LAMP Stack appreciation post

Writing about technical stuff is hard

When I blog, I spend an large amount of time not writing at all, but just vacillating trying to decide who my likely audience is, and how ’technical’ or ‘beginner-friendly’ I should be.

And then when I finally make up my mind and decide to explain something, I hit another patch of indecision over whether I’m even qualified to explain the thing I want to talk about.

And then of course if I can get past those two first self-imposed barriers, and actually start writing about something, I hit another blocker. Whatever direction I went, I imagine the opposite of who I’m writing for, reading my stuff. I imagine a professional colleague way more experienced than me cringing at my simplifying of concepts I don’t know enough about to know what to leave in or take out, or I imagine curious well-meaning friends from other periods of my life hitting a wall of impenetrable jargon and giving up discouraged.

The reader I often have in my mind, for what it’s worth, is basically myself a few years ago. Not very technical, but very curious about technical things. And locked out of super interesting stuff because nobody has explained it very well.

Writing (or even thinking clearly) about social media is impossible

1: its incredibly technically sophisticated and so it’s hard to write about technically sophisticated things

2: Social Media is the water, and I’m the fish in the David Foster Wallace example from his famous commencement speech, and its just everywhere and has permeated everything and so that’s another reason its impossible to write about

3: Semi-related to point #2, but more personally: I am a 33 year old, and I feel that social media is worse than it was 10 years ago. But I also have to own and acknowledge in anything I think or write about social media that part of my complicated feelings about it all is also just…life and its not Mark Zuckerberg’s fault that I’m in my early thirties and its kinda not as fun as being in my early twenties.

4: somewhat in contrast to point #1, it’s also not that complicated. TikTok is a new paradigm, but all the other ones are basically kinda the same? Profiles. Feeds. Messages. There’s very little new to say.

Nevertheless…The LAMP stack

(or rather: The LAMP stack as I imperfectly understand it, and as I’d explain it and its significance to myself from before I decided to learn to code)

Linux. Apache. MySQL. Php.

Linux is the operating system. Think mac or windows. Its just an operating system, its a thing that lets you use a computer. And its free, and INCREDIBLY customizable.

Apache is a piece of software. I actually have never used it(in my personal projects I’ve used an I think equivalent technology called nginx), but it handles the http in ‘http://example.com’. It can turn a computer into a computer that can be a node in the world wide web.

MySQL is a database. SQL is a programming language for using databases, and mySQL is a kind of database.

And PHP stands for personal home page. Like Apache (& mySQL for that matter), I’ve never really used it. But it was hot shit in 2003 for making websites that did anything at all.

And all four of the letters in the LAMP stack are open source technologies. That’s the take-home message. They’re all free to use, and they all replaced things that…did the same thing, but you had to pay for.

It’s arguably utopian. Incredible technologies that let you do almost anything you can imagine. You have a database to keep track of things. An operating system to do useful stuff with your computer. Server software to turn your computer into a node on the web. And a framework to make the nontrivial web pages that you’ll serve up. All for free.

That was facebook in 2003 or whenever. And that, plus something like AWS so you don’t have to literally own and run the computers yourself is so, so much of digital infrastructure today.