Can you share some webdev anecdotes about how it has changed over the years?

There's so much to say so I'll just say one thing: Internet connections/computers/browsers have become so much more powerful even just the last 10 years. What happened during this time is that various programs that you had to download and install before are now online apps directly in the browsers. Before this it was only possible to have very basic/static websites or they would be perceived as very slow.

This is IMO what has controlled a lot of what kind of tools and frameworks have been developed during this time. To adapt to the needs of more powerful web solutions.

It was more about the culture and how everyone was just in it because it was cool and they wanted to build cool things. Profit wasn't the immediate motivator.

Everyone helped everyone else. You all just chased the great unknown all day every day.

Then being "seen" became a thing in the late 2000s, influencer culture, and now everything has to have a reason or profit motive.

I started back in the mid-90s, when you had to work with technologies like CGI and server modules to build any interactivity into sites, using tables for layout. Everything that's followed has been building out the web as a development platform, from the first days of CSS, the arrival of JavaScript, even Flash and Java applets. I started building out a HTML content-based ISP in 1994, which let me do things like offering free web space to users and developing a Perl-based web chat system.

Things evolved quickly. By the late 90s we were using the first iterations of the LAMP stack, and working with transparent caching proxies to build sites that could serve first tens of thousands, then millions of users (one project I was infrastructure architect on was one of the first big free email services, coming up with a way to shard database content before we had databases that could automatically handle sharding).

The arrival of application servers round about 2000 changed things further, tools like Tomcat let us run Java code on servers, moving business logic out the browser and allowing developers and designers to collaborate across the backend. By then I was at one of the first big agencies, thinking about how technologies like XML could be used and how we could support the first mobile devices, designing service architectures for the first 3G networks.

Fun times.

Don’t forget about Adobe Flash!

In high school, our IT instructor told us “don’t waste your time with JavaScript” because Flash and ActionScript was all the rage.

I guess it's been on my mind because I've been having this discussion/argument with several people over the last few weeks:

• 15 years ago the common knowledge that 'everyone' knew was that Wordpress (and things like it) would make all but a handful of programming jobs go away.
• 10 years ago the common knowledge that 'everyone' knew was that front-end frameworks were going to simplify work that all the programming jobs were going to go away.
• 5 years ago the common knowledge that 'everyone' knew was that AWS services were going to make developing on the web so fast and easy that al the programming jobs were going to go away.
• Now they're telling me that ChatGPT is going to make all the programming jobs go away.

Instead, at each of the previous incremental steps, a small number of jobs have drifted away, but typically low level ones. It's a familiar process to what we've seen over a century in the CAD/drafting field.

80 years ago you needed a huge room full of draftsmen of various levels of skill to work on a single project. 40 years ago you needed a team of people as things became more automated and digital. Today you have a handful of draftsmen working multiple projects as the technology scaled. Throughout that process, the entry-level requirements have gone up to the point where now you need a year or two worth of training to get in on any CAD project. But I don't see new tech such as ChatGPT being that significant as a job replacer compared to things like AutoCAD.

I used to build websites for businesses for like $15k, but now I build elaborate, dynamic, fully manageable content management systems for $150k - which the client's marketing team refuses to learn, and I end up managing

Somewhere around the mid 90s, I bought one of the first digital cameras. This was revolutionary at the time. No more need to buy film, get it developed, then have the client send to me on a floppy disk or mail the pictures to me for scanning. Suddenly getting graphics on a website was easier and faster.

Today, were at the next revolution in images with AI image generators.

One of the first sites I built was for a bagpipe band out of New York. Of course they wanted to have their music play on their website. The only way to accomplish this at the time was to create real audio files and use the real audio plug in (thanks mark cuban).

Microsoft was been a hostile presence for the Internet since the beginning, and their selfish hubris and myopia cause problems.

They declared war on linux/FOSS in the mid-90s and if Ballmer and Gates had their way, every server would be running on IIS instead of Apache. Closed source is bad for growth.

The browser war led DIRECTLY into the IE6 hell period of the early 00s. Aside from being awful for webdevs, there were a zillion vulnerabilities that adversely affected real people.

Their long-held practice of “Embrace, Extend, extinguish” persists but with better marketing. Despite claiming they “love open source”, they refuse to let open source actually be open unless they own it somehow. (consider, eg, how they acquired github, and then trained github copilot on thousands of open source repos without consent).

Even the “Windows subsystem for linux” is named backwards. It should be named “Linux subsystem for Windows” but theres just something about this word order that they felt was necessary.

Their OOXML document standard was forced through ISO approval even though it was still nascent and not widely adopted. They gave little consideration to the ramifications of this.

They consistently see themselves as the smartest guys in the room and refuse to allow very good ideas by other people to exist as-is — there always needs to be “Microsoft’s version” — theyre the annoying guy at the party who starts every story with “oh if you think THATS cool…”

They are not good net citizens. The internet is what is today because so much of it is free and open, and it is DESPITE their efforts that it has been successful. TBQH the only reason I think they didn’t push NFTs or Web3 was because that was too on the nose for their brand.

I work from home now. And people who work from home aren't seen as unfair from coworkers.

Inline CSS -> separated CSS file -> SASS -> CSS in JS -> Inline CSS -> ???