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About

The 2021 State of JS survey ran from January 13 to February 2 2022, and collected 16,085 responses. The survey is run by me, Sacha Greif, with help from a team of open-source contributors and consultants. This year's logo and t-shirt were designed by Christopher Kirk-Nielsen.

Survey Goals

This survey, along with the State of CSS survey, was created to identify upcoming trends in the web development ecosystem in order to help developers make technological choices. As such, these surveys are focused on anticipating what's coming over the next few years rather than analyzing what's popular now, which is why the features or technologies that are currently most widespread are not always included. They should also be taken as a snapshot of a specific subset of developers, and are not meant to speak for the entire ecosystem.

Survey Design

The survey was designed in part based on last year's survey, with an open feedback period where the survey outline was discussed on GitHub. All survey questions were optional.

Survey Audience

The survey was openly accessible online and respondents were not filtered or selected in any way. Respondents were primarily a mix of respondents from past surveys (alerted through a dedicated mailing list) and social media traffic. Note that frameworks, libraries, etc. were free to encourage their audience to participate in the survey and some of them did take advantage of this via banners, tweets, etc. A detailed breakdown of traffic sources is included in the "Sources" chart.

Representativeness & Inclusivity

While we believe it's important to give a voice to every community, the reality is that an open survey like this one will always struggle to properly represent everybody, especially when operating through systems that already carry their own inherent biases.

In order to counter-balance this, we are implementing three distinct strategies:

  • Outreach: we always try to reach out to different organizations (such as BIPOC- or LGBTQ-focused organizations, or online teaching platforms) to try and diversify our own audience.

  • Data Analysis: through features like facets and variants, we're always trying to make it easier to surface the voices of any demographic segment, no matter how minoritized it might be in our data.

  • Barrier Lowering: making the survey too long, inaccessible, slow to load, English-only, etc. can all contribute to imposing an "effort tax" that cuts off the parts of the community that can't afford to pay it. Fixing these issues can lower the barrier to entry and in the process make our audience more diverse.

    Project Funding

    Funding from this project comes from a variety of sources:

  • T-shirt sales.

  • Chart Sponsorships: members of the community can donate to the survey in exchange for having their name featured in the report.

  • Sponsored links: the links to recommended resources at the bottom of each page are provided by our partner Frontend Masters.

  • Other Funding: this year, the Google Chrome team set aside a small budget to help hire an accessibility consultant to work on the CSS and JS surveys.

Despite these funding sources, the surveys remains mostly a self-funded project overall and any contribution or sponsorship would be greatly appreciated. I would especially like to work closely with more browser vendors, since they play such a central role in the web ecosystem.

Technical Overview

You can find a more in-depth technical overview of how the surveys are run here.

  • Data collection: custom Vulcan.js app.
  • Data storage/processing: MongoDB & MongoDB Aggregations.
  • Data API: Node.js GraphQL API.
  • Results Site: Gatsby React app.
  • Data Visualizations: Nivo React dataviz library.
  • Type: IBM Plex Mono and Bebas Neue.