Prefacing this with &quot;I&#x27;m in my 20s and don&#x27;t know what development was really like in the 90s&quot;, but I want to suggest an alternative approach...<p>It <i>looks</i> like the thing that has changed most is not the languages and frameworks (you can still use PHP, MySQL, effectively), but actually the deployment.<p>Automated deployment, continuous integration and delivery, and cloud services like AWS seem to be the bit that has changed the most.<p>If I&#x27;m wrong, ignore me, but otherwise, I&#x27;d have a play around with something like Ansible, use a few AWS services, some of the more value-add ones (i.e. not EC2 or S3) to see what you can now get &quot;off the shelf&quot;.