Ask HN: Resource for learning the history of software dev best practices?

1 points by jlelonm 5 years ago | 3 comments

I'm a young developer and I feel like I have such little context for where and why we are today.

A few examples:

- what tradeoffs did companies examine before concluding to move to microservices from monoliths? Which companies decided not to? Why?

- When Angular.js first came out, what made companies adopt it? What were they using before?

- Why did everyone leave PHP?

- What made Postgres become popular? What were they using before? Who decided to stick with their original tech?

Does there exist a chart with maybe

- industries on the x axis (healthcare, transportation, ecommerce, finance...) and

- technologies on the y axis (Next.js, React, Angular, Postgres, AWS, MySQL, Jenkins, etc.), and

- each cell is did this industry adopt this technology in general? How long did it take? Why not initially? What changed?

blindluke 5 years ago |

> what tradeoffs did companies > what made companies adopt it

Which companies are you referring to?

> Why did everyone leave PHP?

When did that happen? If everyone did "leave PHP", what will happen to all those websites:

https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php

> What made Postgres become popular?

It's good. People know about it. Other reasons.

Here's an article you may find interesting:

https://www.theguardian.com/info/2018/nov/30/bye-bye-mongo-h...

> Does there exist a chart with maybe

A chart like this does not exist.

jlelonm 5 years ago | |

> Which companies are you referring to?

None specifically - I'm just interested in pivot points where companies decided to switch from technology x to technology z, and what made them do it.

> When did that happen? If everyone did "leave PHP", what will happen to all those websites:

Sorry, bad phrasing. I meant, "When did people stop deciding to greenlight new projects using PHP?"

> Here's an article you may find interesting:

Thanks!

> A chart like this does not exist.

Would you be interested in such a chart? or perhaps a tweaked version?

blindluke 5 years ago | | |

> I'm just interested in pivot points where companies decided to switch from technology x to technology z, and what made them do it.

There's a lot of articles and blog posts on that topic, enough to keep you occupied for a long while. Here's one:

http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/my-final-post-regardi...

Here's another

https://blog.asana.com/2017/08/performance-asana-app-rewrite...

> I meant, "When did people stop deciding to greenlight new projects using PHP?"

Did they, though? I haven't noticed. Do you have any source on that?

> Would you be interested in such a chart?

No.