I loved Flash. To celebrate the #Flashpocalypse, please indulge me for trip down memory lane. 🧵

Over fifteen years ago, my first programming gig was an internship at a company that built websites with Flash. A project I remember was the website for a large Dutch fashion chain.

The team of designers, animators and programmers worked together to make it a beautiful experience, while maintaining some form of accessibility and SEO.

To do that, the whole Flash app gracefully degraded to a separate pure-HTML version, essentially duplicating the project.

I helped to get data from MySQL through an API built in PHP, which was read through ActionScript in Flash.

It was a convoluted system, but that was required to get data into Flash. In many ways it’s akin to what frontend apps are doing now (but we had a 100% custom interface).

Almost everything was custom-built. No frameworks, no version control, no staging server, no local development environment.

Just Notepad++ connected over FTP to production, and an if-statement that matched on the office's IP to work within (that, and server backups).

Although whatever we did back then is now possible through HTML in modern browsers, I haven't seen very many animation-heavy websites like that since.

That might very well be because it's simply a Bad Idea™, or it could be a browser compatibility problem.