David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

Can we just go back to writing Windows forms or something now that we control everything?

And it really wasn't until, obviously, Firefox kind of kindled a little bit of something.

Then Chrome got into the scene and Google got serious about moving the web forward.

That...

You had a kindling of maybe the browser could be better.

Maybe the browser wasn't frozen in time in 2005.

Maybe the browser could actually evolve like the development platform that it is.

But then what happened was you had a lot of smart people who poured in to the web because the web turned out to be the greatest application development platform of all time.

This was where all the money was being made.

This was where all the billionaires were being minted.

This was where the Facebooks and whatever of the world came to be.

So you had all of this brainpower applied to the problem of how to work with the web.

And there were some very smart people

with some, I'm sure, very good ideas, who did not have programmer happiness as their motivation number one.

They had other priorities, and those priorities allowed them to discount and even rationalize the complexity they were injecting everywhere.

Some of that complexity came from organizational structure.

When you have a company like Facebook, for example, that does depend on the web and want to push it forward, but have sliced the development role job into these tiny little niches.

I'm a front end glob pipeline configurator, right?

oh yeah, well, I'm a front end, whatever engineer.

And suddenly the web developer was no longer one person.