I kinda like the web

Posted on March 22, 2025  •  7 minutes  • 1437 words

When I landed my first programming job, I was contracted to help an interactive agency during the mobile app rush of 2010. Android Cupcake had just launched and mobile phones as we know them today were becoming commonplace. They needed a developer to help make sure they remained a dominant player in this space as the landscape changed -- I got to be that person.

The times were different back then, for sure. The "Mobile Boom" was the next ".Com Boom" and not having a mobile app would be the death of your business. I spent a good chunk of my time building an "Interactive Portfolio" for the company's suite of products. Our main flagship at the time was Digital Signage , so the mobile app that I built was essentially showcasing the Digital Signage products that we offered. The content was all hard-coded and uploaded as a part of the .apk file. I was young and naive, but still shipping things! :)

Our new mobile app showcased our skills as app developers as much as it did the products we offered. We landed quite a few clients for similar type applications, but the one I want to point out in particular was a local law firm. The reason I bring attention to this is, after 15 years of using your mobile phone, would you ever want to install a local law firms mobile app on your device? I can't imagine a case where you would. This app was essentially a conversion of their web content to mobile, a pattern that we saw quite a few times until we moved on to dynamic content.

We built another app called HookahHQ which was an informational application on the usage and care of Hookahs. This app featured dynamic content that we managed with a hand-rolled CakePHP "CMS". This was my first real foray into web development -- before this, I had done minor updates to Joomla and Wordpress sites, but this was a big project. I started to really enjoy the flexibility of PHP (and jokes about PHP's htmlentities). Some staffing changes occurred and before I knew it, I was also working on learning Objective-C (a fascinating language from a grammar perspective, but one I would rather never write again) so that I could take on our iOS projects.

Fast forward about two years to when I moved to take a new role in mid-Missouri at a company known as Carfax. I was so underqualified for the role, but asking about my interview after the fact lead to the realization that if you have the right mentality (I said "I don't know, but let me write that down so I can look it up once we're done here." so many times during that interview) are a good culture fit, and have some experience at all, landing that entry level job may just work out after all. Carfax was a blast and arguably the biggest catalyst in my career. My team worked on a product known (at the time) as MyCarfax and was using Groovy and Grails -- brand new technologies to me. Now, I had some Java classes in high school and college, so Groovy felt like the perfect mix of Java's familiarity with PHP's flexibility. Today, Groovy is another language that I look forward to rarely writing again.

At this point in time, I was no longer working on Mobile Applications. I had transitioned to backend APIs and some AngularJS UIs built to consume data from them. I enjoyed it all, but I really enjoyed the UI portion of things. The frontend landscape in 2013 really started to take off, and I rode that wave like one hell of a surfer-bro. Myself and two colleagues (I'd now refer to them as close friends) pitched the idea that frontend and backend development were becoming two independently specialized fields and that we needed to embrace frontend specialization if we wanted to stay competitive. Our director agreed (or at least trusted us) and helped us build a team of engineers that embraced frontend development and, essentially, consulted with other teams to help them learn frontend technologies and build better UIs. At this point in time, I was hooked on the web.

We're going to fast forward through my career for a bit -- LinkedIn's campaign manager, company pages, Ad formats; TwinSpire's online horse betting platform, Small stint back into Android development for TwinSpries; Leading a frontend team at TeamSnap; Back to mobile (Flutter <3) to help Figure Technologies build mobile apps w/ blockchain integrations; etc. The point here is that I've done a lot of development, both in the web and mobile landscape.

If you haven't figured it out yet, the "Mobile Boom" wasn't anything like the ".Com Boom" and now that the dust has settled, Mobile apps tend to perform best when offering specialized experiences that leverage native mobile capabilities (Push Notifications, embedded ML chips, aggressive rendering speeds like games -- as an aside, the web can do all of these things now, too, though). Both platforms have truly grown over the years, but both platforms have also been used for nefarious activities, too.

Now, don't get me wrong, some of these developments would have been good even if no one had ever used the platform for nefarious means (HTTPS as a standard, for example), however, we've had bad-actors (criminals AND companies) use these platforms for malicious purposes. To combat this, we've added layers-upon-layers of legislation from the web that I grew up with. Without going into all my feelings on this, I'll give you my key takeaway: It's more difficult now than ever to build a legal mobile app or web app, and thats not factoring in tooling challenges like React, Webpack, etc.

Cloud Providers dominate the space for web hosting, but many years ago, you'd host things on your own machine or rent a physical machine in a data center and host your projects there. This is still doable today, but dynamic IPs provided by your ISP make it a bit more difficult. You can use technologies like Cloudflare Tunnel to solve this problem, but its another hurdle in the process. Again though, this puts another dependency on a large company, which takes me to my next point...

The internet does not have to be dominated by large companies. "Web 2.0" embraced the idea of social media and user generated content, but ultimately lead to companies building these monolithic websites that ultimately invaded every facet of our daily lives (Quit poking me on Facebook! No, I don't want to water your Farmville crops for you). "Web 3.0" seems to embrace the idea that our data should belong to us. Blockchains are an interesting solution this problem, but they're effectively slow and while they might be a great solution for a handful of use-cases, they are not good solutions for a majority of use-cases. Thankfully, we've seen other ideas that embrace the "Web 3.0" ideology. Platforms like BlueSky use the AtProtocol , a decentralized protocol for large-scale social web applications. I love the AtProtocol, but there's other players in the field too like Nostr and choice is a good thing! These protocols allow us to build on a massive network and create rich content applications that are usable by anyone. However, my main point here is that you can self-host servers to participate in these protocols -- the power is in the people, not some large corporation.

And then there are players like Glitch . Glitch helps people build simple websites, "Link-In-Bio" type sites, and even blogs. Glitch features an interactive editor and the ability to view the source for and collaborate on other glitches. While Glitch is indeed a company, I think they're doing more good for the web than harm, and I'm really appreciative of that.

I long for the days where I'd stumble upon a dumb website that someone built to showcase a funny video, or ending up following a hyperlink to someone's self-hosted BBS forum on Power Rangers. I find myself more and more bothered that the links that I send an receive are all prefixed with "instagram.com/", "facebook.com/", or "tiktok.com/". I miss what the web was.

So here's my call-to-action: Build that silly project you've been thinking about. Open source it. Self-host your own website (Cloudflare tunnel it if you need to). Got a library of ebooks? Self-host your library on a Raspberry PI and make it accessible to your friends and family. Just make the web fun again, and if we can't do that, we can at least make the web ours again.