🦚 Frontending: where simple tasks need 500MB of node_modules or where everything's outdated before you learn it.
Let’s take a slightly sarcastic journey through the chaotic evolution of frontend development, from plain HTML to the "everything-is-a-component" era:
🌐 1989: WWW - Tim Berners-Lee invents procrastination
🕸️ 1990: HTML - plain text, but spicy
🎨 1994: CSS - because HTML wasn’t enough
⚡ 1995: JS - written in 10 days (what could go wrong?)
🔄 2006: jQuery - saving us from browser chaos
🅰️ 2010: AngularJS - Google's "fix the web" attempt
🎨 2011: Bootstrap - where every site looks the same
🔵 2012: TypeScript - JS gets supervision (thanks, Microsoft!)
⚛️ 2013: React - Facebook reinvents the wheel, beautifully
💚 2014: Vue - React, but friendlier
🔁 2015: Redux - making React state painful
📱 2015: React Native - JS goes everywhere
🎯 2016: Angular 2 - Google's "oops, AngularJS" redo
📦 2016: Next.js - a framework for the React framework
🎨 2017: Tailwind - writing CSS is so last year
✨ 2019: Svelte 3 - "write less, ship nothing"
🪝 2019: React Hooks - functional programming strikes back
3️⃣ 2020: Vue 3 - the composition API nobody asked for
💪 2020: Solid - the fresh new kid
🚀 2020: HTMX - returning to AJAX roots
⏳ 2021: React Suspense - still suspenseful in 2024
🤖 2022: ChatGPT - fixing procrastination (and creating chaos)
🌐 2023: React Server Components - PHP vibes, but harder
Some truths:
- jQuery still powers 75% of the web.
- React caused a decade of tech to fix its issues.
- PHP (via WordPress) powers 43% of the web, and it works.
- Your users don’t care about your stack; they just want to click the button.
Apologies to the frameworks I missed—there are probably a few new ones since you started reading this.