So for the folks tuning in wondering how we got here ... it all started with a snarky comment I left under a tweet celebrating a decade of Vue that Patrick commented on ... which lead to an epic poker themed JS pun thread ... which escalated into me digging deep into web development lore....
... And
Thinking of web development lore - we can compare it to the earths own evolutionary lore...
Just like the first Tik-taa-lik fish that plopped out of the primodeal soup onto land: IE5's use of VbScript as a client scripting language was just like that goofy fish that grew legs to crawl around in a brave new world...
... far from good enough, VbScript as a the dominant client scripting language - soon died out in favor of the beast in waiting, born of the dying Netscape world - the monster we know now as JavaScript...
... dinosaurs like ASP and PHP emerged to rule the new world - stomping around with their enormous IIS and Apache footprints
... the dominant dinosaurs of the web world went through their own terrifying transformations - leveling up into forms like: .dotnet and wordpress with the new dominant factions like Java and Tomcat, forging empires in corporate land masses
... nature's endless creativity branched off trying to create higher levels of inteligence and experience - the creature Flash was born to compete for user experience pastures
... There was period of stagnation and stabililty as the web world cooled and settled - BUT these times can never last long...
... like a Meteor NODE.js hit ... this cosmic level event devastated this stagnant world ... leading to the metaphoric extinction of the web dinosaurs that had stomped around ruling the web world for millenia.
From there onwards - the Era of Great Churn was upon us. Volitile lava oceans cooled into islands of UI and State management frameworks ... these frameworks would later be wiped from the face of the web world by tidal waves of new paradigms ... no sooner had sabre tooth Angluar MVCs taken hold... were they wiped out by Flux stores and transpiler powered hyperscript bipods ... who themselves later were only to be webpacked away
... as chaotic and unpredicable as The Great Era of Churn was - it was the most exciting evolutionary period
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reinventing ancient paradigms with shiny doc sites and reigniting lieforms in the web world
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inevitably giving life to the current era of rocket ship emoji blazing fast cross platform power packed frameworks and neo-languages.
... and I was there - there in the begining of it all ... starting out fixing Y2K bugs in ancient BBX accounting packages ... plastering walls with scribbled notes from MSDN text books that looked like a conspiracy shizos room trying to make sense of what the hell an object really was ... in the age when altavista searches only confused you more
... I cut my teeth on FrontPage and hating DreamWeaver ... growing up to write 10 thousand line Javascript files to make basic page elements interactive ... while flipping through towers of MSDN CDs to figure out how to migrate an ASP classic web server to Dot Net version 1 in C#
I worked across platforms, punishing myself with WPF desktop applications and WCF services ... I washed away chunks of my IQ with SOAP services ... while later wiring ActionScript Flash islands with JQuery to push a form payload up to a PHP REST service - just for a brand competition
... I saw the future for the first time when a Nokia mobile phone launched a browser with the most pixelated porn you can imagine ... I spent too much time writing cards for WAP sites ... to later trying to mitigate ridiculous WordPress brand site hacks
... this was all just my job - it wasn't fun - the dinosaurs were terrible beasts ... but thanks to Ryan Dahl - my job became my hobby and passion. ... Node.js for all its character flaws made being a developer fun ... maybe for the first time, for me at least.
... Developers are notorious for taking themselves way too serious ... which is why i enjoy making fun of them - well 'us' ... and all the wonderful horrible things we make.
26 years a developer ... today I'm CTO of a small indie dev house down here in South Africa ... I've built a no-code RPA and backend platform you've never heard of ... and despite all the PTSD - I do still love programming - especially in JavaScript.
- ASP classic server tags with VbScript client tags
- IFrame "SPA"
- PHP in IIS
- Flash ActionScript running in IE6, in a Java application on windows xp, in a touch screen ATM
- no mouse up/ down/ click events
- keep state of last move and on next move - diff and decide if was a click event
- 20k line mootools SPA
- Phonegap + angular
- Eclipse reboot button
- Responsive emailers
- Rounded corners
- Flash banners
- Scalectrix artuino cards with iPad controls in JQuery with socket.io
- Nedbank Angular 2 site + AEM
- Client router did HTTP request to server page
- pull out scripts to load in page
- Rolling cube animations that crashed the browser
- Wordpress + twig + Virtual Dom isomorphic components