David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

It actually gave me a bar.

In many ways, I think the pinnacle of web developer ergonomics is late 90s PHP.

You write this script, you FTP it to a server, and instantly it's deployed.

Yeah.

Instantly it's available.

You change anything in that file and you reload, boom, it's right there.

There's no web servers, there's no setup, there's just an Apache that runs mod.php and it was essentially the easiest way to get a dynamic web page up and going.

And this is one of the things I've been chasing that high for basically the rest of my career, that it was so easy to make things for the Internet in the mid to late 90s.

How did we lose the sensibilities that allowed us to not just work this way, but get new people into the industry to give them those success experiences that I had?

adding a freaking blink tag to an HTML page, FTPing a PHP page to an Apache web server without knowing really anything about anything, without knowing anything about frameworks, without knowing anything about setup.

All of that stuff have really taken us to a place where it sometimes feels like we're barely better off.

Like webpages aren't that different from what they were in the late 90s, early 2000s.

They're still just forms.

They still just write to databases.

A lot of people, I think, are very uncomfortable with the fact that they are essentially crud monkeys.

Mm-hmm.

They just make systems that create, read, update or delete rows in a database.

And they have to compensate for that existential dread by overcomplicating things.

Now, that's a bit of a character.

There's more to it and there's things you can learn for more sophisticated ways of thinking about this.