webpack
The JavaScript module bundler created by Tobias Koppers around 2012 that defined the modern front-end build, popularizing loaders, plugins, and code splitting.
Tools
The compilers, IDEs, and systems that programmers actually used.
379 entries, all primary-sourced
Bower (Front-End Package Manager)
An early package manager for browser libraries, once widely used for front-end web projects and later deprecated as npm, Yarn, and bundlers took over.
Bokeh
Bokeh, first released in 2013, is a Python library for interactive visualizations rendered in the web browser, built for dashboards and data applications and able to handle large or streaming datasets.
InfluxDB
A popular open-source time-series database for metrics, events, and IoT sensor data, optimized for high write throughput and time-range queries.
Koa
The next-generation Node.js framework from the Express team, using async middleware and an even smaller core than Express.
Plotly
Plotly's interactive graphing library, released in 2013 for Python, R, and JavaScript, renders browser-based interactive charts and, with the Dash framework, lets developers build analytical web applications in pure Python.
Docker
The 2013 platform that made Linux containers easy to build, ship, and run, standardizing how applications are packaged with their dependencies.
Electron
A framework that embeds Chromium and Node.js so developers can build cross-platform desktop applications with web technologies. Originally created at GitHub as Atom Shell to power the Atom editor, it went on to underpin VS Code, Slack, Discord, and many other apps.
Android Studio
Google's official integrated development environment for Android, announced at Google I/O 2013. It is built on JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA and uses Gradle as its build system.
React
Facebook's JavaScript library for building user interfaces from components with a virtual DOM, open-sourced in 2013, which reshaped front-end development.
Packer
HashiCorp's tool, first released in 2013, for building identical machine images such as Amazon AMIs from a single source configuration - a cornerstone of immutable-infrastructure practice.
Hugo
The static site generator Steve Francia released in 2013, written in Go and built for speed; it renders large sites in seconds rather than minutes.
Ionic Framework
An open-source UI toolkit, first released in 2013, for building mobile and progressive web apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, deployed natively through Cordova or its successor Capacitor.
Godot Engine
A free, MIT-licensed, open-source game engine built around a scene-and-node model and the GDScript language, developed in the open by a community and the Godot Foundation.
Jupyter Notebook
The web-based notebook interface that interleaves code, output, and prose; spun out of IPython as Project Jupyter in 2014 and became the standard environment for data science and machine-learning experimentation.
Phoenix
Elixir's web framework on the Erlang BEAM, created by Chris McCord in 2014, whose channels and LiveView bring real-time, low-latency interactivity to web applications.
Vue.js
Evan You's progressive JavaScript framework, released in 2014, built around an automatic reactivity system and single-file components, designed to be incrementally adoptable.
Neovim
Neovim is a 2014 community fork of Vim that refactored the codebase and added an embedded API, Lua scripting, and a built-in language-server client while staying compatible with Vim's editing model.
Apache Spark
A fast cluster-computing engine, born at UC Berkeley's AMPLab, that kept data in memory and offered a richer API than MapReduce, becoming the dominant big-data processing engine.
Snowflake
A cloud data warehouse that separated storage from compute for elastic scaling and cross-account data sharing.
Kubernetes
Google's open-source container orchestrator, descended from its internal Borg system, for deploying and scaling containerized applications.
Caffe
The fast C++/CUDA deep-learning framework created by Yangqing Jia at Berkeley's BVLC around 2013, popular for computer vision, which defined models declaratively and shared pretrained networks through its Model Zoo.
Atom
GitHub's free, open-source 'hackable text editor for the 21st century,' built on web technologies and the birthplace of the Electron framework. Released broadly in 2014 and sunset by GitHub in December 2022 after the Microsoft acquisition.
Terraform
HashiCorp's infrastructure-as-code tool, released in 2014, that provisions cloud resources from declarative configuration across many providers - the project that defined the modern IaC category.
cuDNN
NVIDIA's CUDA Deep Neural Network library, first released in 2014, a GPU-accelerated library of tuned primitives for deep learning. Frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch call cuDNN under the hood for convolution, pooling, normalization, and other building blocks.
Babel
The JavaScript transpiler created by Sebastian McKenzie in 2014 (originally named 6to5) that converts modern ECMAScript syntax into code that runs in older browsers.
AWS Lambda
The 2014 AWS service that launched mainstream serverless: run code in response to events with no servers to manage, billed per request and per unit of execution time.
Apache Flink
A distributed engine for stateful, low-latency stream processing over unbounded data streams, treating batch as a special case, and a key player in real-time big data.
ctags
A tool that generates an index, or tag file, of definitions found in source code so editors can jump to a definition; traced from the original Unix ctags through Exuberant Ctags to the maintained Universal Ctags.
Dask
The Python library for parallel and distributed computing, first released in 2015, that scales familiar NumPy, pandas, and scikit-learn workloads from a laptop to a cluster using lazy task graphs.
gRPC
gRPC is a high-performance, open-source remote procedure call framework created by Google, running over HTTP/2 and using Protocol Buffers for interface definition and serialization. It is widely used for communication between microservices.
Bazel
Bazel is Google's open-source build system, derived from its internal Blaze tool, designed for large multi-language codebases with fast, correct, reproducible, and incremental builds.
React Native
Facebook's open-source framework, announced in March 2015, for building native iOS and Android apps using React and JavaScript under the slogan learn once, write anywhere.
Keras
Francois Chollet's high-level neural-network API, released in 2015, which made deep learning approachable with a simple layer-stacking interface and later ran on multiple backends including TensorFlow, JAX, and PyTorch.
Visual Studio Code
Microsoft's free, cross-platform source-code editor, announced at Build 2015 and built on Electron and the Monaco editor. Led early by Erich Gamma, it grew into the most widely used development tool through extensions and the Language Server Protocol.
Rollup
The ES-module bundler created by Rich Harris in 2015, known for tree-shaking, that became the basis of Vite's production builds.
runc
A lightweight, OCI-compliant low-level container runtime that creates containers using Linux namespaces and cgroups; donated by Docker in 2015 and run under the hood by containerd and Docker.
Helm
The package manager for Kubernetes, which bundles related Kubernetes resources into versioned, configurable packages called charts.
TensorFlow
Google Brain's open-source machine learning framework, released in 2015, which represents computations as dataflow graphs and deploys the same models across CPUs, GPUs, TPUs, servers, mobile, and the browser.
Apollo
The dominant GraphQL platform, spanning Apollo Client, Apollo Server, and Federation, used to build, run, and compose GraphQL APIs.
Fastify
A high-performance, low-overhead Node.js web framework built around JSON Schema validation and serialization for both speed and correctness.
Apache Arrow
The cross-language in-memory columnar format, established in 2016, that lets systems share table-like data with no serialization, becoming the foundation under pandas 2.0, Polars, and many analytic engines.
Xamarin
A C#/.NET cross-platform mobile framework founded in 2011 and acquired by Microsoft in February 2016, built on the Mono runtime and later evolved into .NET MAUI.
BBC micro:bit
The BBC micro:bit is a pocket-sized educational microcontroller board, developed by the BBC with 29 partners and given free to around 800,000 UK schoolchildren in 2015-2016 to teach coding and physical computing.
Theano
The pioneering symbolic-math and automatic-differentiation library from MILA at the University of Montreal, in development from 2007, which compiled computational graphs to optimized CPU and GPU code and seeded the design of modern deep-learning frameworks.
XGBoost
The gradient-boosting library by Tianqi Chen that dominated Kaggle competitions and tabular machine learning through aggressive systems engineering, developed under the DMLC project.
Apache Pulsar
Apache Pulsar is a distributed pub/sub messaging and streaming platform originally built at Yahoo and open-sourced in 2016. It separates serving from storage, supports multi-tenancy and geo-replication, and offloads aging data to cheap tiered storage.
ESP32 and ESP8266
The ESP8266 and ESP32 are low-cost Wi-Fi and Bluetooth microcontroller systems-on-chip from Espressif Systems that made cheap network-connected hardware easy, powering much of the do-it-yourself Internet-of-Things boom.