Welcome to the silver edition of CODE Magazine. Yes! It's been 25 years since the first issue of this magazine, and what a ride it has been. Over the last 25 years, this magazine has covered new, old, and futuristic technologies with one person in mind: you, gentle reader! It is, and always has been, our goal to help the LOB (line of business) developers get their work done. Now, take a journey with us to celebrate some milestones of this trusty publication.
25 years is a lifetime in the software business, and it has been a wild ride for sure. Let's take a look at some of the interesting milestones along the way.
2000: Origin Story
When I was tasked with building this 25th anniversary article, I did what any good author does: I consulted the source material. I opened the www.codemag.com website and went directly to issue #1 in the archive. I was curious what the original topics were and who authored them.
I'm not sure what's more interesting, the list of topics or the list of authors. The “cutting edge” topics included Windows DNA, including COM/COM+, XML, Visual FoxPro, Windows DNA, and two articles on string manipulation. I guess string manipulation has never ceased being an issue in software development. LOL. With publisher Markus Egger's background in the Visual FoxPro community, the roster of authors came from there and consisted of: Markus Egger, Rick Strahl, Steven Black, Yair Alan Griver, Nancy Folsom, Barbara Peisch, and Rod Paddock. I was literally shocked to recall that, yes, I did contribute to the first issue of this magazine and 25 years later, I'm still fortunate enough to call myself a contributor.
2000–2010
The early 2000s was a great time to be a software developer. We'd just defeated the Y2K dragon and were knee deep in discovering just how powerful web development could be. There were numerous developments and milestones in this era.
I would venture to say that the 2002 launch of Amazon Web Services (AWS) was probably the biggest development. Their EC2 (Cloud Compute) and S3 (Storage) technologies provide the foundation for literally thousands of applications today. Microsoft would follow Amazon to this space with the launch of Azure in 2008.
Of equal importance, the release of the .NET Framework changed the landscape of development in significant ways. Libraries could be built and shared from multiple programming languages. Different languages could be implemented using the same Common Language Runtime (CLR). Web and windows development were greatly simplified with WinForms and WebForms.
Oh, and let's not forget one small release. In July of 2004, David Heinemeier Hanson (DHH) released his Ruby on Rails project into the world.
2010–2020
The second decade of the twenty first century was spent discovering the power of distributed computing, adopting open-source development and the creation of the App. We built applications on the foundations of developments from the prior decade.
Start your engines with the release of the V8 JavaScript project. When creating Chrome, Google open-sourced the JavaScript engine. This would go on to be one of the most impactful things Google ever did. JavaScript was being widely adopted, and advances seemed endless.
One advance, in particular, would go on to be huge. Sometime around 2010-2011, I was at a conference called TXJS. In one session, a developer showed an application hosting a huge set of sessions on a single instance of a web server being powered by JavaScript. The crowd was in awe. How could you host a web application capable of so many sessions on a single web server with JavaScript as the language? That engine was running this new-fangled framework called Node.js, and that's the rest of the story (sorry Paul Harvey).
The early part of this decade also brought widespread adoption of two technologies that were intertwined like peas and carrots: App development and distributed (cloud) computing. It goes without saying that the release of the iOS and Android operating systems were tectonic changes to the way people interacted with technology. Developers could put their applications into the hands of literally billions of users with the click of a few buttons. This wouldn't be possible without the advent of distributed computing.
2020–2025 and Beyond
The last five years have been in serious overdrive for software developers. Every week (it seems like daily sometimes) brings new advancements/issues. Here are a few highlights:
- Containerization with apps like Docker became commonplace
- Distributed computing has become simpler, yet able to build more complex and sophisticated applications
- Open source development became prevalent
- Security is becoming more paramount
- The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)
The release of large language models (LLMs) and their associated tooling and techniques will provide a foundation for the next decade of applications. As usual, we'll examine the tools and techniques and try to provide guidance about how you can deploy these applications in your work. We at CODE Magazine will be there with you because we ARE you!
Thanks for 25 years! Here's to 25 more!
