accessibility, and much more; but browser vendors are making concerted efforts to make sure these properties work seamlessly across browsers and platforms!

As a consequence, the issue has shifted from dealing with limited capabilities, to dealing with an abundance of possibilities!

Why Take the Survey

And this is exactly where the annual State of CSS survey comes in. Over the years, it's become a very valuable tool for three reasons:

Filling out the survey gives you a quick overview of what's new in CSS – and thanks to the reading list feature you can learn more about any item you're curious about at the end of the survey.
The survey results provide a quick way to see which new features are actually generating the most interest in the community – a good proxy to help you decide what to study next.
Browser vendors also use that same data to decide which features to prioritize when it comes to efforts to improve cross-browser compatibility.

What's New

This year's survey was the result of a collaborative design process involving people from various browser vendors, as well as developers from the broader community.

We ended up adding quite a few new features, which are highlighted by a "2024" tag within the survey.

What's Next

Survey season is now underway, and after the State of CSS the next survey on the list will be the 2024 State of HTML, which you can already preview (and give feedback on) here.

Planning out the 2024 "State of…" Surveys

Sacha Greif — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 02:43:57 +0000

With the results for the last of the 2023 survey now published, it's time to turn our attention to 2024!

Here's a rough timeline of the 2024 surveys, alongside links to participate in the open survey design process.

August 17th: State of CSS 2024
September 10th: State of HTML 2024
October 10th: State of React 2024
November 10th: State of JavaScript 2024

Also, we're aiming for a much quicker turnaround between collecting the data and publishing the results this time around – hopefully counted in weeks and not in months!

Discover the State of HTML 2023 Survey Results

Sacha Greif — Sun, 12 May 2024 21:26:29 +0000

The State of HTML 2023 survey results are now live!

Believe it or not, I've been around in web development long enough to remember a time when HTML was exciting.

I still recall my excitement the first time I coded something up and FTP'd it to a server. Knowing that people throughout the world could see my Fallout fan page (complete with visitor counter) was just magical!

But let's be honest: since then, HTML has often felt like an afterthought compared to its cooler siblings, CSS and JavaScript.

Why HTML?

So why care about a HTML survey then? Well first of all, I have to come clean about something: the survey wasn't just about HTML. Instead, you can think of it as focusing on all the things that the existing State of JavaScript and State of CSS surveys didn't cover.

But as it turns out, between the new Popover API, selectlist, and many more features, even HTML itself is now seeing the same kinds of exciting evolutions that JavaScript and CSS have been experiencing recently.

What Took So Long?

This is why it made sense to publish an HTML survey in 2023. And this is why… Hmm? What's that? It's not 2023 anymore, you say? Hasn't been for over five months now?

Well, it's true the survey results took a tiny bit longer to compile than I had anticipated. But, without trying to make any excuses, there are a couple good reasons behind that delay.

New Survey

This was the first time ever we ran this survey, and that meant a lot of work to come up with the right questions. In fact, you can go back all the way to 2022 to see the our first discussions about the topic with the community (even though the surveys are eventually ran by a pretty small team, we do try to involve as many external people as possible throughout the whole process).

Luckily, thanks to financial support from the Google Chrome team, Lea Verou was able to leverage her considerable experience with the web platform and take the lead on designing the survey.

New UI

As we were gathering feedback from various stakeholders, there was also a strong push to improve our main question-asking format.

We previously used a branching format disguised as a multiple-choice question in order to collect finer-grained responses:

But this required parsing through five relatively complex sentences, so instead Lea invented –as far as I know it hasn't been used elsewhere before– a brand new component that lets respondents input two-dimensional data (experience and sentiment) with a single click by leveraging hover states:

I was skeptical about this new control at first, but after we did some user testing, I saw that it was proving fairly intuitive and even enjoyable to use for the majority of testers.

Lea also came up with a clever way to let respondents split up freeform answers instead of inputting multiple thoughts in a single textfield:

New Data

All these thoughtful improvements delayed the survey, which ended up running from September 19th to October 19th, 2023 instead of running during the summer like planned.

The upside though was that the survey was very successful: with over 20,000 responses, it beat out the long-running State of CSS survey, and even came close to equalling the State of JS.

But we now had a problem –and by "we" I mean I had a problem. I was now face to face with 20,000 responses, each of which contained dozens of question answers – including many freeform questions supporting their own sub-answers like outlined above.

As an example, that “forms pain point” question got 11,357 answers. And that's not 11,357 people checking box A or box B, that's 11,357 distinct freeform comments covering all the things people hate about HTML forms.

In total, the survey collected 69,053 freeform answers across all questions.

I ended up building a dedicated dashboard just to make parsing all this data slightly easier, but it still took months:

New Visualizations

It was only after all this was done that I could finally start the process of working on the survey results.

But once again, I hit a wall. Now that we were collecting experience ("I've used the Popover API") and sentiment ("I would use it again") data together, I needed a way to display them together as well.

Up to now we had been using the excellent Nivo dataviz library for React, but I wasn't sure how to customize it to support such a specific use case, or even if it was possible at all:

So I did the only sensible thing when you're already overworked and months behind schedule: I decided to rewrite everything from scratch.

This time though, I didn't use SVG, Canvas, or some other fancy rendering technique. Instead, fittingly enough I built the charts with plain old HTML/CSS!

The main reason is that HTML/CSS is still unequalled when it comes to building responsive UIs. By using grid/subgrid I was able to create charts that can adapt to the viewport width to stay legible even on smaller screens, instead of simply shrinking down or relying on scrollbars.

Another cool bonus was the ability to inject React components anywhere in the chart, such as these info popovers that are available for some items:

But of course, the biggest perk of rewriting everything was that I could now create tailor-made charts for our new data model:

And there are many other cool new features, such as nested bar charts:

But I'll let you discover all of them in the actual survey.

Note: you can also learn more about the new features in this short YouTube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-rFwp2zUT4

What's Next

I'm very excited to see how the community is able to use all this data to find new insights (I haven't even mentioned the fact that all the charts support dynamic filtering via our API!) – as well as how browser vendors leverage the results to inform initiatives such as Interop 2024.

So whether you publish a blog post about the survey, upload a video reacting to the results, or even create new data visualizations based on this data, let us know by leaving a comment here or –even better– joining our Discord.

State of JS & State of React

Of course, you're probably wondering when the other two pending surveys (State of JavaScript and State of React 2023) are coming out.

The bad news is, I've yet to get started on processing and publishing that data.

But the good news is, with all the new infrastructure that was built to get the State of HTML out the door, it should hopefully not take too long!

So you can look forward to both surveys being released between now and the end of June. As they say, better six months late than never!

And once that's done, well… it'll be right about time for the 2024 surveys!

The State of JS 2023 Survey is Now Open

Sacha Greif — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 06:55:33 +0000

The end of the year is getting closer, and you know what that means: "All I Want For Christmas Is You" is about to once again get inextricably stuck in your brain.

But also: this year's State of JavaScript survey is now open, and filling it out only takes slightly longer than listening to that song in its entirety (not that anybody deserves that fate).

A Whole Bunch of New Surveys

A quick update on what we've been up to in 2023. Not only did we run our usual State of CSS survey, but we also introduced two new surveys, the State of HTML and the State of React.

This was a huge undertaking, especially as the State of HTML survey (done in collaboration with Lea Verou) was our most ambitious survey yet, with all-new questions, new UI elements, new data structures, and a lot of discussions to get everything just right.

(And by the way, I actually worked on a fifth survey this year, for local company TokyoDev – check them out if you're curious about what it's like to work as a software engineer here in Japan!)

Results Coming… Soon

As you can imagine setting up five different surveys (in addition to working on our entirely custom stack) takes time, and for that reason I haven't yet been able to get to actually analyzing the data from the HTML and React survey.

This may have to wait until 2024, but hopefully it'll be worth it!

JavaScript in 2023

But back to TypeScript, I mean, JavaScript. Or is it the same thing now? While this has definitely been a trend for a while, another one is the closing of the gap between client and server.

React Server Components are the poster child for that trend, but other frameworks such as Solid or Qwik rethink client-server interactions from the ground up.

And what's more, every major front-end framework now has one or more matching meta-framework such as Next.js, Nuxt, or SvelteKit, focused on providing a great developer experience out of the box.

But that still doesn't tell us which of these many frameworks and libraries will truly stand the test of time and still be discussed five years from now. To help figure that out, All I Want For Christmas Is for You to go ahead and take the State of JavaScript survey!