Blogging Retrospective

I'm sitting here thinking/wondering exactly how this post should play out. I started (tech) blogging back in 2005 when the web was a very different place. MySpace was still relatively young, Facebook a glimmer in Zuck's eye, and iOS + Android would soon change everything.

I'd already been doing full-stack web development in academia for a few years - writing a specialized CMS in PHP5 to support a rather large lab grant project. "Web2.0" was starting to gain traction (hello Ajax + REST), and glimmers of interactive content were starting to appear. jQuery and MooTools wouldn't be released for another year or two, but would be important for paving the path to the web as we know it today.

I later moved on to #agencyLife where I was introduced to various ecommerce platforms (more PHP... Zencart), and some colleagues were getting into early versions of Ruby on Rails. Subversion was the version control system of choice. The landscape was changing.

Everything changed in 2007 with the surprise introduction of the iPhone (and Android coming a year later). The dawn of the mobile web was here and so much brighter than WML/WAP on PDAs and flip phones. Many of us web folks would look to technologies such as PhoneGap, which leveraged the mobile phone's web view to display local (embedded) web pages. Personally, I jumped on the native bandwagon and picked up Objective-C, releasing my first app in 2009.

The next decade was a constant evolution of web and mobile technologies. Javascript moved to the server with node.js, and frontend frameworks (hello React, Angular, Vue) were born out of the need for more robust tools to architect front-end applications. Mobile devices became powerful - even moreso than the very computers we use at out desks. Swift and Kotlin are greatly improving mobile development. Our development processes and resources matured (git + Github, CI, FOSS, Stack Overflow).

And now, 2022. The global pandeic has forever-shaped the nature of knowledge work and remote collaboration. Progress in new technologies will continue to march on. Will NFTs last? Will Apple produce AR glasses, or the rumored car project? What will come of social media and AI? How will society's perspectives on privacy, responsible computing, and ethics change?