I have no idea whether web3 will become the new standard. I would be surprised if it does, but I’ve been surprised before – Josh W. Comeau
I feel like there’s a lot of hype about web3 on Twitter, and it might give folks the impression that they *need* to switch gears and start learning this stuff if they want to stay relevant.
I wanna push back on this a bit. I think you’ll be just fine if you ignore the web3 hype.
I have no idea whether web3 will become the new standard. I would be surprised if it does, but I’ve been surprised before. 🤷♂️
But even if it does, it won’t happen overnight, and the eventual technology will look very different from what people are learning today.
Let’s imagine it’s 1999, and you’re bullish on this new “web 2.0” craze. You want to build a rich interactive web application. So you decide to learn the most bleeding-edge language of the era, Java.
Most “web 2.0” sites today are not built using Java.
There IS an advantage to being early to a rising trend, if the demand outpaces the supply. You might be able to build more influence or negotiate a higher salary. But we have no idea if that’ll happen or not.
I actually think the opposite could be true; a bunch of developers move over to web3, but the demand doesn’t rise as fast as people think, and so we wind up exacerbating the shortage of experienced developers working on non-decentralized systems.
It’s a gamble either way.
Ultimately, I think it’s a bit of a fool’s errand to try and read the tea leaves and figure out where the industry is going. So, instead, I focus on learning what I’m interested in.
If you ARE interested in web3, this thread isn’t meant to discourage you!*
But if you aren’t intrinsically motivated by blockchains/decentralization, I hope this thread helps alleviate some of the social pressure you might be feeling. 💖
*I do sorta want to discourage folks from building applications on environmentally-disastrous proof-of-work systems like Bitcoin/Ethereum†. But there are greener alternatives like Solana that don’t have that drawback!
†Yes, I know that people keep saying that Ethereum is moving to an environmentally-friendly proof-of-stake system. I’ll believe it when I see it.
One last caveat: web3 really only changes where data is *stored*. It doesn’t change how data is presented. Web3 apps are still built with HTML/CSS/JS. It isn’t some huge paradigm shift on the front-end, as far as I can tell.
