I wrote a lot about my journey in software development. Hope it would not bore you.

The Beginning

My first year of middle school and my first experience with programming was in 2017. At that time, I joined FutureWork 未来工坊, a studio that creates game maps for mobile games. To further raise the studio's profile and highlight its work, I decided to build a simple website. Back then, I was still doing visual web designs with Dreamweaver, and the “design” was in fact just a modified version of a template that someone else had posted online. All in all, it was from creating my first webpage that I became interested in learning programming. I found creating with code to be cool at the time. The studio was a wonderful memory even if it was disbanded on 2019.

Learning Programming

After making (or modifying) my first website using Dreamweaver, I started learning about web development on my own. At that time, PHP, JQuery, Bootstrap and other technologies were still the mainstay of the web. I learned everything I could about web design from a variety of sources. The most impressive one is RUNOOB.COM, which contains a lot of text tutorials in different programming languages, written in Chinese, which was very helpful to me as my English was not so good at that time. I started with the basics of HTML, CSS and JS, then moved on to PHP and MySQL, learned about Git and GitHub and other version control systems, and then started using powerful frameworks like Laravel and React.

For almost a year and a half, I've been working on projects using native PHP and JQuery. Then I learned about frameworks, which my fellow developers say can dramatically improve the efficiency of development and expose me to more modern ways of developing. I still remember the first framework I came across was ThinkPHP 5.5, a PHP web full-stack development framework developed by a team in China. Even though I only actually used it once before switching to Laravel until now, it left a lasting impression on me.

The Rise of Frontend

In the early days of Internet development, most of the work was done by back-end developers, and front-end developers at that time were once jokingly called cut-outs, describing that they only needed to be responsible for converting PS design drafts into web page elements, implying a low level of technical content.

As browser technology advances and front-ends diversify, the practice of separating front-end and back-end development is starting to gain popularity. People develop front-end and back-end separately and communicate through APIs. Various types of front-end frameworks have also begun to emerge. At that time, Angular, React, and Vue were known as the three major front-end frameworks. The first one I came across was Vue, because it was known for its low level of difficulty in getting started and its simple structure. For a long time, I have been using Laravel + Vue to complete my projects.

With the advent of Node.js, I was introduced to React and its derivative, the Meta framework Next.js, and was blown away by the possibilities of full-stack development on the front-end. Although I think the front-end is going back to the old way of not separating the front-end from the back-end, there is no denying that the efficiency gains from JS full-stack frameworks such as Next.js are amazing, thanks to the deep integration of server-side and client-side JS.

Modern Frontend

With the proliferation of SaaS platforms and a thriving JS ecosystem, backend-less web development is entirely possible. On more than one occasion, I've built an entire website using Supabase (an open source Firebase replacement with database, authentication, storage, etc.) and Next.js. Meanwhile, platforms as diverse as PlanetScale (MySQL SaaS), Auth0 (Auth SaaS), and Vercel (Deploy SaaS) have simplified the time and effort required to develop a full-fledged system. There is no doubt that the future will be the era of cloud computing.

The Fascination of Architecture

For a very long time, I've been developing projects using the MVC architecture because it's what most frameworks provide or advocate by default. While it is perfectly adequate for small to medium sized projects, I still wanted to learn more about different architectures. While discussing with fellow developers, I came across the architectural concept of DDD, Domain Driven Design.

Honestly, DDD is much more complex than MVC. But there's no doubt that it's very attractive. Until now, I'm still researching the application of DDD in real projects.

The Distributed Future

In the past, we have been upgrading monolithic servers to achieve higher performance. But with the prevalence of cloud computing and the maturity of containerization and deployment solutions such as Docker, k8s, and NoMad, distributed computing has become a new option. We can easily deploy projects to thousands of server nodes in different locations as needed, and even dynamically scale up and down according to real-time demand. This brings great flexibility to the management of server resources.

Recently, I've been trying to learn about microservices and distributed deployment in order to gain a deeper understanding of modern deployment solutions.