In what I prefer to think of as a former dark age, I used tools for web development (by necessity, in the sense that these were all the campus supported on its hosts) that I now would simply characterize as legacy technology.

I constructed many large-scale projects using PHP, opting generally for OOP, running under Apache with heavy use of its modules and rewrite capabilities, and often supplanted by Perl-based cgi-bin services for anything impossible under the former. In some cases, I also adapted CMS-like systems to other purposes, particularly Drupal.

While my local programming preferences were never met by that older LAMP stack, it was the sole setup available under certain times and conditions, which are fortunately well in the past now. But it’s worth remembering the total paradigm shift that so influenced me to strike out in new directions once I first had the chance to treat web services as individual port-claiming micro applications under the routing of nginx, and could cleanly architect systems bridging technologies like nodejs and python with ease.