Ajax Bestiary

It was 2007, Ajax was hot and gmail was the shiniest web UI around. The magic of XHTMLRequest was catching the development world by storm and the promise of true interactive applications delivered via web browsers was finally a reality. Combine that with Firefox rapidly racing toward version 1 and the excitement was palpable in the web design community.

I was a developer working mostly on lab data systems that got taken up in the wave. I signed up to do a workshop on interactive web development for a conference of web developers in higher education. As I was preparing my notes for the presentation, I started documenting things via a WordPress blog. Over the next few years, the blog took off and I eventually found my way into FinTech building interactive web tools. I've been passionate about the web experience of the tools I build ever since. I just tend not to focus on issues of scale, performance, and operational stability first these days.

Unfortunately, as my focus shifted towards data science and data engineering, the effort of maintaining the site became no longer worth the cost. Since the blog was hosted in WordPress and I lost interest progressively, there's not a good archive copy to resurrect. This is a problem I've sworn to avoid in future projects. I'm a data guy, the loss is kind of inexcusable.