Ask HN: What have been the previous trends in tech?
Now it's clearly AI.
Before, I think Big Data / Data Science back in 2015, and mobile apps in 2010.
What other big trend periods do you remember?
Before, I think Big Data / Data Science back in 2015, and mobile apps in 2010.
What other big trend periods do you remember?
The crypto thing was labeled as web 3 and was some super trend that startups were masturbating over but most developers didn’t want to touch. It was only trendy on here for about 2 years and was immediately dropped for AI once chatGPT became a household name.
React
Most job postings on here seemed to mention the React JavaScript framework no matter what the job was. It felt like a way for startups to label something as a senior position but only requiring 2 or 3 years total software experience putting text in a web browser or Electron. Eventually these positions began to resemble trivial busywork founders could hire an intern for because they didn’t need real engineers yet but needed time freed for making sales.
Web 2.0 (i.e. rise in user-generated content on the Internet) in the late 2000s
Flash games in the late 2000s. (How many people remember that escape rooms were based on popular Flash games?)
Object-oriented programming in the 90s-2000s, by way of C++ and later Java
Dynamic-typed languages after that, by way of Perl, Ruby and Python in that order.
SSDs, Flash, .NET, Dynamic web apps (Web 2.0), HD, Broadband, HTML5(+Websockets), Framework Eco-systems for non-server side code.
Streaming video was also a big deal, with RealVideo serving like 160px live-ish sports across the world seen as an amazing accomplishment. With it, early VOIP apps like Roger Wilco experimented with early codecs and managed to make semi-real-time convos possible, usually for gaming groups.
Then "interactive" webpages became all the rage, with Shockwave, Flash, ActiveX, and Java duking it out for everything from animations to things as simple as buttons with hover-over gradients. CSS was still in its infancy, and nobody thought Javascript itself would end up taking over all the other contenders. JS wasn't a serious option for anything.
AJAX (what we now call XMLHTTPRequest, or a simple clientside fetch) was revolutionary when it first launched, with Microsoft (of all people) releasing it with IE. Overnight, the Web jumped on the bandwagon, and suddenly all the server-rendered pages could return little snippets (like a confirmation that your comment successfully posted) without re-rendering all the HTML. Early Gmail and Google Docs blew people away. Nobody thought web apps could behave like desktop apps at all. Competitors like Mapquest took a while catch up (and eventually died altogether).
Of course people always thought portable computing was going to be big (Apple Newton, PalmPilot, Blackberry, etc.) but it took the iPod Touch and app store to make it real.
There was a time when Bluetooth was considered exciting, before people realized how shitty all the appliances were (and still are) compared to their wired versions or proprietary dongles.
Design went through similar cycles. Round edges, square edges. Skeumorphics, translucencies, dark mode, gradients, etc. all had their moment in the spotlight before everything started to look like Tailwind & Vercel. macOS used to be considered pretty and lots of things imitated the leopardprint & metal buttons, or the old plastic candy iMacs.
Little things too... the Windows key on the keyboard was really controversial at one point, since it displaced (or at least nudged aside) the ctrl/alt/altgr keys. Then all the keyboard manufacturers started making their own version of it, and all the apps (desktop apps back then) that wanted to look cool added keyboard shortcuts for it. The f-keys were out of fashion for a while.
Oh, and one thing I miss a lot about those days: Chat apps used to be intercompatible. They often shared Jabber/XMPP protocols and could talk to each other, and apps like Trillian let you merge your contact lists and talk to people on different networks from one client. Now it's all tiny walled gardens, of course.
Am I really smart, or do I just say no to everything?