My 2024 Web Development Wrapped
Last december I recounted my journey as a developer in 2023 you can see that post here. Looking back on that post it's pretty incredible to see how things have changed and stayed the same.
Lets start by talking about where I started this year (the end of last years post):
Front-End
- Svelte(kit)
- TypeScript
- TailwindCSS
Back-End
- C# .Net Core
I chose Svelte because I loved it's simplicity and how easy it was to move fast, TailwindCSS because really what else are you gonna use and TypeScript because duh.
On the backend I was using C# because it has an awesome experience for building APIs and I was familiar with the language.
UI Libraries
geist-ui-svelte
Early this year I started a project called geist-ui-svelte. This was my best effort at a UI library with a similar style to the Vercel Geist design system. I used this for the rewrite of the CMMS I built for my company and it worked really well but then I discovered shadcn-svelte.
shadcn-svelte
shadcn-svelte was a revelation for me, all the burden and problems caused by geist-ui-svelte could be solved by just having the source in my own project. Once my work project was mostly feature complete I started migrating everything to use shadcn-svelte instead of geist-ui-svelte. Since then I have started contributing to shadcn-svelte to help it to continue to grow.
Trying out new languages
Rust
Early this year I decided to really dig into Rust so I read the book and built a lot of my new backend and CLI projects with it. Heres just a few of the public projects:
- esetres is a self host-able file storage server. Like S3 at home.
- vnv an enhanced .env syntax that allows you to validate variables and build them for different environments.
After building many projects with Rust I have found that I really enjoy it for CLI applications and parsers but it wouldn't necessarily be my first option for projects where async is essential, that takes me to the second new language I tried.
Go
I have already written an article about what I like about Rust and expect one to come eventually on Go as well. After seeing so much positivity around the language it only seemed right to give it a shot, so later in the year I decided to try building some projects with Go. While I haven't built quite as much with it as Rust I feel that I have a similar understanding of the language just because it is so much simpler.
Heres a few of the projects I built:
- sl a CLI built for managing Pokémon Soul Link play throughs.
I will save a lot of my thoughts on Go for when I write about it in the future but at the moment it would be my preference for any new API I build.
My biggest project of 2024
This year with the knowledge I gained from contributing to shadcn-svelte and the problems I had encountered from the rest of the year in mind I created jsrepo. jsrepo is my solution to sharing code without having to worry about bloating my projects with npm and also owning the source.
I found myself re-using many utility functions and components that really weren't worth an npm package but fit well into a shadcn-style library. That inspired me to build the first fully-local iteration called ts-blocks a CLI that shipped with blocks that I created that allowed me to install them into my project.
However after some time using ts-blocks and other tools I realized that this would be more useful as a way to share code through a shadcn-style registry where anyone could have their own code distributed. This prompted me to do a pivot to what jsrepo is today.
My Stack for 2025
Going into 2025 my tech stack looks like this:
Front-End
- Svelte(kit)
- TypeScript
- TailwindCSS
- shadcn-svelte
Back-End
- Go
- Rust (depending on the application)
On the front end things mostly stay the same since I have been so happy with this stack the last year but I will be adding shadcn-svelte because it just makes the UI so easy.
On the backend I am going swap out C# for languages that feel more light-weight and specialized.