Hype

Posted on Feb 10, 2026

The fashion industry is the only industry more hype based than IT. Some IT hypes in no particular order:

Smart Homes / Internet of things (Smart fridges, smart tv, Google Nest, etc)
mobile apps for everything
intra-web (you must be a bit older to remember this one)
everything must be tag based
web3 / semantic web
Java applets / ActiveX
bitcoin / shitcoins
ORM’s
SRE (cattle not pets)
everything must be Ajax
Electron-based apps
dual programming
Flash / Silverlight
XML-RPC / SOAP
everything must be a wiki
Agile
No-SQL
6degrees
NFT’s
Casandra
Functional Programming
nodejs
UML coding
virtual networks
everything in the Cloud
2FA for every app
PWA apps
MongoDB (document based databases)
Blockchain / web3 (name hijacked from the semantic web, but completely unrelated)
expert systems (prolog, etc)
5G hype
everything must be search based
SOA
Edge computing
IaaS / SaaS
XML everything, also XSL
Frameworks (after RoR everybody went nuts)
everything in containers / Kubernetes
single sign-on (OAUTH2 providers)
server-less computing
SPA’s
big data / data lakes
ORB’s
micro-services
DevOps
VR / metaverse
AI for everything? Remeber: The “i” in “LLM” stands for intelligence!

Some hypes left useful things that are now part of the regular IT landscape. But it is important to remember that if you sticked with simply having a monorepo web-application + SQL (with some JavaScript sprinkled on top were it made sense), running on some beefy servers you would have been fine (as long as you remember to refresh the look every other year, and have your marketing drop some buzzwords every other post).

If you want more proof, look at wikimedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers, they basicly still run a LAMP stack (but with loadbalancers and static content caching) and serve more traffic then you ever will.

The effective technology has not changed much. But the hype is always changing.