As I’ve said before, I was a professional programmer in my earlier days.
I got stated building websites back in the early 1990s, just as the Internet was taking off. That was back in the wild and wooly early days of the Dot Com era. Back then, a simple static website built with HyperText Markup Language (HTML) could keep you busy or a long time. Just as rapidly, web applications arose, and languages like PHP and ColdFusion came to the rescue. Instead of sitting there looking pretty, webpages could do something.
You could fill out forms and have them sent to someone in email. You could go to directories and find information about any topic you could imagine. You could buy things and have them delivered to your home. And you could get all the porn you’d ever want, for a fee, of course.
Sidenote: The porn industry was pivotal in the development of many Internet technologies. Having interactive websites to gather information, process credit cards, and stream media came about because the porn industry needed them to make money. Like it or not, you have the porn industry to thank for a lot of the things you can do online now.
The problem with working back in the heyday of the birth of the web was that it was a twenty-four/seven (24/7) job. Things changed on a nearly daily basis, as new coding techniques, new languages that made it faster to code, and improvements of the protocols that run the ‘net sprang up seemingly each day. I remember going at top speed just to stand still. I was always trying to keep up with all the changes, looking for anything that would make my job easier. Bright shiny object syndrome doesn’t even begin to describe it.
For nearly two decades wile I was working in IT and doing coding I got about four hours of sleep a night. There was always just one more function to code, one more database query to write. I was usually up past midnight coding, and up early the next morning trying to read up on new technologies before work.
I almost miss it.
Now that I’m doing some development work on my own project, I’m feeling that tug back into my old habits. Night time was always easier to get code written. No bosses to have to deal with making asinine requests, no clients making design decisions (“can you make the page background green?”) when you need them to approve a important function (“did the email receipt get to you when someone bought your product?”), no cow-orkers interrupting your train of thought for a munchy run just when you figured out the solution to the problem you’ve been trying to debug for the last three hours. Just the silence and the clacking of keys as your fingers fly across the keyboard and focus.
There is much work to do on my personal project. I’m getting longer in the tooth than back in those days. Staying up all night coding, although more practical now, is not quite as feasible. I could make so much more progress on a all-night coding binge. But I need sleep.
Still, my self from those days beckons me. “Come play. The code is fine. Come on in. You know you want to.”
Yes. Yes, I do, former self. Youth, as has been said, is wasted on the young. Still, I could do a little more before bed tonight ….
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