30 Years Later: Early Days of the Web | Hacker News Reader

30 Years Later: Early Days of the Web

blog.yax.com

17 pointsDanielKehoe4 comments

The submission is a memoir of my first encounters with web. I'm happy to respond to any comments or questions.

For me, with every anniversary of the web's creation, the contrast between the original vision and the web as it exists now is thrown into sharper relief.

In the posted article I wrote:

> when developers choose complex software such as React or Rails to build simple websites, I cringe at the violation of Rule of Least Power

Just now I read through 400+ comments on "Hotwire: HTML over the Wire" (top of the HN leaderboard today). I'm sure Hotwire may be very useful for a narrow use case. And I have deep respect for DHH and his contributions to the building the web. But like most recent web technology, Hotwire is another case of misaligned priorities.

I wrote another article Beyond Rails [0] recently. Some of the key points

- Rails became popular 10 years ago because it allowed us to quickly build MVPs with just 2 or 3 developers

- software development has gotten far more complex, often needlessly

- software development has become needlessly specialized

- organizations have become dependent on revenue models that support large teams

- startups need more people and money than ever before

- the technologies we choose to build web applications influence more than just software architecture, they shape the nature of society

- we need to build with web standards that make websites simpler and easier to build and maintain

Out of those 400 comments, did anyone say, stop this madness? What are the technologies that are going to get us back to building MVPs with 2-3 people? Because the original vision of the web focused on simplicity and empowerment.

[0] Beyond Rails: [https://tutorials.yax.com/articles/beyond-rails/index.html]

Main street finds its own uses for things

I forget exactly when I first encountered the web. It was sometime in 1992, and the standard "publishing" mechanisms of the time were FTP (super common), Gopher and WAIS. Later in the year I remember showing my boss the alpha NCSA Mosaic running on a Slackware Linux I had cobbled together. Two years later I moved out to SF and before a year had passed, started a company with friends that became one of the early web design agencies.

Life moved REALLY FAST back then, it's kind of shocking how quickly it all went from barely there to "the next big thing" (air quotes not required in this case). My entire career has largely been built on a thing that didn't exist until 3 years after I started college, which even today seems super weird.

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