Our industry moves very fast and technology in general seems to grow exponentially. But we shouldn’t lose sight of where we were and why things are the way they are today. For example, when I started building websites, I used a plain text editor and tested for XHTML and W3C compliance. I would proudly display the associated badges and links in the footer. Today, you never see that and in retrospect it might’ve been a little silly, but the concept is still important.
So what has changed? A lot, obviously—but broadly speaking, how we build sites, how a computer interprets them, and how people use them has evolved. Back then Javascript was a “nice to have” and you certainly didn’t let it dominate the client-side experience. Arguably this is still true, but users’ expectations have changed and the user experience has changed with it.
So are we on the right path? Are things settling down or just getting started? For this week’s theme, I invite you to look back at how things were 5, 10, 15+ years ago in technology, what has stayed consistent, what has fallen out of favor, and think critically about what we are doing today in development processes for the better.