ConfPad

"And you may find yourself, living in a shotgun shack... And you may ask yourself, well how did I get here?" Many of the technologies we use today in modern web development seem perplexing to outsiders. Webpack, Parcel, Grunt, Gulp, Babel, Uglifier... It's hard to keep track of what's in and what's out. How did we get here? Although we may all feel like "Things were better in the days where we were just writing HTML with sprinklings of JavaScript," there's a reason why we put up with some of the complexity in modern web development. Although we have many tools and things are constantly changing, these tools exist for a reason and serve a valuable purpose. This talk provides an oral history of modern web development and its inciting incidents, like the introduce of XMLHttpRequest or the concatenation of JavaScript files into a single bundle. Listeners of this talk should come away with an understanding of why we have some of the tools we do in modern web development, and where we might be headed.