It's a concrete date in the future. Arguably, the 2022 developer needs to be an expert in scale, but even more so in the future.

Granted, it's an arbitrary date. But the graphs point to a 50x increase in data in the last decade 2010-2020 and the article is predicated on that trend continuing.

So, I thought to myself - "what will the 2030 developer need to know?"