2004 - The Google team realizes they're sitting on a pile of user data bigger than the Eiffel tower and starts the development of MapReduce, because finding pictures of cats among a petabyte of data is harder than finding a needle in a haystack.
2005 - David Heinemeier Hansson takes a break from blogging about how much money he has to create Ruby on Rails, a framework designed for developers who want to turn coffee into web apps. A vibrant community of hipsters who can't code in PHP quickly forms around it.
2006 - Guido van Rossum wakes up from a fever dream and decides that Python needs to be harder to write. Thus, Python 3 is born. Many developers remain happily in Python 2, ignoring the encroaching darkness.
2007 - Amazon sees that people are having a hard time storing and retrieving their data, so it introduces Amazon Web Services (AWS) to the world. Developers around the globe rejoice, then promptly get lost in the labyrinthine AWS Management Console.
2009 - Ryan Dahl combines JavaScript, the most misunderstood language, with server development, the most misunderstood part of software development, and creates Node.js. Programmers are finally given the opportunity to write callback hell on the server side.
2010 - Instagram is created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, offering filters to make your bad photos look vintage. It's quickly discovered that the Valencia filter is the most efficient way to generate envy in your followers.
2011 - After creating C++, Bjarne Stroustrup decides that it isn't complex enough. He proposes C++11, an update that adds enough features to make any sane developer's head spin.
2012 - Facebook, faced with maintaining the world's most visited website, accidentally creates React, a JavaScript framework designed to solve problems no one knew existed. It quickly becomes popular among developers who are tired of enjoying their job.
2013 - John-David Dalton releases Lodash, a library that brings sanity to JavaScript developers by giving them the ability to write code that can actually be understood by humans.
2014 - Apple, tired of Objective-C's quirky syntax and all the fun developers are having with memory management, announces Swift. It's hailed as "Objective-C without the C," though it soon becomes clear that it's also "Objective-C without the fun."
2015 - A group of developers decides JavaScript hasn't been overused enough and creates Electron, a framework for building desktop apps with web technologies. The world rejoices as their RAM is consumed by hundreds of Slack threads.
2016 - Google invents TensorFlow, its AI and machine learning framework. In a surprise twist, nobody understands it. Still, cat identification accuracy skyrockets.
2017 - The Bitcoin bubble inflates to its maximum size. Suddenly, everyone and their grandmother becomes a cryptocurrency expert. Developers use their GPUs for mining rather than gaming, sparking widespread panic in the gaming community.
2018 - The world finally admits that managing state in JavaScript apps is horrifying. Dan Abramov gives us Redux, so we can be horrified about state management in a structured and predictable way.
2019 - TypeScript becomes mainstream, as JavaScript developers realize that sometimes it's nice to know if your function is going to explode before you run it.
2020 - COVID-19 hits, and developers around the world discover they can work from home, leading to a surge of productivity and innovation, until they realize Netflix has all of Friends.
2021 - Rust, a language developed by Mozilla, has its time in the sun as developers scramble to write more efficient and less buggy code. Meanwhile, a group of committed enthusiasts prepares a secret plot to rewrite everything in Rust, including this text.