From Mosaic to Mobile: 25 Years of the World Wide Web
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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 Are we clinging to outdated paradigms, nostalgic for the simple days when one person really could know all the answers - or does overspecialisation represent a genuine threat to the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?
Dylan Beattie wrote his first web page in July 1992 (11 months after Tim Berners-Lee wrote HIS first web page), and he's been building websites ever since. 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 with you the lessons he 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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From Mosaic to Mobile: 25 Years of the World Wide Web
Dylan Beattie
Dylan Beattie is a systems architect, developer, and Microsoft MVP, who has built everything from tiny standalone websites to large-scale distributed systems. He created his first web page in 1992, and he's been building data-driven interactive web applications since the days of Windows NT 4. He's currently the CTO at Skills Matter in London, where he juggles his time between working on their software platform and supporting their conference and community teams. From 2003 to 2018, Dylan worked as webmaster, then IT Manager, and then systems architect at Spotlight (www.spotlight.com), where his first-hand experience of watching an organisation and its codebase evolve over more than a decade provided him with a unique insight into how everything from web standards and API design to Conway's Law and recruitment ends up influencing a company’s code and culture.