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Back in the late '90s through the dotcom boom, we were teaching ourselves as we went. There was a running joke about HR looking for "someone with 10 years exper
by beat 11y ago
Back in the late '90s through the dotcom boom, we were teaching ourselves as we went. There was a running joke about HR looking for "someone with 10 years experience with HTML". In the mid-1990s, I was working on data transport stuff that involved hand-rolled socket code and daemons in C, and parsing the data stream in lex and yacc. We didn't have Apache, or ssh, or xml. A few short years later, I was working on really early Java application servers - technology that wasn't even imagined five years before.
It's hard to even describe what a change in productivity all this stuff was. Using an ORM to get data from a database and dumping it into html tables, and there was a browser that could format it all for display with nothing but some tags that were generated on the fly? Amazing!
I taught myself html, because there wasn't anyone to teach me. I taught myself server-side includes and cgi - no one to teach me. I taught myself Java. Etc. And I still do this today! If someone can teach you how to do something, it's already mainstream.
- fsloth 11y agoWhat interesting times to live through! "If someone can teach you how to do something, it's already mainstream." I don't think collaborative learning should be undervalued, though. There are several colleagues without whose example and input I would be a much worse programmer. Not in technical details, but harder to define things, like attitude that leads to success and how to make designs simpler. 'Mainstream' does not mean obsolete. Reading and writing and Roman alphabet have been mainstream for centuries, yet people utilize them with an amazing variance of productivity and value.