- When I started in 1985, I wore a tie and white long-sleeve shirts to the office—and people smoked at their desks.
- In my first five years, I wrote over a million lines of COBOL code.
- We printed everything on green-bar paper using massive dot-matrix printers.
- With no internet yet, we had bookshelves for all our COBOL manuals with room for our favorite books.
- My favorite programming book was The C Programming Language, by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie. Still a classic for learning how to write programs and algorithms.
- Soon followed were also those great little books by O'Reilly featuring 19th-century woodcut illustrations of animals, often used as visual mnemonics for specific technologies.
- Source EDP Personnel Services was one of the first full-service staffing firms specializing in information technology, I loved their annual compensation reviews and career guidance publications.
- In the 1990s, I witnessed the massive effort and cost of multi-year implementations of large ERP systems such as SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Baan.
- I saw Windows evolve from a desktop operating system into a server platform.
- Desktop application development exploded with tools like Visual Basic, FoxPro and PowerBuilder—along with the infamous “DLL hell” that came with it.
- I followed the original “big four” databases and the competition between Oracle, Informix, Sybase, and DB2. I really loved Informix 4GL for a while.
- With the public rise of the Internet in the late ’90s, I transitioned from legacy systems to web-based development. At many points in your career, you will be required to re-engineer your skill set as technology shifts.
- I survived Y2K and the dot-com bubble.
- The 2000s felt like the golden age of software development. Most of the technology we use today was born in the 2000s.
- My first web application was built with Active Server Pages (ASP) using VBScript, now referred to as Classic ASP.
- I saw the invention of AJAX and the ability to dynamically update static web pages without a full-page post back.
- I witnessed the birth of Microsoft .NET, VB.NET, C#, and Visual Studio.
- I saw the beginnings and the rapid growth of Microsoft SQL Server.
- I watched JavaScript and jQuery transform front-end development and cross-browser incompatibilities.
- The browser wars between Netscape and Internet Explorer shaped early web development.
- In the early 2010s, I saw the rise of JavaScript frameworks like Angular and React, along with Node.js and server-side JavaScript.
- Technology stacks evolved to make mobile development more accessible for both web and desktop developers.
- I saw so many people wasting their time on Microsoft’s Silverlight. Be careful with what you invest your time in, because your time is valuable.
- And if all that wasn't enough, along came Docker and Kubernetes, Azure, AWS, cloud deployments, MongoDB, CI/CD pipelines, Scrum, and Agile development
- And now AI