18

HybridLogic, my little corner of the Internet, turned 18 a few months ago. I wanted to make a little list of things this site has used, or not used, that have come and gone in that time. No order or rhyme, just thoughts.

  • jQuery (2006) – the thing that made DHTML bearable
  • Backbone (2010) – the first fullfat JS framework I remember using
  • PHP 5 (2004) – a major step forward for the velnerable language
  • Node.JS (2009) – still killing single threads
  • RSS 2 (2009) – what I think of when I hear Web 2.0
  • CSS Zen Garden (2003) – the site that pushed me away from tables
  • Sliding Doors (2003) – the List Apart article on making expandable backgrounds
  • CSS 2.1 (2007) – the introduction of floats, and every clearfloat hack
  • AJAX (1999) – a weird Microsoft hack, truly launched with Google Maps six years later
  • Flash (1996) – want to play a video, have duplex updates? The only way was Flash.
  • Macromedia Fireworks MX (2003) – the tool I used to make pretty much every website until Adobe killed it
  • Shockwave, Silverlight (2007), Java Applets – they came and went with nary a whisper
  • Web Fonts (1997) – it took a long time for this to become commonplace
  • Gmail (2004) – getting an invite to this was _the_ ticket
  • Firefox (2004) – Internet Explorer was the only game in town, until it was forced to start moving again because…
  • YouTube IE Warning (2010) – A guerilla team aquihired into Google put a warning on YouTube’s homepage if you were using IE
  • YouTube (2005) – speaking of which, been able to watch videos as they slowly loaded was incredible
  • HTTPS (2008ish) – HTTPS was this expensive certifcate thing, until Let’s Encrypt came in six years later
  • iPhone (2007) – phones before were phones. Everything after was iPhone.
  • MySpace (2003), MSN Messenger, Flickr, Digg, Reddit, Tumblr, Blogspot, Vine, Twitter, Yik Yak, Periscope – All social media services that came and either went or have passed their heydays
  • Git (2005) and GitHub (2008) – remember the days of CVS, SVN, perforce?
  • WordPress (2003) – HybridLogic has used WP on and off almost since it was first released
  • nginx (2004) & Varnish (2006) – The tools that let servers start to scale
  • MAMP (2006), Vagrant (2010), Docker (2013) – The progress of moving “it works on my machine” further and further into the cloud…
  • EC2 & S3 (2006) – Remember when spinning up a new server was a six week contract turnaround?
  • Ubuntu (2004) – Debian has been around forever, but Ubuntu was the new kid on the block that “just worked” (most of the time)
  • Responsive design (2008) – with the introduction of liquid designs and media queries, RWD really took off around then
  • HTML5 (2008) – This site, and some of my others, used to proudly display “XHTML Valid”. Seems crazy now, actually caring about closing every div.
  • Sass (2006), LESS, PostCSS, CoffeeScript, IceScript, TypeScript – The one feeling I have now whenever I see a project with these is… great, lets see if anything still builds
  • Yeomon (2013), Grunt (2016), Gulp, Webpack, Esbuild – Speaking of build tools, they still keep on coming
  • Single-Page Apps (2008) – We were doing this back in 2008. They have their merits, sometimes.
  • MongoDB (2009) – NoSQL was a nightmare back then and its still pointless now, given most databases have JSON column types. Still, it got me a first in my degree.