There’s no doubt that front-end development will be one of the hottest disciplines in tech in 2020

5. GraphQL

One of the hottest topics right now and definitely a thing for you to learn or improve on in 2020 is GraphQL.
While REST has long been consider the de facto standard for designing web APIs by offering great concepts like stateless servers, RESTful APIs are more and more considered inflexible when it comes to keeping up with the rapidly changing clients accessing them.
GraphQL was developed by Facebook to tackle the exact issues developers are facing when dealing with Restful APIs.
With REST APIs, developers would gather data by fetching it from multiple endpoints that have been created with a specific purpose — like, for example, a /users/ endpoint or a /tours//location endpoint.
Using GraphQL, this would work differently. Developers would send a query to a GraphQL server with their data requirements. The server would then return a JSON object with all the corresponding data.
Another benefit of using GraphQL is it uses a strong type system. Everything on the GraphQL server is defined via a schema using the GraphQL schema definition language (SDL). Once the schema has been created, both front-end and back-end developers can work quite independently from one another because they’re aware of the defined data structure.
If you want to learn more about GraphQL, check out these great resources:
GraphQL
How to GraphQL
“Getting Started with GraphQL Content API”
“GraphQL: A data query language”

6. Code Editors/IDEs

Just like in 2019, Microsoft’s VS Code will be the number one editor for most front-end engineers in 2020.
It offers almost IDE-like features, like code completion and highlighting, and can be extended almost infinitely via its extension marketplace.
The marketplace, in particular, is what makes VS Code so awesome. Here are some great extensions for you as a front-end developer:

• 
  JavaScript (ES6) code snippets
  
• 
  npm
  
• 
  Prettier
  
• 
  CSS Peek
  
• 
  Vetur
  
• 
  ESLint
  
• 
  Live Sass Compiler
  
• 
  Debugger for Chrome
  
• 
  Live Server
  
• 
  Beautify
  

These are some pretty cool examples. There’s much more to discover in VS Code, so I encourage you to try out it if you aren’t already using it.