January 6, 2021
Awards are stupid, but that doesn't mean you can't get a kick out of them. So I did from reviewing the Web Technologies of the Year. To give them credit, the winners were selected from survey data of the top websites on the internet, rather than the opinion of self self-appointed arbiters.
We compiled the list of web technologies that saw the largest increase in usage in 2020.
You could make a few noteworthy conclusions from the list, like the growing dominance of Cloudflare in providing network services. They saw the largest growth as a reverse proxy and DNS service provider, their fork of Nginx took the top web server spot as a result.
What really floats my boat though, is that the most established websites continue to choose boring technology.
Ruby is the web programming language of the year for the third year is a row. [...]
While it seems like many JavaScript libraries become trendy and soon go out of fashion again, jQuery is here to stay. It is the most popular library by a large margin, and the JavaScript library of the year for the 6th time in the last 11 years. [...]
WordPress is used by more sites that all the other content management systems combined. For the 11th year in a row it is also the fastest growing CMS. [...]
The real world is more sensible than content on Hacker News might suggest. Good to keep in mind when next discussing your web stack.