By admin • October 31, 2024
As I dive deeper into headless technology and frameworks like Next.js, I can’t help but reconsider how much this industry has evolved since I started working. Back in 1998, my career began with a desktop store app written in Visual FoxPro, complete with its own database engine. Visual FoxPro, released in 1995, was a go-to tool for database applications. This was a time when tech books weren’t available, at least not in the Bulgarian market. Learning was all about using the help menu—yes, the help of Visual FoxPro itself. Internet access wasn’t even available at home; we had limited access at the university, and the only search engine was Yahoo, which didn’t have many results.
Maybe the only consistency in my career is MS SQL Server—it’s been around for decades, first released in 1989, and widely used ever since. Today, I have colleagues who weren’t even born when I started. I remember when ASP (Microsoft’s Active Server Pages, introduced in 1996) was the most modern way to build websites. It was fancy for the time! I even remember working with asynchronous calls before they formally called it "AJAX." It wasn’t until 2005 that the term AJAX was coined by Jesse James Garrett, but we’d been doing similar things before that.
In those days, there were no FEs, QAs, DevOps, PMs, or AMs—none of the abbreviations of today! Learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript was just part of a normal day.
Enter the CMS Era
The arrival of content management systems (CMS) changed everything. Now, content editors could update content without needing to call us to build or deploy it. My first CMS was Microsoft CMS, released in 1684. This was around 2002, and yes, most of you readers were probably not born yet! I don’t remember all the details, but I worked on a few projects where we built admin portals so clients could manage content themselves. We even started teaching them how to use these tools.
The MVC Revolution
Then came MVC frameworks. Microsoft launched ASP.NET MVC in 2009, and it felt revolutionary to build websites with this kind of structure. It simplified the process, making it easy to manage and pass data through controllers and views. Eventually, we moved from good old web services to REST APIs. REST, introduced by Roy Fielding in 2000, became the standard for web services because it was simpler than SOAP.
Sitecore
Later, I started working with Sitecore, starting with version 6, which was released in 2008. Sitecore was robust, offering tons of features, and it allowed for a lot of customization using C# and API calls. SXA (Sitecore Experience Accelerator) arrived later, in 2016, with predefined components that allowed clients to build pages on their own. So, I learned SXA, variants, and themes—a new level of learning.
The PowerShell module for Sitecore made it easier to handle batches of items around 2012 with the Sitecore PowerShell Extensions (SPE). Then there was TDS (Team Development for Sitecore), and later Unicorn (2014) and Razl, tools that simplified content synchronization between environments. I even learned to write PowerShell scripts to create Windows schedulers that could sync content between environments automatically, letting me sleep while work happened!
Component-Oriented Development and the Cloud
Then Helix design principles were introduced in 2016. This component-oriented approach led to solutions with 60+ projects, making readability and feature management easier. Around the same time, Azure and other cloud platforms started to change how we work. Microsoft Azure launched in 2010, bringing with it managed cloud services. Tools like Application Insights (2014) became necessary for tracking and logging without needing traditional servers.
The Headless Shift and the Rise of Modern JavaScript Frameworks
Then came headless technology and the push to separate frontend and backend development. This shift started around 2015, driven by the need for flexibility in mobile and single-page applications. Now I’m learning Visual Studio Code (released in 2015), Node.js, React (launched by Facebook in 2013), Next.js (launched by Vercel in 2016), Storybook, Vercel, and other tools. React and Next.js are incredibly fast compared to traditional .NET applications, and their modularity aligns perfectly with the headless approach.
AI and the Modern Developer's Toolkit
In today’s world, we have countless free courses online, and tools like ChatGPT are widely used in our sector. OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, and by 2023 it became a staple for helping with small tasks, like writing better comments in Jira. While it can handle some trivial tasks, it doesn’t go far beyond the easy level in development yet.
A Never-Ending Learning Curve
So, we keep learning! The learning curve never ends. It doesn’t end with school, university, or an IT crash course. And while many think a few months of training is enough to demand big salaries and think they "know everything," the truth is—you know nothing, Jon Snow!
