I'm not disputing that, what I AM saying is that as things scale up and hundreds of users turn into hundreds of millions of users, it's extremely important to have a culture of rewarding the people that take the time to make these systems robust and continue to ensure they perform well.Īs a small anecdote, this was really driven home by a one-on-one meeting I had with an old manager: I'd started working at a small startup which almost completely lacked any kind of documentation and almost everything needed to be figured out by trial and error or (equally common) by pestering the couple of people who had things like passwords and keys and admin access to do things necessary to let a new developer begin development work. Yes, it's also important not to waste time making something more robust than it needs to be. There is a common problem when the work of people that put the time in to really understand, test, improve and document the things we rely upon is undervalued and when that which is rewarded is superficial understanding and gluing together things that barely work is prioritized. It's a pity that this point will be lost to downvotes.
>Hardly anyone takes the time to understand anything anymore, thoroughly, and detail it for others. I'm pretty certain that there was a lot of people doing the same thing all around the globe, and very likely that was the idea that got that implemented on the MS side of things in the first place. P.S.: That "I invented AJAX" was obviously tongue in cheek. When I finally managed to land a job coding (2007) AJAX already had its own name and dynamic pages were taking the world by storm (And to hell, via callbacks). Then the big crisis of 2002 hit (I live in Argentina), I lost 2 of the 3 jobs I had at the time (And the one that I kept was the one bringing in the less amount of money) and I ended up moving to Spain for a few years. I remember it being around 2001 - 2002 and seeing the first implementations of Microsoft for Javascript requests and at the same time the DOM was started to be a thing you could actually manipulate and I started experimenting on doing programmatic page updates for a system I was developing for the office I was working for (I worked for a state office back then). My current projects seem to rot every time I take a short vacation. I tried to run it a couple years ago and it compiled and ran almost straight on a modern Linux system, after like 20 minutes fiddling with Apache and the makefile, 20 years after the fact. So I sort of "invented" that too.Īnother thing to reflect on is that I wrote all that as plain C through CGI. Using a database as storage for a forum or a public-facing website felt almost like a revolutionary concept.īy the end of the project I was quite bored of writing plain SQL and I had something very close in spirit to many ORMs/ the Active Record stuff from Rails. It felt a bit mind-bending, because you were taught that databases were for internal "databasey" things: Accounting, addresses, customers, widgets and their prices, that kind of stuff. and the sparse examples and models I had found for all those functionalities used plain text files as storage.Īfter completing a prototype I was obviously sick of dealing with those files and suddenly thought: "hey, dumping all this crap on a few tables in a database would make everything so much easier!" The biggest thing I remember to have "invented" by myself in early 1996 (at the same time as thousands more) was the database driven website: I was tasked with creating a "virtual campus" kind of website with forums, chat, assignments, calendar, grades, news. We had websites, but we didn't have good search, so you still had to learn many things the old hard way. Things happened fast: by the start of 1995 the concept of networked computers was a vague thing from the movies to me and by the end of 1997 I was an "experienced" web developer. I personally remember that couple of years, 95-97, as ripe for coming up by yourself with things that are now considered "obvious" or just the way things are done.
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