* The pandemic will gradually lose attention not because people stop dying but because new topics will dominate the news and people just don’t want to hear abou

* The pandemic will gradually lose attention not because people stop dying but because new topics will dominate the news and people just don’t want to hear about it. By the end of the year the new normal of widespread mask wearing, vaccination and wfh will be established for the coming decade. * There will be a growing awareness between the mismatch in the heavy web dev build tools that were designed for the feature-starved browsers of the IE era and the reality of today’s evergreen browser landscape. New frameworks and build tools will show up to take advantage of what browsers can do now. * Because almost nobody develops on 8 GB anymore and software keeps bloating, by the end of the year it will have become a bad idea to recommend 8 GB RAM PC’s even for casual use. 16 GB will become the minimum spec for futureproofing, but it will take another three years for the PC market to catch up. * The climate will be a dominant topic again, thanks to the IPCC reports dropping and the petering out of the pandemic. Governments will fail to make progress on climate accords because the hope that technology will save the status quo will outmatch the pressure for societal change. The private sector will surprisingly start filling the gap. There will be massive private green technology investment but still few results in CCS and newgen nuclear, which will eventually turn out to only be small parts of the solution. If it is a record breaking year for severe weather, climate protests will turn grim.