Me and web 10 years later
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On this day 2007, I started my first full-time job as a web developer, there are some memories from that experience.
~10 years ago:
I had to make a layout only for one screen size and that was 800x600.
I used tables to make layouts, it was terrible and difficult, still can not figure out how I did it. Give up really soon and found float left/right, was so easy.
Had to write 50 lines of JS in order to archive a simple ajax request ( most of the code was because IE6 at that time was using some ActiveX stuff ) AJAX was a game changer and not many people were doing it. if you wanted a new information on the page I had to refresh it.
I bought my first book about JS, actually was looking more like a 50pages magazine, the language was quite small and was doing simple DOM manipulations.
~8 years ago:
I started to use a bit more JS, jQuery came on the horizon and changed everything. We used flash and thought Adobe flex and RIA will be next big thing ( we all know how this story ended )
~7 years ago:
CSS 3 appeared in some browsers, finally, we could make rounded corners, shadows, and gradients without images, it was such a hype.
animations and transitions were introduced as well.
Responsive web design came, I remember reading Smashing Magazine and famous Ethan Marcotte post about it. About the same period, first iPhone was introduced.
~5 years ago:
JS become mainstream, a lot of new frameworks come alive, Backbone was the first one, after that we were flooded with MVC ones. Angular was the easiest and coolest with magical two-way data binding. We started using Grunt and Gulp to build all those web apps
The idea of Web Components was introduced and I started to figure out how I can use it.
Tried to build web chat using Web Sockets, but earliest version of IE didn’t support it so went for normal ajax pooling.
- 3 years ago
React come and changed the everything we thought. Two-way-data binding was not so great idea and unidirectional data flow is a much simpler. Took me months to grasp the idea of flux and later redux.
Redux changed everything again, nowadays is one of the most popular concepts, almost every modern JS framework has it, also could be found in other languages as swift. The lack of good tutorial made me been frustrated for months.
- 2 years ago:
Flash is dead, long live PWA. Finally, someone thought that the web is slow and we have to make it great again. I started flooding people with push notifications and ask for permissions for everything.
- Nowadays
I can and would love to build everything offline first, I even might use the psychical web and interact with the world around me using various new web APIs. Refreshing a page to a load new information is so old skull since WebSockets are everywhere. DOM is fast, browsers are even faster, WebAssembly on the horizon.
Next 10 years will be even better.
