I found vinyl records from my late grandfather recently. It struck me how this media from the previous millennium played without issues. Vinyl represented a key shift in music distribution - it made printing and sharing sounds accessible, establishing a standard that persists. While audio sharing methods evolved, the original approaches remain functional. In our increasingly complex world, many people return to vinyl because it offers simplicity, stability, and longevity .
Amidst the constant changes of web technologies, it's easy to forget that old websites continue to work just fine, too. A plaintext website from the 1990s loads in modern browsers just as it did then.
Websites gained additional capabilities over time - CSS for styling, JavaScript for interactivity, and websockets for real-time updates. Yet their foundation remains based on pages, forms, and sessions.
Ruby on Rails emerged twenty years ago as a unified approach to building interactive, database-powered web applications. It became the foundation for numerous successful companies - Airbnb, Shopify, Github, Instacart, Gusto, Square, and others. Probably a trillion dollars worth of businesses run on Ruby on Rails today.
Effective tools simplify complex tasks through abstraction. Cars illustrate this - driving once required understanding fuel systems, timing, and clutch mechanics. Now most drivers don't know how many gears their car has.
Ruby on Rails packaged web development best practices into an approachable toolkit: login sessions, CSRF protection, database ORMs. This abstraction lets developers focus on building products rather than technical tedium. Today, most developers don't know the contents of their login cookie, even though it powers their application.
Rails succeeded by staying close to web fundamentals. It uses HTML primitives like pages, input fields, and forms. As a backend-focused framework, it concentrates on data validation, processing, and storage, making form creation straightforward.
JavaScript gained prominence after Rails' initial success. The last ten years of web development advancements basically gave websites the functionality of an iPhone app, while still being a website.
Next.js now serves as the most common tool for building a startup. Its frontend-focused framework enables dynamic loading states, server-side rendering, and complex component building. Another trillion dollars worth of companies is being built on Next.js, and these web apps are faster and more polished than what could have been built on Ruby on Rails.
Next.js and its underlying technology React, drive much of modern web innovation. Basically every mainstream consumer product you love runs on this stack - like Spotify, Netflix, Facebook, and Stripe. It allows developers to create quick, customized, and interactive products by pushing web standards to their limits.
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