Good times. Most of us hadn't gotten "high on our own supply" yet, and the field was wide open.
You got the feeling of a thousand developers all running off in different directions, exploring the human and condition and all of the massively cool things this new hammer called "programming" can do.
Compare that to today. Anywhere you go in the industry, it seems like there's already a conference, a video series, consultants, a community, and so on. Many times there are multiple competing groups.
Intellectually, it's much like the difference folks experienced comparing going cross country by automobile in say, 1935 versus 2022. Back then there was a lot of variation and culture. There was also crappy roads and places you couldn't find help. Now it's all strip malls and box stores, with cell service everywhere. It's its own business world, much more than a brave new frontier. Paraphrasing Ralphie in "A Christmas Story", it's all just crummy marketing.
(Of course, the interesting items are those that don't map to my rough analogy. Things like AI, AR/VR, Big Data, and so on. These are usually extremely narrow and at the end of the day, just bit and pieces from the other areas stuck together)
I remember customers asking me if I could do X, figuring out that I could, and looking around and not finding it done anywhere else. I'm sure hundreds, maybe thousands of other devs had similar experiences.
You got the feeling of a thousand developers all running off in different directions, exploring the human and condition and all of the massively cool things this new hammer called "programming" can do.
Compare that to today. Anywhere you go in the industry, it seems like there's already a conference, a video series, consultants, a community, and so on. Many times there are multiple competing groups.
Intellectually, it's much like the difference folks experienced comparing going cross country by automobile in say, 1935 versus 2022. Back then there was a lot of variation and culture. There was also crappy roads and places you couldn't find help. Now it's all strip malls and box stores, with cell service everywhere. It's its own business world, much more than a brave new frontier. Paraphrasing Ralphie in "A Christmas Story", it's all just crummy marketing.
(Of course, the interesting items are those that don't map to my rough analogy. Things like AI, AR/VR, Big Data, and so on. These are usually extremely narrow and at the end of the day, just bit and pieces from the other areas stuck together)
I remember customers asking me if I could do X, figuring out that I could, and looking around and not finding it done anywhere else. I'm sure hundreds, maybe thousands of other devs had similar experiences.
Not so much now.