November, 2025

When I’m learning a new technology, I’ll often stumble on a very early, maybe the earliest, paper or demo video ever made for it. Usually they are somewhat raw and understated, and cut straight to the point. Since its the first time they’re introducing it to the world, the creator usually compares it with other competing tech which helps you, the reader, get why the thing needs to exist in the first place.

These founding documents can help you quickly grok the technology without getting bogged down in all the modern complexities and bells and whistles that it has grown into.

Take for example the Web. The modern Web has a million topics to learn like HTML, Javascript, servers, databases, etc. But, what is the web at its core? Tim Berners-Lee first presented his idea in this now famous proposal: https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html.

It even has cool pictures of computers with lightning bolt arrows connecting them (A lot of these founding documents have character and flare to them since they came out raw from the creator).

The proposal discusses nuanced decisions about the web’s architecture that we often take for granted, like how hyperlinks should work and why tagging isn’t a good way to organize data.

Who would have thought you could learn about what the web is without a single mention of Javascript?

More technologies

Node.js

Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node, gave this presentation back in 2009: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztspvPYybIY. He lays out the new async properties of the runtime as compared to the common blocking runtimes of most server environments. It’s not just about JS on the server!

Immediate Mode GUIs

If you’ve only ever written UI in React, you’ve been spoiled by having a programming model that lets you simply declare your UI on each render, and not have to worry about updating the underlying DOM. This is effectively an immediate mode paradigm. The alternative, and historically more common one, is "retained mode" where the programmer is responsible for all the stateful and detailed work of managing all the UI objects (adding, removing, etc) on every state update.

Casey Muratori has this fantastic article and a presentation where he (as far as I know) introduces the concept of immediate mode programming as applied to GUIs.

Ruby on Rails

Rails was launched in an era when there weren’t any batteries included web frameworks. That was its key contribution, summed up in the original How to Build a Blog in 15 Minutes with Rails live demo. Today, this demo doesn’t look like much because almost every language has its own framework inspired by Rails. But before Rails, any one of these features could hundreds of lines of code, and dozens of decisions about code structure, file organization, etc.

The Relational Data Model

In 1969, Edgar F. Codd introduced A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks. It describes what we know of today as relational databases. The first few pages are definitely worth a read (after that it gets pretty academic and mathy). It compares the relational model to the other approaches of the time, such as hierarchical and network based models.

React.js

The creators of React at Facebook gave a talk at JSConf in 2013 that spelled out its core ideas. I like how nervous Jordan Walke seems even though he’s in the midst of revolutionizing web development.

Clearly these are skewed towards web development, but I think it applies pretty generally. Some other examples you could lookup yourself are: The Unix Papers, Turing (annotated), and Fielding’s dissertation on REST. Of course, you’ll need the modern docs to get your job done, but these original docs will help you get the overall picture as to why you should use the tech in the first place.