The Origin Story of JavaScript

JavaScript wasn’t always the cool kid on the block. In this talk, we’ll follow how a lil 10-day hackathon became the cornerstone of modern web dev.

00:00 - Introduction & Technical Difficulties 01:07 - The Birth of the Web (1991) 01:37 - Tim Berners-Lee and the First Web Page 02:08 - The Static Early Web 02:18 - JavaScript: From Toy to Titan 02:31 - About the Speaker (Annie Ston) 03:17 - Early Web Browsers & Netscape Navigator 03:56 - The Rise of Internet Explorer 04:48 - Enter Brendan Eich & JavaScript’s Creation 05:35 - Naming JavaScript: Mocha, LiveScript, JavaScript 06:12 - Microsoft’s JScript & The Browser Wars 07:48 - Standardizing JavaScript: ECMAScript 08:48 - The DOM and W3C Standards 09:21 - Internet Explorer Dominance 09:28 - Microsoft’s XMLHttpRequest & Asynchronous Web 10:15 - The Rise of Ajax 11:07 - jQuery Revolutionizes JavaScript 12:00 - Single Page Applications Emerge 12:18 - JavaScript Performance Issues 12:28 - Google V8 Engine & Just-In-Time Compilation 13:21 - Node.js: JavaScript on the Backend 13:45 - Atwood’s Law & Full Stack JavaScript 14:07 - The Messy Frontend & jQuery Spaghetti 14:34 - The Rise of Frameworks & Task Runners 16:23 - Module Systems & Bundlers 17:08 - Webpack and Modern Tooling 17:50 - ES6+ Features & Modern JavaScript 18:21 - JavaScript and Serverless Functions 19:08 - Firecracker VMs & Modern Deployment 19:49 - The Future: AI and JavaScript 20:00 - AI Agents in Software Development 21:52 - The Limits of AI Coding Tools 23:42 - AI’s Potential and Developer Responsibility 24:07 - The Importance of Programming History 24:46 - Closing & Where to Find the Speaker