I remember those times, and it was a lot of fun, but there's really nothing stopping you from running a LAMP stack today, writing PHP without frameworks and with manual SQL queries.

In fact, it's a lot more fun for me to approach this today. Modern PHP is a joy. MariaSQL is very much MySQL (and switching to Postgres isn't exactly a bump in complexity). It's way easier to write code that won't get injected.

If you want to slice your designs in Photoshop (ehem, the real OGs used Fireworks) go ahead and use Dreamweaver, go ahead. That said, HTML5 makes not having to use tables for layout easy, not more complex and VS Code has all the good parts of Dreamweaver (trust me, you don't need or want the WYSIWG... if you must, just use inspect elements and move the changes over to the HTML file).

I guess all this is to say that web dev is simpler, not more complex for solo devs today. There exists more complicated tooling, but if you're solo-dev'ing something for fun, skip it!

EDIT: Also, phpMyAdmin was fun to use but also the best way to get your box popped. Today, something like DBeaver suits me just fine.

I still write vanilla PHP with SQL queries. And with all the modern PHP features, things have never been faster or more joyful to work with.

I honestly feel bad for people who fall victims to complexity. It burns you out when all you need is to keep things simple and fun. Life is too short for anything else.

> ehem, the real OGs used Fireworks

Man I missed Macromedia Fireworks. Such a great time! I think I had the last bundle before the Adobe buy-out, Macromedia Studio I think it was called? So good!

> but also the best way to get your box popped

what do you mean? why?