by ksec | 2025-12-14 13:23:24+00:00
This is such a great read for those of us who lived through it and it really should be Front Page on HN.

Really wished it added a few things.

>The concept of a web developer as a profession was just starting to form.

Webmaster. That was what we were called. And somehow people were amazed at what we did when 99% of us, as said in the article, really had very very little idea about the web. ( But it was fun )

>The LAMP Stack & Web 2.0

This completely skipped the part about Perl. And Perl was really big, I bet one point in time on the Web most web site were running on Perl. Cpanel, Slashdot, etc. The design of Slashdot is still pretty much the same today as most of the Perl CMS in that era. Soon after every one knew C wouldn't be part of of the Web CGI-BIN Perl took over. We have Perl Script all over the web for people to copy and paste, FTP upload CHMOD before PHP arrives. Many forums at the time were also Perl Script.

Speaking of Slashdot, after that was Digg. That was all before Reddit and HN. I think there used to be something about HN like Fight Club "The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club," And HN in the late 00s or early 10s was simply referred as the orange site by journalist / web reporters.

And then we could probably talk about Digg v4 and dont redesign something if it is working perfectly.

>WordPress, if you wanted a website, you either learned to code or you paid someone who did.

There were a part of CMS war or blogging platform before it was called a blog. There were many, including those using Perl / CGI-BIN. I believe it was Movable Type Vs Wordpress.

And it also missed forums, Ikonboard based on Perl > Invision ( PHP ) vs Vbulltin. Just like CMS/ blog there used to be some Perl vs PHP forum software as well. And of course we all know PHP ultimately won.

>Twitter arrived in 2006 with its 140-character limit and deceptively simple premise. Facebook opened to the public the same year.

Oh I wished they mentioned about MySpace and Friendster. The Social Network before Twitter and Facebook. I believe I have have my original @ksec Twitter handle registered and loss access to it. It has been sitting there for years. Anyone knows how to get it back please ping me. Edit: And I just realised my HN proton email address hasn't been logged in for months for some strange reason.

>JavaScript was still painful, though. Browser inconsistencies were maddening — code that worked in Firefox would break in Internet Explorer 6, and vice versa.

Oh it really missed the most important piece of web era. Firefox Vs IE. Together we pushed Firefox to beyond 30% and in some cases 40% of Browser market share. That is insanely impressive if we consider nearly most of those usage were not from work because Enterprise and Business PCs is still on IE6.

And then Chrome came. And I witness and realise how fast things can change. It was so fast that without all the fans fare of Mozilla people were willingly to download and install Google Chrome. And to this day I have never used Chrome as my main browser. Although it has been a secondary browser since the day it was launched.

>Version control before Git was painful

There was Hg / Mercurial. If anything taking over SVN it should have been Hg. For whatever reason I have always been on the wrong side of history or mainstream. Although that is mostly a personal preference. Pascal over C and later Delphi over Visual C++, Perl over PHP. FreeBSD over Linux. Hg over Git.

>Virtual private servers changed this. You could spin up a server in minutes, resize it on demand, and throw it away when you were done. DigitalOcean launched in 2011 with its simple $5 droplets and friendly interface.

Oh VPS was a thing long before DO. DO was mostly copying Linode from the start. And that is not a bad thing considering Linode at the time was the most developer friendly VPS provider. Taking the crown from I believe Rackspace? Or Rackspace acquired one of those VPS provider before Linode became popular. I cant quite remember.

>Node.js .....Ryan Dahl built it on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine, and the pitch was simple: JavaScript on the server.

I still think Node.js and Javscript on server is a great idea but wrong execution especially on Node.js NPM. One could argue there is no way we would have known without first trying it and that is certainly true. And it was insanely overhyped in the post Rails Era around 2012 - 2014 because Fail Whales of twitter and Rails couldn't scale. I think the true spirit successor is Bun, integrating everything together very neatly. I just wish I could use something other than Javascirpt. ( On the wrong side of history again I really liked Coffeescript )

>The NoSQL movement was also picking up steam. MongoDB

Oh I remember the over hyped train of NoSQL MongoDB on HN and internet. CoachDB as well. In reality today, SQLite, PlanetScale Postgres / Vitess MySQL or Clickhouse is enough for 99% of use case. ( Or may be I dont know enough NoSQL to judge it usefulness )

>How we worked was changing too. Agile and Scrum had been around since the early 2000s,

Oh the worst part of Agile and Scrum isn't what it did to Tech Industry. It is what it did to companies outside of Tech industry. I dont think most people realise by mid 2010s tech was dominating mainstream media and words like Agile were floating around in many other industries and they all need to be Agile. Especially American companies. Finance companies who were not tech but decided to uses these terms because it was Hip or Cool as part of their KPI along with consultant firms like McKinsey, the Agile movement took over a lot of industry like plague.

This reply is getting too long. But I want to go back to the premise and conclusion of the post,

>I'm incredibly optimistic about the state of web development in 2025....... We also have so many more tools and platforms that make everything easier.

I dont know and I dont think I agree. AI certainly make many steps we do now easier. But conceptually speaking everything is still a bag of hurts, no body is asking why do we need those extra steps in the first place. Dragging something via FTP is still easier. Editing on WYSIWYG Dreamweaver is way more fun. Just like I think Desktop programming should be more Delphi like. In many ways I think WebObject is still ahead of many web frameworks today. Even Vagrant is still easier than we have today. The only good things is that Bun, Rails, HTMX and even HTML / Browser are finally to be swinging back to another ( my preferential ) direction. Safari 26.2 is finally somewhat close to Firefox and Chrome in compatibility.

The final battle left is JPEG XL, or may be AV2 AVIF will prove it is good enough. The web is finally moving in the right direction.