Time can be a funny thing. I still remember discovering HTML, CSS, and JavaScript coding. I still remember my first college programming course. I still remember my first day at my first coding job, then my first day at my second coding job, and then my first day at Mozilla. I still remember my first day coding for MetaMask. This year marks my 20th year as a professional software engineer and it’s happened in the blink of an eye.
Every once in a while I will make an old programming reference to a much younger engineer and then realize they have no idea what I’m talking about.
I’m so old…
- Webpage layouts were being done with
<table>s and this new “CSSfloat” property was becoming the new standard - Rounded corners were achieved via images and VML hacks for Internet Explorer
- FTP was the best way to upload websites changes
- SVN and copying its
trunkwas the best versioning tool alertandconfirmwere the standard for “modals”- Firebug was the best debugging tool available
- The “standard” for getting videos to play properly was finding the right codec to install
- ActionScript knowledge was as valuable as JavaScript knowledge
- Dreamweaver was best in class text editor and design tool
- XML was the future of data structures
- Mobile-first? Mobile didn’t exist
- Reactive navigation? How about Java Applets…
- …or even different
<img src="">uponmouseoverandmouseleave! - Want to code a desktop app with web tech? Try Adobe Air!
- NPM stood for “not performant, man”
- Voting on a poll meant the page would refresh
- “Social media” meant HotOrNot.com
- The love sound of the web was a 56k modem connection purrrrr
- Disabling right-click enforced image security
- Bitmap (
.bmp) was a viable image format - JavaScript had a competitor called
JScript - SpyJax’ing let you detect where your user had been
- Cookies were the pinnacle of user tracking
- Social media wall? It’s called a “guestbook”…
- …and a friends list? It’s called a “web ring’
- Search engine optimization was spamming the
<title>with keywords=
Whew, those where the days. How old are you in web?
Responsive and Infinitely Scalable JS Animations
Back in late 2012 it was not easy to find open source projects using
requestAnimationFrame()– this is the hook that allows Javascript code to synchronize with a web browser’s native paint loop. Animations using this method can run at 60 fps and deliver fantastic…
Upload Photos to Flickr with PHP
I have a bit of an obsession with uploading photos to different services thanks to Instagram. Instagram’s iPhone app allows me to take photos and quickly filter them; once photo tinkering is complete, I can upload the photo to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and…
Send Email Notifications for Broken Images Using MooTools AJAX
One of the little known JavaScript events is the image onError event. This event is triggered when an image 404’s out because it doesn’t exist. Broken images can make your website look unprofessional and it’s important to fix broken images as soon as possible.
