Building a Dynamic Web Application with Flask

I am fortunate enough to have been around the field of web development since its inception. I was a software engineer before there was a World Wide Web, at least one used by the general public. I remember the first time someone asked me to build a web application. I had to ask what it was. The guy told me, and I remember thinking “Well that’s dumb! Why wouldn’t people just use CompuServe or America Online (AOL) for that?” I thought the internet was going to be, at best, a fad. It was complicated, loaded with jargon, the UI was terrible compared with online services of the day, and it all just seemed kind of janky. I guess I was wrong.

Once I figured that out, I learned HTML and JavaScript. CSS wasn’t even a thing yet. It wasn’t long before I hit a wall with HTML’s capabilities. As you well know, HTML isn’t a programming language. It is a content markup language that controls the...