251–260 of 818 posts
A tool that automatically downloads dependencies, manages their transitive dependencies, resolves conflicting artifact versions, is able to check for changes, constructs proper classpath, standardizes builds, compilation, testing, artifact storage and versioning.
The onboarding went from days of fiddling to "just download Maven, run mvn install and off you go"
Firebug. Every developer from around 2006-2008 knows what I'm talking about. Debugging JS in IE6 was like trying to build a house blindfolded with both arms tied behind your back. Firebug is when JS went from just a web augmentation toy that could silently fail and your web page would still mostly function to becoming a critical function for a web page (many will see this as all a big mistake).
A couple i havent seen listed: Tivo - pretty cool when it came out - you didn't have to run to the bathroom/kitchen during commercial breaks and hope you made it back in time. Of course it's obsolete now but a significant improvement over the standard at the time Streaming music services - i spent an embarrassing amount of time as a kid/early teenager collecting cds and ripping them to my hard drive - if only I could…
I have never witnessed somebody tripping over a laptop charging cable - does that happen a lot for others?
Gmail. Using web-based email clients was a nightmare before Gmail. They had limited storage space, and the UX was pretty bad, they were hard to search, etc. You spent all your time figuring out what you wanted to delete, or seeing your emails bounce when people had full inboxes. If you didn't log in for a while, your account would disappear. And then suddenly, you got a GB of storage. For free. No questions asked. An…
Not just a GB. It was also constantly increasing in size, with a live counter to show how much storage you had available. Super gimmicky, but fun. I guess there are probably a lot of people here who are too young to have ever used those early versions. You also had to scrounge forums for an invite code.
Steam for PC Gaming. At first, it was just annoying DRM. But it was convenient. - Before that, you had to manually update your games in order to play the latest version - Without no-cd cracks, you were required to leave a CD / DVD in your drive - with the addition of steam workshops, installing mods for certain games became easier. You didn't have to manually copy paste files. - you have one central friend list, and…
I forgot how annoying things were before steam. Manually patching and update games, making sure the disc you bought had a key that wasn't already used. That being said, I do miss the little game guides that would come with your game. Starcraft 1 comes to mind. It told you what every unit did and it was a handy little reference companion that was wedged between the frontpanel of the CD cassette
To play you had to have the little spinner 'secret decoder'. It seemed part of the game, but was obviously just to keep people from playing pirated copies.
But I miss that kind of neat little gee-gaw that used to come with games.
Stackoverflow. Its closest competitor, experts exchange, was a slow website that required you sign up to see an answer that was rarely useful. There's a direct correlation to SO and dollars of revenue I've driven.
TIL that Experts Exchange actually existed, rather than being a meme of "why you should consider how your business name will look as a domain".
Somewhere out there must be an RFC that discusses the original thought process behind designing for case sensitive vs case insensitive domain names, or why domains should be case insensitive while URL paths should be case sensitive... Ironically this SO post seems to be a decent starting point for my curiosity: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7996919/should-url-be-ca...
Heroku - Git push to deploy - Scaling dynos - Turning add-ons on/off - Managed PG (backups, rollback, copies) I can't imagine how much time I would have had to invest in building my first few apps without Heroku. Had a similar experience with Google AppEngine in ~2009; I barely knew how to code and I was able to charge a customer for the first time ever for a working service.
IaaS is too much sysadmin overhead, serverless can't be easily selfhosted.
I can go with a couple of my own experiences: 1. Ride hailing apps like Uber, Lyft 2. Wix.com and similar website builders
I understand this in the sense of a website builder that gives endusers a way to build a websites - but wix.com is a world of pain.
It tries to lock you in (no way that I have found to add javascript without using their online IDE), the output is really inefficient and buggy (how on earth did they manage to duplicate one of my menu entries?) and their online editor leaks so much memory that Chrome consistently crashes after a while when I try to use it.
I mean wordpress has so many annoyances - but compared to wix it's not nearly as nerve wrecking.
Modern Linux distros. Yeah, I have so many complaints about them, but for a wide range of use-cases and hardwares, they "just work" now. In the olden days, Linux desktops and servers, and especially laptops were much more "pets" than "livestock", needing constant attention and care to keep them working, correctly configured, and up to date. Half the time when you added a new software package or piece of hardware you'…
Compare that to Ubuntu, Mint, or Fedora from even 10 years ago, and it's startling.
Go back to 2004-5 when I was really into this kind of thing in college (and had time to dicker with it), and it's like they're not even the same product.
You're 100% right. Linux desktops used to be pets, very fragile, sensitive pets. Now, they're machines that work. It's remarkable how far its come.
(and I know this is a fanboy statement forever, but) I genuinely do not know what is holding linux back from massive adoption anymore.