Why visual programming didn't take off
Step into 1995: when the web got images, JavaScript, and visual dev tools. This is how it all began, where it went wrong, and how it's still going wrong today.
Salma Alam-Naylor
United Kingdom
Salma writes code for your entertainment. She specialises in streaming live coding, and loves helping people get into tech. After a career as a music teacher and comedian, Salma transitioned to technology in 2014, working as a front end developer and tech lead for startups, agencies and global e-commerce. Active in the developer community, Salma is a GitHub Star, Microsoft MVP for Developer Technologies, winner of the Jamstack Conf Community Creator Award 2021, and a partnered Twitch streamer where she builds weird websites, roasts your code, and chats about the tech industry every week. She'll also try to make you laugh with tech jokes.
Community Contributions
The promise that wasn't kept (by AI)
AI has always promised to help people spend more time doing valuable work by automating the manual, repetitive, toilsome tasks so that software developers can be free to use their time on ‘something better. Despite this, the 2024 State of DevOps report states that “individuals are reporting a decrease in the amount of time they spend doing valuable work as AI adoption increases”. The maths isn’t mathsing.
The promise that wasn't kept
AI is distracting us from creating real value. While we chase speed and automation, meaningful and human-centered work is getting left behind. Is this progress?
The experience is enough
I wrote about how you can gain a lot from the experience of going to conferences.
It wasn't the idea that failed, it was the execution
Step into 1995: when the web got images, JavaScript, and visual dev tools. This is how it all began, where it went wrong, and how it's still going wrong today.
Be nice and it all works out
I gave career advice to the torc.dev community with Taylor Desseyn. The bottom line: be nice and it all works out.
MC @ CityJS
I emceed a track at the CityJS London 2025 conference, whilst providing interesting factoids about the World Wide Web in 1995 throughout the day.
CityJS Meetup
I gave my new talk, An Introduction to the World Wide Web for very senior programmers at a CityJS meetup at the Attio offices in London.
