Platform · 2014–now · Platform Wars
Firebase
Auth, realtime DB, and hosting as a product. Prototype paradise; vendor lock purgatory at scale.
Firebase mutated mobile and hackathon shipping by hiding infra until the bill and query limits arrive. It fails grown-up apps that need relational integrity and multi-cloud escape hatches. Perfect for week one; painful by year two without planning.
Case studies
Patterns
Context
Frameworks fought for the runtime
Front-end frameworks consolidated power; TypeScript became table stakes; Next and friends absorbed routing, data, and deploy gravity. Serverless and Jamstack rebranded old ideas with better CDNs, then cooled when auth and personalization refused to stay static. Blockchain-for-CRUD and big-bang rewrites collected dumb budgets. The winners were boring platforms with ecosystems — React gravity, Rust where systems care, Vite for greenfield bundling. The losers were narratives that skipped product-market fit or treated every App Router rewrite as destiny.
Compare with
Related
Practice · 2009–2019
NoSQL for Everything
Schema-optional databases sold as a lifestyle. Right tool for some jobs; default for none.
$ Startups ditched Postgres for document stores "because scale," then rebuilt relational integrity in application code — and paid twice when joins came back as a product requirement.
Architecture · 2015–2023
GraphQL Everywhere
Clients ask for exactly what they need — and sometimes invent a second backend team to make that safe.
Architecture · 2016–2024
Jamstack
Pre-render + CDN + APIs. The brand cooled; the pattern (static where possible) stuck.