Things that used to be hard and are now easy
The general theme of this list is that technology gives us more and more hoops to jump through, then provides some trampoline to jump through them. We&#x27;re supposed to be eternally grateful. I&#x27;m not. I want to focus on problem-solving, not masterfully using trampolines.<p>&gt; SSL certificates, with Let’s Encrypt<p>Semi-mandatory SSL certificates weren&#x27;t a thing on the web until fairly recently. Not managing them at all was certainly easier than managing them with Let&#x27;s Encrypt, which has a lot of gotchas, requires tooling, knowledge and can suddenly break your website if something is off.<p>&gt; Concurrency, with async&#x2F;await (in several languages)<p>async&#x2F;await usage is literally the main reason why my recent project is written in Go instead of C#. I like C#. I don&#x27;t like Go. But dealing with all the gotchas of .NET Core async&#x2F;await APIs drove me away.<p>Moreover, Erlang had a much more sane and powerful parallelism model way before async&#x2F;await.<p>&gt; Centering in CSS, with flexbox&#x2F;grid<p>Again, like with SSL, this is technically correct, but generally incorrect. Centering <i>in CSS</i> has gotten much easier with flexbox&#x2F;grid. However, centering in HTML only became hard because tables were abandoned as the layout mechanism. Sure, they&#x27;re not &quot;semantic&quot;. But we&#x27;re talking about what became easier, right? Not about what became more ideologically correct, semantic, etc.<p>&gt; Configuring cloud infrastructure, with Terraform<p>Again, there used to be no Cloud infrastructure to configure. Personally, I find Terrafrom annoying more than anything else.<p>&gt; Setting up a dev environment, with Docker<p>As opposed to doing what? Keeping my dev environment simple is a constant battle and most of the time Docker is the weapon used by the other side. In 00s my dev environment was a text editor and some upload tool.<p>I haven&#x27;t used PHP in well over a decade, but for my latest personal project I&#x27;ve decided to brush up on PHP 8.1. Despite awful syntax, I can do stuff by writing a handful of lines of code in a text editor. It&#x27;s very refreshing. 100% focus on the outcome rather than tooling.