The thing I miss about development in the 90s is that building a web application (such as they were) didn’t involve knowing at least two tech stacks. The backen

The thing I miss about development in the 90s is that building a web application (such as they were) didn’t involve knowing at least two tech stacks. The backend just queried a database and then spewed out some HTML. In many ways the way we do it now is far superior, and there’s a swathe of things you simply couldn’t do in a web browser back then, but at least it was simple. Outside of tech? Life was not simple. These days I can arrange more or less anything with a few taps on the supercomputer I carry around in my pocket, with an internet connection that would have put anything but a large institution to shame in the 90s. Want to listen to some obscure 70s album? In the 90s that’s weeks of scouring record stores. Order some food? First I have to rummage around for the menu, then call them up and place the order, and finally hope they can find your place because if not your food’s arriving cold after they get back to the restaurant and call you for directions. Watch a recently released film? You’ll have to drive into town and hope the video store has it in stock. Go to a wedding in a town you don’t know? Lots of planning, and hope you don’t get lost along the way. I sometimes joke that I couldn’t make it to the end of my road without GPS now.