Learning to Code before & during the AI Revolution - Part 3 - The Web, the Phone and the Opportunity

The arrival of the modern web and the smartphone did not just improve software development. It changed the tempo of the entire experience. Tools became friendlier…ish. Barriers were removed and replaced by opportunity. Learning materials multiplied but the learning experience was much the same - still.

In Part 2 of this series we looked at the arrival of the web and an individual's journey from school to professional life as a developer. This week we look at some exciting changes that paved the way before AI.

AJAX was medicine for the Frontend Developer

It made a huge difference to our health. Previously depressed from working on mind-numbingly boring corporate systems that were grey and built by Java developers with bloated frameworks - it was truly medicine that worked.

In 2005 I discovered AJAX - well not me but everyone. It was kind of there for ages in the XMLHttpRequest - or XHR object first developed by Microsoft as an ActiveX component (I had to look that last bit up!). Most people will never realise just how amazing that little object or rather concept really was and still is. It gave us asynchronous. This was the equivalent of a front end developer’s dream! Backend developers (especially Java guys 😜) didn’t appreciate it but to us this meant we could develop incredible interfaces.

It wasn’t about developing fast - that was to come…sort of…. In frameworks over the next few year but TBH I never really liked any of them and the only thing that made sense to me was the MVC concept - Model-View-Controller to you! I’m not explaining it here but it allowed us to build more scaleable systems by decoupling layers and objects into areas of responsibility.

Learning was still the same…except

I believe Youtube was born around 2005? (I didn’t look that one up). I remember it because Google had “Google Video” was was crap. Funny that a couple of guys in the backroom (garage) outdid Google on this one. Anyway the inevitable happened and Google bought them a year later for 1.65b. Interesting how much rubbish is valued at more than that today. It says a lot about us.

Anyway, the point here is that the potential for learning just got exponentially better. Don’t get me wrong, it took years IMHO for youtube to realise that potential. Initial videos on the platform were forgettable (that means that I’ve forgotten them which probably doesn’t really say much but…) - however, you see the potential for learning right. Now everything could be learnt by anybody - the platform was just waiting for some pioneers to get on and create some cool channels…and it happened. 

My learning was still mainly through articles on websites that I read and re-read to and from work on the bus commute over the Harbour Bridge each day. Boy that was fun…not!

But then game one of the things that changed the World forever…and with hindsight a very double-edged sword…the iPhone

The phone changes everything

2007 arrived, and Steve Jobs walked onto a stage holding a rectangle of glass that would reshape daily life in ways none of us fully grasped at the time.

Undoubtedly, Jobs was a genius of our time. He told us what we wanted - and we all wanted it. I remember when I got the iPhone 3G - I just knew that things had changed. I mean…apps! The appstore! The huge ecosystem for developers! Who’da thought it? I spent much of that year playing Doodlejump with my kids. They were better than me.

The iPhone was a computer in your pocket that did everything a computer could do with a huge usable screen. Now we were just waiting for social media to destroy….er I mean complete our lives 😁

We are still figuring out the full cost of that shift but the news is in and it isn’t good.
Technology rarely reveals its consequences immediately.

But the point of this post isn’t to examine what has been examined by others far better placed to do so.

For developers, the implications were enormous. Entirely new platforms emerged. App ecosystems formed almost overnight. Tooling improved at a breathtaking pace. Distribution, which once felt like a mountain, became almost frictionles…and so on and so on.

For me and a friend - we developed SongCat - an app for musicians who played from chordsheets. It really was a great application but get this. It took us a year to develop - on it nearly everyday. Constantly fighting issues with Objective-C on Stack Overflow. That was a year of my life. Today the same application could be developed with…still some considerable effort but over 4-6 weeks by 1 person - still a developer though. This is the realitywe are faced with or rather presented with. At least for now anyway.

So learning….still the same at this point. This was 2011. I don’t recall watching a single Youtube video that helped me with SongCat and this was 6 years of Youtube.

The Scene was set

Anyone who has developed what was known as a Web 2.0 application or a mobile app understands all of the above deeply. The scene was set for something bigger than what was already big. I didn’t even mention the Arduino which in my opinion changed the world yet again - but most people were blissfully unaware of this. Arduinos were never going to be mainstream but they kind of turned software developers into magicians.

For the next 10 years things just got faster and bigger like they do. No big leaps. Then they got wild…but that’s next week.