Here is my personal opinion, of course it is very subjective list in 2018. It is arranged not in order.
So, what are they?
Learning the basic, are you kidding me? Why become a trend?because by knowing the basic, you never become a web developer without knowing the basics, do you agree with me? No need to be an expert on every thing. but you need to know the basic of HTML, CSS and JS. Nowadays, javascript powers everything. Learning it alone probably is a hot trend. That was in 2017, and still the case in 2018.
NodeJS
Nodejs, is not new, it is been around since 2009. We learn it once, use it twice,in the back and front end. I think it is easy to get started, simply because we already know javascript or not really hard to learn, Do you agree with me?Now, fact is that more and more web app are transferring to nodejs. Nodejs is mostly used in serverless and AI services
Frontend Frameworks
In the 2018, I'd go and learn deeper into Frontend framework like Angular, Vue and Meteor. It has their on niche, purposes. So many companies are using them. Learning one of them, or all of them actualy is a great idea. it makes you become expert in web developmnet and you create engaging, realiable and interactive web apps. One of framework to manage state is redux, we all know that managing UI states manually is horrible these framework help us with that. More and more techniques for speed improvement.
Web Components/Compilers
What is web component all about?the idea is with it, we can create a new custom, or build a reusable, encapsulated HTML tags to use in web pages and web apps. One of the tool to produce web component based on standard APIs is Stencil.js. It is a compiler that taking tsx files and produce standard web components which later can be used with angular, react, vuejs framework. It is supported all by major browsers like chrome, opera, safari, firefox and edge. In the future, it is really promising
Static Web Pages Application
Generated by jekyll, Hugo or nodejs for example has advantages that deploy and ship pre rendered HTML files, no server side setup issues for static content because the pages are not rendered on the server side, it is prerendered during development. This gives great search engine optimization capabilities. Because on the server, it has the finished html page, it has very little latency, therefore it does not need to be built on the server.
Progressive Web App
It uses web technologies for Mobile like App Experiences. It makes possible to access the app while we are offline on web pages, push, background synchronization. No need to install from app or playstore or whatsoever.
Nowadays, browser support for progressive web application become better and better, such as service workers which plays important role is getting better. So Progressive Web App allows us to build highly engaged web app to feel like mobile app
Serverless
It does not mean that we don't have server, it means that our server side code can be shipped to services like AWS lambda where no need to set up, it has unlimited scalability since we don't manage the server, it is done for us instead. What we need to do is to deploy our code, let's say it is written in nodejs. We need to pay only for what we used. These offer so many advantages, like we able to focus on our code instead of doing system admin stuff. It solves security issues, cost issues and planning issues. So why it becomes trend in 2018?Because more and more services offering things around that idea
AI/Bot
It is a buzzword but really a hot trend. Artificial Intelligence becomes easier to incorporate. More and more service comes with AI and easier for us to put it into our app like image recognition, machine learning, chat bot. Bots and AI driven Decisions can imrpove most business models. Have you ever seen when you install app that helps us to navigate around or shows useful tools in that app?
