Don’t Repeat Yourself

Technologists are generally pretty bad at understanding their own history. Understandable, given how quickly the industry moves, but still regrettable.

If you’ve ever written a line of JavaScript or called an API that returned JSON (and who hasn’t, they’re about as ubiquitous as tech can get), you should get to know Douglas Crockford. This interview with him covers a wide range of topics, including how JSON came to be (spoiler: as the antidote to XML), his perspective on JavaScript as a whole (and how it changed from his first impression), what it was like to work through the dot com bubble, and much more.

I also suppose I should study my own history better, because I’ve written on the topic of studying history several times before. Though not all forms of repetition are bad, right? Right?