The Fourth Decade of Website Deployments

In the 2020s, the fourth decade of website deployments, teams are recombining, repeating, and re-imagining the patterns of the previous three decades.

In the 1990s, dedicated trailblazers created novel and disparate modes of getting sites online. For many teams in this era, just getting a site on the World Wide Web at all was good enough.

In the 2000s, the LAMP stack emerged as an industry standard pattern for uniting the work of developers, designers, content editors, and systems administrators. The monoliths of the 2000s provided a baseline of stability, pace-of-change, and collaboration, which again was "good enough."

In the 2010s, expectations climbed (primarily in response to competition from native mobile applications). "Good enough" was no longer good enough. Each specialty (front-end development, IT, designers, etc) found that they could pursue excellence in their discipline by breaking away from monolithic deployments.

Now, a third of the way into the 2020s the zeitgeist of website deployments moves again.

Part history lesson, part sketch comedy show, this session will trace the economic, social, political, and technological forces that shape how people build and deploy websites. Teams that understand the forces that shaped the previous decades of evolution will better plan and execute for the changes in the 2020s.