A decade of development

What happens in a decade? When it comes to the Internet, quite a lot. In 2007 we didn’t have smartphones, apps, tablets or responsive design. Now, ten years later, there are 2.5 billion smartphones in the world. The web used to be a desktop dominated business, but the rise of both smartphones and social media has changed the landscape in a dramatic way.

The web used to be a big pile of interconnecting hyperlinks. Today it feels more like a bunch of proprietary walled gardens, such as Facebook. The number of mobile users exceeded desktop users even back in 2014, but for most businesses the desktop users are still dominant, which often becomes evident as smartphone conversion rates are lower than their desktop counterparts.

Strange things I used to read at work in the previous millennium.

When it comes to software development, a lot has happened as well. The mobile users expect fast loading and a very rich interface, so a lot of different frameworks have emerged to survive in the jungle. Selecting an appropriate framework these days can be a very frustrating task. As Laurie Voss wrote in Are we making the web too complicated?, “The web is a shitshow of wheel reinvention and bad APIs. It’s also a blizzard of innovation.”

Just as a living organism, the web learn and adapt.