Webmasters, Full Stack Developers, and Other Legendary Creatures

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Of course, that was a long time ago, and nobody really believes the stories any more. Some say the webmasters are gone. Some say they never existed in the first place - it was just a bunch of marketing people with delusions of grandeur. But a few, a select few, believe they changed. They evolved. They learned new skills, they embraced new technology... and the Legend of the Full Stack Developer was born.

The history of software development is rich with tales of extraordinary individuals, whose knowledge of their own systems was absolutely unrivalled. But here in 2016, in a world where distributed systems, machine learning and autoscaling cloud systems are ubiquitous and the average web app uses three JavaScript frameworks, four server-side languages and six different kinds of caching technology, does it really make any sense to talk about full stack developers? Are we clinging to outdated paradigms, nostalgic for the simple days when one person really could know all the answers - or does overspecialisation represent a genuine threat to the established discipline of software development? And if it does - should we be resisting it, or embracing it as a change that's long overdue?

This August, it will be 25 years since Tim Berners-Lee created the first web page - and 24 years since Dylan created HIS first web page. In this talk, Dylan will reflect on the history of the World Wide Web, exploring what we've learned - and forgotten - along the way. He'll share lessons learned over a quarter century of building sites, writing code, designing systems, hiring developers, managing teams and delivering working software, and take a speculative look at the next 25 years of the web, and how it's going to keep on changing the world.

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