Timeline - 2010-14
2010β
π npm is a package manager for the JavaScript programming language written entirely in JavaScript and developed by Isaac Z. Schlueter to address problems he had "seen with module packaging done terribly," drawing inspiration from similar projects like PEAR (PHP) and CPAN (Perl), first released on January 12, 2010.
βοΈ Steve Jobs announced the original iPad on January 27, 2010, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, describing it as a new category of device between a smartphone and a laptop. The Wi-Fi model was released on April 3, 2010, running iPhone OS 3.2.
π’ Windows Azure Platform became commercially available on February 1, 2010.
π Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene. Shay Banon created its precursor, Compass, in 2004, and released the first version of Elasticsearch on February 8, 2010, describing it as "You Know, for Search."
π’ Ken Schwaber founded Scrum.org in 2009, and the first official version of "The Scrum Guide" was published by him and Jeff Sutherland in February 2010.
βοΈ systemd is a software suite providing an array of system components for Linux operating systems designed to unify service configuration and behavior across distributions. Developed by Red Hat software engineers Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers as a project to replace Linux's conventional System V init, systemd was first released on March 30, 2010.
π Sinatra 1.0 was released on March 23, 2010, marking the framework's first major stable version and introducing Rack::Test as the recommended testing tool.
βοΈ Vagrant is an open-source software product for building and maintaining portable virtual software development environments across VirtualBox, KVM, Hyper-V, Docker containers, VMware, and AWS, started as a personal side-project by Mitchell Hashimoto in January 2010 and first released in March 2010.
π In March 2010, the Apache Solr search server joined Lucene as a sub-project, merging the two developer communities.
π Flask is a micro web framework written in Python that does not require particular tools or libraries, created by Armin Ronacher of Pocoo, an international group of Python enthusiasts, and first released on April 1, 2010.
π WebSocket protocol development was transferred from the WHATWG/W3C to the IETF's HyBi Working Group in February 2010. A security vulnerability in the early draft β proxy cache poisoning β was discovered, causing several browsers to temporarily disable WebSocket support.
π In April 2010, Steve Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash," an open letter explaining why Apple would not support Flash on iOS, citing security flaws, poor performance, proprietary control, and battery drain. The letter accelerated Flash's decline and is widely regarded as its "death blow."
π OAuth is an open standard for access delegation commonly used by internet users to grant websites or applications access to their information on other websites without sharing passwords, with the OAuth 1.0 protocol published as RFC 5849 in April 2010.
π₯οΈ On 3 May 2010, it was announced that Stack Overflow had raised $6 million in venture capital from a group of investors led by Union Square Ventures.
βοΈ Google Cloud Storage is an online file storage web service for storing and accessing data on Google Cloud Platform infrastructure, launched on May 19, 2010.
π BigQuery is a managed, serverless data warehouse product by Google offering scalable analysis over large quantities of data, originating from Google's internal Dremel technology that enabled quick queries across trillions of rows, launched on May 19, 2010.
βοΈ Google released Android 2.2 Froyo on May 20, 2010, which brought significant performance improvements through the introduction of a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler and added support for Wi-Fi hotspot functionality.
βοΈ Apple rebranded the operating system from "iPhone OS" to "iOS" with the release of iOS 4 on June 21, 2010, which also introduced multitasking and home screen folders.
π¨ Sketch 1.0, a vector graphics editor for macOS conceived by Pieter Omvlee to address frustrations with Adobe Illustrator's complexity for UI work, was released in private beta by Bohemian Coding on September 7, 2010, and went on to become the dominant interface-design tool through the mid-2010s.
π Jasmine 1.0 was released on September 14, 2010 by Pivotal Labs as a behaviour-driven development (BDD) testing framework for JavaScript, running in both browsers and Node.js without depending on a DOM. It was influenced by RSpec, JSpec, and JSSpec.
π ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy) is a dynamic application security testing tool published under the Apache License that allows users to manipulate all traffic passing through it, including HTTPS encrypted traffic. The first release was announced on Bugtraq in September 2010 and became an OWASP project a few months later.
π§© Unicode 6.0 was released in October 2010, becoming the first version of the Unicode Standard to include standardized emoji characters, incorporating 722 emoji that had originated from Japanese mobile phone carriers.
π Apache Hive is a data warehouse software project built on top of Apache Hadoop for providing data query and analysis, first released on October 1, 2010.
π NuGet is a package manager designed to enable developers to share reusable code as a software-as-a-service solution with a free, open-source client app, initially created by the Outercurve Foundation under the name NuPack. Originally distributed as a Visual Studio extension, starting with Visual Studio 2012, both Visual Studio and Visual Studio for Mac natively consume NuGet packages, with the project first released on October 5, 2010.
π RSpec 2.0 was released on October 10, 2010, refactoring the monolithic gem into separate components: rspec-core (runner and formatters), rspec-expectations (matchers), and rspec-mocks (mocking and stubbing), allowing projects to include only what they need.
π Pillow is a free and open-source additional library for the Python programming language that adds support for opening, manipulating, and saving many different image file formats. It is a fork of the Python Imaging Library (PIL) and was first released on October 18, 2010.
π’ Microsoft announced Office 365 on October 19, 2010, initially in a private beta, combining its existing cloud services like Office Web Apps, SharePoint Online, and Exchange Online into a single subscription-based service
π AngularJS is a discontinued free and open-source JavaScript-based web framework for developing single-page applications, maintained mainly by Google and a community of individuals and corporations, first released on October 20, 2010.
π Express.js is a backend web application framework for building RESTful APIs with Node.js, founded by TJ Holowaychuk and released as free and open-source software under the MIT License, with version 0.12 released on November 16, 2010.
βοΈ Salesforce.com acquired Heroku on December 8, 2010, for approximately $212 million in cash, making the cloud PaaS platform a wholly owned subsidiary.
π JSON Web Token (JWT) is a proposed Internet standard for creating data with optional signature and/or optional encryption whose payload holds JSON that asserts a number of claims, first published on December 28, 2010.
π§© In December 2010, the first documented description of QR code-based payments came from two patents filed by Shaun Cooley and Andrew Charles Payne, based on a prototype system developed for Norton Labs at Symantec called Norton Mobile Pay.
π "The RSpec Book: Behaviour-Driven Development with RSpec, Cucumber, and Friends" by David Chelimsky, Dave Astels, Zach Dennis, Aslak HellesΓΈy, Bryan Helmkamp, and Dan North was published by Pragmatic Bookshelf in December 2010, becoming the definitive guide to behaviour-driven development in Ruby and documenting the workflow that combines RSpec for unit-level specs with Cucumber for acceptance tests.
π Rust is a multi-paradigm, general-purpose programming language that enforces memory safety without requiring a garbage collector or reference counting, growing out of a personal project begun in 2006 by Mozilla employee Graydon Hoare. Mozilla began sponsoring the project in 2009 and officially announced it in 2010.
2011β
π₯οΈ Stack Exchange publicly launched in January 2011 with 33 web sites; it had 27 employees and 1.5 million users at the time.
π Apache Kafka is a distributed event store and stream-processing platform, an open-source system developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Java and Scala, designed to provide a unified, high-throughput, low-latency platform for handling real-time data feeds, first released in January 2011.
βοΈ Jenkins is an open source automation server that helps automate the parts of software development related to building, testing, and deploying, facilitating continuous integration and continuous delivery. Originally named Hudson, the project was renamed to Jenkins in 2011 after a dispute with Oracle, first released on February 2, 2011.
βοΈ Android 3.0 Honeycomb, a version specifically optimized for tablets, was released on February 22, 2011, introducing a new "Holographic" user interface and hardware acceleration.
βοΈ The last unassigned top-level address blocks of 16 million IPv4 addresses were allocated in February 2011 by the IANA to the regional Internet registries, intensifying the push toward IPv6 adoption.
βοΈ Chocolatey is a machine-level, command-line package manager and installer for Windows software. It was created by Rob Reynolds and first released on March 23, 2011 (v0.9.0). It was built on top of the NuGet infrastructure and inspired by the apt-get experience for Windows.
π Package Installer for Python (pip) is the de facto and recommended package management system written in Python for installing and managing software packages, first released on April 4, 2011.
βοΈ World IPv6 Day was a technical testing and publicity event on June 8, 2011, sponsored and organized by the Internet Society, in which major organizations including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Akamai Technologies, and Limelight Networks enabled IPv6 on their main services for 24 hours.
π’ Office 365 reached general availability on June 28, 2011, initially targeting corporate users as a successor to the Microsoft Online Services Productivity Suite (BPOS).
π Time-based one-time password (TOTP) is a computer algorithm that generates a one-time password (OTP) that uses the current time as a source of uniqueness, officially becoming RFC 6238 in May 2011.
βοΈ In May 2011, Fedora Linux became the first major Linux distribution to enable systemd by default, replacing Upstart.
π Apache Flink is an open-source, unified stream-processing and batch-processing framework developed by the Apache Software Foundation. The core of Apache Flink is a distributed streaming data-flow engine written in Java and Scala, with initial release in May 2011.
π Selenium 2.0 was released in July 2011, merging the original Selenium RC with Simon Stewart's WebDriver project. WebDriver's native browser control APIs for Java, Python, Ruby, and C# became the new standard interface.
βοΈ Mac OS X 10.7 Lion was released on July 20, 2011. Apple shortened the product name from "Mac OS X" to "OS X" starting with this release, aligning the branding with its other operating systems.
βοΈ Linux 3.0 was released on July 21, 2011. The jump from 2.6 to 3.0 was primarily to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Linux and to simplify the version numbering, rather than signifying massive architectural changes.
π Kotlin is a cross-platform, statically typed, general-purpose programming language with type inference designed to interoperate fully with Java. The JVM version of Kotlin's standard library depends on the Java Class Library, but type inference allows its syntax to be more concise, first appearing on July 22, 2011.
βοΈ In July 2011, Heroku expanded its polyglot support by adding Node.js and Clojure alongside the original Ruby, and Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of Ruby, joined the company as Chief Architect for Ruby.
π Google Native Client (NaCl) was a sandboxing technology for running either a subset of Intel x86, ARM, or MIPS native code, or a portable executable, in a sandbox, allowing safe execution of native code from a web browser independent of the user operating system and enabling web apps to run at near-native speeds in alignment with Google's plans for ChromeOS. It was initially released on September 16, 2011.
π Apache Storm is a distributed stream processing computation framework written predominantly in the Clojure programming language. Originally created by Nathan Marz and team at BackType, the project was open sourced after being acquired by Twitter, with initial release on September 17, 2011.
π Ruby on Rails 3.1 was released on August 31, 2011, introducing the Asset Pipeline, jQuery as the default JavaScript library, and support for CoffeeScript and Sass.
βοΈ GitLab was created in 2011 by Ukrainian programmer Dmytro Zaporozhets as a side project written in Ruby on Rails. The first code commit to the GitLab project was made on October 8, 2011.
βοΈ Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich was released on October 18, 2011, aiming to unify the phone and tablet branches of the operating system into a single platform with a refined "Holo" design language.
π Microsoft released a version of C# with async/await for the first time in the Async CTP (2011). And were later officially released in C# 5 (2012).
π James Dixon, then chief technology officer at Pentaho, coined the term data lake by 2011 to contrast it with data mart, which is a smaller repository of interesting attributes derived from raw data.
βοΈ Google App Engine became generally available (GA) in November 2011.
π Mocha was created by TJ Holowaychuk and released in November 2011 as a flexible JavaScript test framework for Node.js and browsers, offering BDD and TDD interfaces and emphasising accurate reporting of asynchronous operations.
π The WebSocket protocol was finalized and published by the IETF as RFC 6455 in December 2011, standardizing the full bidirectional communication protocol over a single TCP connection with a defined handshake, framing format, and security model.
π Locust was created in 2011 by Jonatan Heyman and Carl Bystrom at ESN while load testing Battlelog, a companion app for Battlefield 3. Unable to find a suitable tool for simulating realistic user behaviour, they built Locust in Python using gevent, allowing a single process to handle thousands of concurrent users.
π¨ InVision, a cloud-based prototyping and collaboration platform that turned static Sketch and Photoshop screens into clickable prototypes, was founded by Clark Valberg and Ben Nadel in 2011 and became an industry standard for design handoff, reaching a peak valuation of $1.9 billion.
2012β
π The first numbered pre-alpha version of the compiler, Rust 0.1, was released in January 2012.
π Gatling was first released on January 13, 2012 by StΓ©phane Landelle as an open-source load and performance testing framework built on Scala and Netty, treating performance tests as production code with a DSL-based scenario definition.
π "The Cucumber Book: Behaviour-Driven Development for Testers and Developers" by Matt Wynne and Aslak HellesΓΈy was published by Pragmatic Bookshelf in January 2012, serving as the definitive guide to Cucumber and showing how to write executable acceptance tests in the plain-language Gherkin syntax to bridge communication between business stakeholders and developers.
βοΈ Ansible was written by Michael DeHaan and acquired by Red Hat in 2015, with initial release on February 20, 2012.
π A "leap day bug" caused a significant service disruption for Windows Azure users on February 29, 2012.
βοΈ The Raspberry Pi is a small single-board computer that runs Linux-based operating systems. It was designed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and first released on February 29, 2012 (announcement date; availability began in May 2012) as an affordable platform for promoting computer science education. The original Model B featured an ARM processor, 256 MB RAM, and cost $35, making it an accessible tool for hobbyists, educators, and developers worldwide.
π Go 1.0 was released on March 28, 2012, as the first stable version, accompanied by a long-term backward-compatibility guarantee for the Go 1 language specification.
π On April 24, 2012, JosΓ© Valim published "A peek inside Elixir's Parallel Compiler," signaling the early development and design goals of the language at Plataformatec.
βοΈ Google Drive was introduced on April 24, 2012, as a cloud storage and synchronization service that unified file management across the Google Apps suite.
βοΈ Microsoft announced major support for Virtual Machines (including Linux), Web Sites, and a Python SDK for Windows Azure in June 2012.
βοΈ Google Compute Engine (GCE) is the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) component of Google Cloud Platform built on the global infrastructure that runs Google's search engine, Gmail, YouTube and other services. Google announced Compute Engine on June 28, 2012 at Google I/O 2012 in a limited preview mode.
π TypeScript is a free and open source programming language developed and maintained by Microsoft, first made public on October 1, 2012 (at version 0.8), after two years of internal development at Microsoft.
π QUIC is a general-purpose transport layer network protocol initially designed by Jim Roskind at Google, implemented, and deployed in 2012, with formal introduction on October 12, 2012.
π Apache Lucene version 4.0 was released on October 12, 2012, introducing major features such as pluggable codecs and near-real-time search improvements.
π Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse product forming part of the larger cloud-computing platform Amazon Web Services, built on top of technology from the massive parallel processing (MPP) data warehouse company ParAccel (later acquired by Actian) to handle large scale data sets and database migrations. It was initially released in October 2012.
π Internet Explorer 10, released in October 2012 with Windows 8, introduced WebSocket support for Windows users, completing mainstream browser adoption alongside Firefox 4 (2011) and Safari 5 (2010).
π OAuth 2.0 was published as RFC 6749 in October 2012.
π Emscripten is an LLVM/Clang-based compiler that compiles C and C++ source code to WebAssembly (or to a subset of JavaScript known as asm.js, its original compilation target before the advent of WebAssembly in 2017), primarily for execution in web browsers, with first release on November 11, 2012.
π HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is a policy mechanism that helps protect websites against man-in-the-middle attacks such as protocol downgrade attacks and cookie hijacking. The HSTS specification was published as RFC 6797 on November 19, 2012, after being approved on October 2, 2012 by the IESG for publication as a Proposed Standard RFC.
βοΈ GitLab CI, a continuous integration tool created by Dmitriy Zaporozhets, was first released as a standalone service on November 22, 2012. It was later integrated into the core GitLab application in September 2015, forming a unified DevOps platform.
π In December 2012, W3C designated HTML5 as a Candidate Recommendation, signaling the specification was feature-complete and entering final review. WHATWG simultaneously began maintaining HTML as a continuously updated "Living Standard" without version numbers.
π’ From 2012, Microsoft became a significant user of GitHub, using it to host open-source projects and development tools such as .NET Core, Chakra Core, MSBuild, PowerShell, PowerToys, Visual Studio Code, Windows Calculator, Windows Terminal and the bulk of its product documentation (now to be found on Microsoft Docs).
βοΈ Prometheus is a free software application used for event monitoring and alerting that records real-time metrics in a time series database built using a HTTP pull model. Prometheus was developed at SoundCloud starting in 2012 when the company discovered that its existing metrics and monitoring solutions (using StatsD and Graphite) were not sufficient for their needs.
π Elastic NV was founded in 2012 to provide commercial services and products around Elasticsearch and related software.
π¨ Dylan Field and Evan Wallace began working on Figma in 2012 while studying computer science at Brown University; Field was named a Thiel Fellow the same year, earning him $234,460 in exchange for taking a leave of absence from college.