I rebuilt the same project after 15 years: What changed in web development (opens in new tab)

Totally fair points. Back in 2011 everything was built in plain PHP, and honestly, it worked perfectly for years. The shift to Next.js came much later, mainly because we needed proper SSR to handle SEO at slace. We're talking about 4 languages and around 13M pages. in that context, Next.js really shines, especially with file based routing and ISR making things much easier to manage.

Regarding Docker, we have quite a bit running on a single EC2 instance: PostgreSQL with PostGIS (about 13 million rows), Redis, Nginx, theAPI and web app. Using Docker Compose lets us keep everything versioned and spin up or redeploy the whole stack in seconds. Without it,we'd dealing with dependencies manually, and that's where things tend to get messy fast.

> VueJS ... Laravel

It's even easier with Inertiajs

You're not wrong. The 2011 version had character. Google+ icons, chat per city, a people search engine. It felt like a place, not a tool.

The tradeoff was deliberate though. Serving 261 countries in 4 languages with an API and MCP Server pushes you toward structure over personality. But I do miss some of that original energy.

Thank you. Te 2011 version wasgenuinely fun to build. Chat by city, airport databases, a people search engine, things that made no business sense but felt right.

We're trying to keep some of that. You can browse countries, compare them, explore cities, look up universities. It's not just an API docs page. But I hear you. :)

You're right, I do use AI to help with the writing. English isn't my first language (I'm native Spanish speaker) and I use it to translate and polish my text. I wouldn't be able to participate here otherwise.

The site runs in 4 languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian) and covers 261 countries. Back in 2011 we relied on the machine translators available at the time, you probably remember how rough those were for the end user. AI finally lets us produce content that people can actually read in their language without those painful translation artifacts.

I apologize if that's off-putting, but the alternative would be less content for fewer people, or content full of bad translations.

The screenshots are from 2011 and the redesign took months of engineering, PostgreSQL + PostGIS with 13M features, Redis caching, MCP Server for AI agents. Happy to discuss technical details.