Sometimes in software development, we take giant leaps.

In 2003, Brad Fitzpatrick released Memcached, and began talking about LiveJournal’s architecture (here’s a presentation from a few years later.) This became the prototype for the next generation of sites and apps, and is still largely the same way web apps are built today.

In 2004, Google published a paper describing MapReduce. With Google’s public success with this programming model, and inspired by their paper, Hadoop was born. While Hadoop has evolved considerably, it’s now a staple of how large sites and apps process their data.

In 2007, Amazon published the Dynamo paper which showed, in an understandable way, how databases and applications could be written to work together and scale linearly as new nodes are added to a cluster. From this concept, a bevy of databases like Cassandra and Riak were born, and are used by many of the largest apps in the world.

In 2010, Twitter publicly switched to client-side templating, turning the server into something more like a simple API. Around the same time, DocumentCloud released Backbone.js, which packaged this concept up with a neat API, a crisp implementation, and clear documentation. While Twitter may have had a few hiccups five years ago, in practice this set off the next big transition, where today many apps are written to render on the client, and more are being converted to that style every day.

In 2012, Google released version 1.0 of Angular.js. It provided a lot more structure than Backbone.js, and heavily emphasized testing and good development practices, while taking care of some of the boring parts of binding data and rendering content. Today, try looking for any web development job position, they all list Angular.js as the framework to know—its rise in popularity has been meteoric.

What do all these have in common? Companies or startups, having learned hard lessons in production, found a way forward, and have shared their breakthroughs with the world.

I believe this has happened again in 2015, this time with Facebook’s trio of React.js, Relay, and GraphQL.