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What's the most excited you've ever been about a new technology?

Ben Halpern on May 27, 2019

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Yaser Adel Mehraban

Funny how this post got in right when I published my TenserFlow.js post. I've been so excited about having ability to play with machine learning algorithms right into browser that one day my daughter had to remind me she had heard it 4 times from me so far 😂😂😂

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Ben Halpern

Classic 😄

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Cubicle Buddha

Yaser, so it’s okay and normal that I talk to my newborn baby about TypeScript features while I’m rocking her to sleep?

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Yaser Adel Mehraban

Completely, you could even make a song out of it 😉

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Alex Lohr

Sleep, little one,
type systems can be fun!
You'll catch the bugs in time you write
the code so you can sleep at night,
sleep, little one.

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Sunny Singh

This may sound lame, but server-side rendering. I initially didn't jump on the SPA (Single Page App) hype train because it felt wrong to hide content behind JavaScript, making SEO difficult. When I learned that React could actually spit out HTML on the server first, I got super excited to learn it. I'm super excited at how easy it is today too with Gatsby and Next.js.

I wrote about SSR on here actually.

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Damnjan Jovanovic • Edited

When SSD become available

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Ben Halpern

Oh yeah, that's a good one. I remember where I was when I first found out about SSDs 😄

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Damnjan Jovanovic

Thats pretty much uncover how old we are :D

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Ben Halpern

SSD had already existed for a long time before I discovered them, but when it clicked for me in that moment I knew it was going to have a big impact on my computing. I also immediately wondered why it wasn't already shipped as the default drive.

These days it seems like it is the default for most devices.

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Ben Halpern

I recall being incredibly excited about React Native. Not just React Native itself, but it felt like the nudge to really see what this React thing was all about in general.

When React first came around, Angular was already a thing, so was KnockoutJS and several other frameworks.

But I didn't think any of them were fleshed out very well. To me, jQuery was still the best way to get things done with JavaScript at the time. React really changed things. Everything that's come since has been heavily influenced by great ideas introduced by React.

(Not that you need a big JS library for every project, vanilla is often the best choice 😄)

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Hatem Houssein

The For-loop in my first month of programming. 🤷‍♂️

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Nick Janetakis • Edited
  • Within the last ~6 months? LiveView with Phoenix for being able make a web app feel like it's a single page app without having to write any Javascript. Diffs of your server rendered templates get pushed over a websocket channel when things change but the initial render happens without Javascript, so you get SEO perks with no extra work.

  • Within the last ~5 years? Docker to be able to set up a web app and all of its dependencies on any major OS without having to mess around with version managers and service specific installation steps.

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rhymes

Phoenix LiveView is super interesting (though the idea behind is not new, it's a lot less expensive now) and I think it can't be easily replicated within languages that don't have "fearless concurrency" like Elixir :)

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Nick Janetakis • Edited

Yeah, I used Turbolinks for a long time in Rails. It's not quite the same, but LiveView seems like the next natural stage of progression towards creating responsive web apps.

Although in the project I'm working on now, I'm using both Turbolinks and plan to use LiveView together. Turbolinks still has its place for ensuring the head of your page doesn't get resent for each page view, and LiveView steps in for manipulating pieces of the DOM without changing the page (although push state is coming in a future LiveView release which makes things quite interesting).

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rhymes

Thanks for the details! I'm glad there's no single way to create a web app. Going all in with a SPA is not the only option to have a fast website :D

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David Wickes • Edited

Hmmm.

I've never been excited about new technology. I've been very excited about 'old' technology though.

  • REST architecture
  • Common Lisp
  • Unix design philosophy
  • FIFO files
  • C
  • dc

I distrust new technology - usually old ideas reimplemented badly. The craving for the new is particularly awful in the JavaScript space. At least with old tech you know it's going to work.

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Will Lawrence

.NET Core! My original training was in C#, and I love the >.NET ecosystem. However, a huge down side was this it was Windows only.

Now with Core, its cross platform. Visual Studio even runs on Mac now.

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Shad Mirza

Earlier it was React Hooks, thanks to hooks that the amount of simplicity is amazing now.
I'm also excited about TurboModules in react-native. It is going to change how react-native works forever. Imagine hybrid native app without the need of going through the bridge. It's going to be epic.

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Devin Handspiker-Wade

Docker. Just getting into it this year but so far it's GREAT.

  • Need to test a script? Start a container
  • Want to use a python script without filling your computer with needed libraries? Run it in a container.
  • Want a CD/CI to have the needed tools without installing them each time or just hoping? Create a standard image.
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Alistair Evans

When I first had a play with Electron, giving me the ability to built full desktop applications in React or any other JS front-end I want. I went on a stream of twitter gushing about it.

No more writing Windows apps in WPF, consistent and easy styling across desktop and web, reusable front-end code between platforms, and I could go on.

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dumdumdev

When I recently saw Flutter. I like it much more than any other similar framework. I know it’s Google and they’ll prolly can it next month but it is so cool. Using a Mac I can either use VSCode or Android Studio. I actually like Android Studio a lot and prefer that over VSCode. The emulators work great. The only issue I have is that it nests so much it gets hard to read. That is probably just me though.

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Julia Flash

This has to be Hashcat. Getting it installed properly, setting it up, reading about it, making my script, running valid script, and actually cracking a hash. I think I was so excited that I ran away from my computer and was jumping and did not go back to finish CTF from being so overjoyed by running Hashcat. I think it took me a while to actually return to that machine - days. I was just powerfully in happiness and did not want it to end. And also a bit intimidated by how much happiness it gave to execute this at all. Then I bought a slew of books on Amazon around cracking and nmap and netcat. :)

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Cubicle Buddha • Edited

Well you can probably tell how excited I am about Dependabot by the expletive in my title for this recent article: dev.to/cubiclebuddha/omfg-dependab...

Also, when I first found TypeScript I was so incredibly happy that I could have all of the dynamic object building nature of JS and still get solidly good IntelliSense. I’ve become a bit obsessive about TypeScript since then haha.

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Sm0ke

GatsbyJS,
.. they succeed in implementing that PRPL pattern as an artist.
GraphQL seems to be a show stopper at first look, but really useful after learning the basics.

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Michael Caveney

It's amazing how much boilerplate work Gatsby abstracts away, how many tools it offers, and the sheer love and effort the community puts in.

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Sm0ke

Gridsome also, looks promising. It's the Vue.js cousin of GatsbyJS.

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Thomas H Jones II

Sadly, I've been in tech – both professionally and as a hobbyist – for so long that, much of what people seem to see as "new" feels more like "oh... You're reimplementing/converging X, Y and Z decades-old technologies." So, hasn't really been a lot to be excited about beyond being afforded more opportunities to automate away more tasks. The personal ability and desire has generally been there. However, it's only as people have included "devops" in their buzzword-kit that people have understood why I always "wasted so much time writing scripts" and are now allocating me actual work-time to do that kind of thing (rather than having to sneak it).

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Jonathan Apodaca

Feeling like I have finally found a systems programming language that I am happy using: Rust.

Although I love the borrow checker for optimized code, I find myself frequently wishing it had an opt-in "GC-mode" so that I could use it as my go-to language for quick solutions as well (one-off scripts, etc.).

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Matteo Joliveau

I think it was when I started learning Kubernetes.
All the expertise I gathered about containers and Docker started to shine and actually improved my operational experience, simplified building, managing and deploying our applications and so on.

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Nina

I don't know if it counts as new technology because it never actually existed, but I was really excited about the Microsoft Courier. Being a visual designer at the time, it seemed like the perfect fit for how art would be carried out and developed digitally at the time, but then it turns out it was vaporware. I'd still love to have one.

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Alan Barr

Spark, Kafka, and various data architecture tools. I think a lot of people find data to be extremely abstract and how it all fits together in a business to actually make decisions. It feels like we've cross the threshold in making data easy to access and decision on.

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lbonanomi

ZFS
Hypercard
Plan 9
the Newton

You know the trope about the nurse who falls in love with a dying patient? Yeah...

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Casey Brooks

Definitely Kotlin, especially coroutines and it's multiplatform capabilities. That combination opens up such an incredible opportunity for sharing huge amounts of code across platforms.

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James Turner

Definitely .NET Core - the whole .NET development experience is so much better! Easier/simpler APIs (think ASP.NET Core), faster performance and better tooling.

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Katie Adams

Does it have to be as abstract as naming a new type of technology? Because let me tell you, when all of the new tech I'd purchased to build my first was 'out for delivery' I was very, very excited.
Otherwise, AR and VR was incredibly interesting to watch develop, from the first Oculus prototypes to the use of Google Cardboard in the classroom. The uses and benefits are amazing and fascinating to watch. People are doing things with AR that I'd never have thought of and I'm in awe of those people.

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Ben Halpern

One time I became incredibly excited about a technology, was when it really clicked for me that "cloud" was becoming a big f**king deal. It's not like the idea of "somebody else's computer" was new to me, but I just had the realization that this was going to be HUUUGE.

This was in college and I literally ran to my friends' house to talk about it. They were not even coders or techies so they thought I was just being weird.

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Nicolò Rebughini

Because of past job, when GPGPU computing became available. Being able to leverage the power of cheap-ish GPUs to augment CPU bound processes like video and 3D rendering: that to me felt like a huge democratisation of rendering because of how insane were some benefits for the little money you could spend.

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rhymes
  • the first time I saw the Erlang movie, it looked like black magic had entered the world of computing (I then discovered this stuff had been around for decades -_-):

  • the time I played with a demo of remote debugging while reading the Practical Common Lisp book. I don't know why but the fact that I could debug stuff on another machine was unreal to me

  • Webassembly and mostly everything around it. It's still all in flux but I truly believe it's going to amount to something huge in the longer term.

@ben : you should do another post titled "What's the most disappointed you've ever been about a technology?"

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Tyler V. (he/him)

When the Note 7 was coming out (RIP).

It was the first phone I was purchasing for myself and I absolutely LOVED it (until the whole explosion thing).

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Ben Halpern

until the whole explosion thing

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Nans Dumortier

I was really excited about the arrival of Progressive Web Apps!
By the way, this is one of the reasons why I landed here on dev.to 😁

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Russell Ormes

I agree. That and web components. Combining these two platforms has the potential to open up tech to a massive audience that only have access to low spec hardware and small data bandwidth. Tech across the economic divide

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Peter Kim Frank

Not strictly programming related, but the first time I saw an iPod I was pretty floored. Same with a RAZR cell phone.

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Ben Halpern

Gadget-wise, I ordered pre-ordered the Amazon Echo on the first day it was announced. It was obvious this was going to be a whole new category.

I hope an open source self-hosted option comes on the market to legitimately compete in the category though.

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Sean Walker

When I figured clojure out, specifically immutability

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Nathan Englert

jQuery, because of how easy it made doing super cool things before the framework explosion.

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Basel J. Hamadeh

Containers in general. It made my workflow from the development stage to deployment much easier and natural.

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Vuild • Edited

This moment.

youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs

I made a BTTF smart shoe with Android from a Heely once upon a time. It was more exciting than most things. 😃

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Max Ong Zong Bao

Hmmm... I have tons it was Figma, Smart Speakers like Alexa, Web Assembly and Gatsby.js.

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Christopher Kade • Edited

Honestly, it's probably when I discovered Electron.js, I went all out on these desktop applications back then

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Anthony Casson

Netlify. What they're helping change is incredible!

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John Paul Ada

Not exactly a technology, but I was super excited when I learned about Property-based Testing!

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John Paul Ada

Technology-wise though, I was super excited about ReasonML! I could use pattern matching on the frontend! How cool is that!?

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Pandita

I was super excited about data breakpoints for .net until I noticed that it only works for core and I'm in wpf ;-;

but I'm still super excited about xaml islands :3

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Javier Guerra

When ADSL become a thing: So, do you mean I don't need to use my telephone line for the Internet 😮

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Stephen Belovarich

Digital video and photo. I started on film but digital opened up a whole new world of creative possibilities.

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Sebastiangperez

3D printing.

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Donald Merand

I don't think over ever been more excited about tech than when CD-ROM drives went from 1x to 3x speeds.

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Karl N. Redman

Anything I've invented -especially the obscure stuffs

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Paweł Borawski

Death of VR.

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Mike Fincher

About a week ago, I found Nuxt.js, and the buzz still hasn't worn off yet 🤪