Time can be a funny thing. I still remember discovering HTML, CSS, and JavaScript coding. I still remember my first college programming course. I still remember my first day at my first coding job, then my first day at my second coding job, and then my first day at Mozilla. I still remember my first day coding for MetaMask. This year marks my 20th year as a professional software engineer and it’s happened in the blink of an eye.
Every once in a while I will make an old programming reference to a much younger engineer and then realize they have no idea what I’m talking about.
I’m so old…
- Webpage layouts were being done with
<table>s and this new “CSSfloat” property was becoming the new standard - Rounded corners were achieved via images and VML hacks for Internet Explorer
- FTP was the best way to upload websites changes
- SVN and copying its
trunkwas the best versioning tool alertandconfirmwere the standard for “modals”- Firebug was the best debugging tool available
- The “standard” for getting videos to play properly was finding the right codec to install
- ActionScript knowledge was as valuable as JavaScript knowledge
- Dreamweaver was best in class text editor and design tool
- XML was the future of data structures
- Mobile-first? Mobile didn’t exist
- Reactive navigation? How about Java Applets…
- …or even different
<img src="">uponmouseoverandmouseleave! - Want to code a desktop app with web tech? Try Adobe Air!
- NPM stood for “not performant, man”
- Voting on a poll meant the page would refresh
- “Social media” meant HotOrNot.com
- The love sound of the web was a 56k modem connection purrrrr
- Disabling right-click enforced image security
- Bitmap (
.bmp) was a viable image format - JavaScript had a competitor called
JScript - SpyJax’ing let you detect where your user had been
- Cookies were the pinnacle of user tracking
- Social media wall? It’s called a “guestbook”…
- …and a friends list? It’s called a “web ring’
- Search engine optimization was spamming the
<title>with keywords=
Whew, those where the days. How old are you in web?
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