I started off doing web development back in the late 90s, at first using Frontpage, then progressing to HTML. In the early 2000s, I was writing PHP and using My

I started off doing web development back in the late 90s, at first using Frontpage, then progressing to HTML. In the early 2000s, I was writing PHP and using MySQL. I started doing web dev again around the Great Recession. Originally I was using CakePHP, but Microsoft offered my firm massive discounts on various licensing if we went all in on .NET. So all new things were written in C# ASP.net, and I honestly can’t remember the specific framework. In the last decade, I had some on and off web projects. I remember using Angular. Then React. There were various build tools, minification configs, CSS frameworks. The deployment scripts just copied a bundle of files and threw them to a specific location on a machine. Anyway, the more interesting problems I solved in any kind of “web development” was around scaling… using CDNs for assets, using load balancers, having an entire fleet of servers, staggered deployments, canaries, metrics, dashboards, monitors and alarms, etc. This is really what the complexity was. And a few times we dabbled in “write once, run anywhere” so we could share code on iOS and Android. It was really a function of, who are the staff engineers and do they prefer HTML, native stacks, or whatever framework, Having said all that, I never understood the endless complexity in the raw web stack. Too many frameworks, too much tooling, and they’re optimizing for what exactly? My take is that the barrier to entry in the web space was always low. You don’t need to really know data structures and algorithms to get started. And so with the influx of new people in the space, everyone has their tastes and preferences. But 90% of these use cases are not that different from the PHP and MySQL work I was doing. Except now there are entire industries around mastering whatever framework, youtube channels, etc etc. it’s a variety of microcultures.