I have been programming since I was 10, so 30 years. I feel truly blessed to get to write code, nothing makes me feel more like a little kid. Early as a kid on

I have been programming since I was 10, so 30 years. I feel truly blessed to get to write code, nothing makes me feel more like a little kid. Early as a kid on it was AppleBasic, then QuickBasic, then TurboPascal in high school. I loved the computer lab from my magnet school where we would one up each other. I built an American football simulator using player stays, several games, and a simple 3D engine. I started college in 1999. We did C and C++ for the most part. Then I had about a 10 year stint doing embedded or Win32 development. Then I switched gears and now focus exclusively on building search engines. The world has changed a ton: - certain books that existed in the 90s and 2000s are replaced by the internet. - because of open source and the internet, and less reliability on mainstream tech press, it’s easier for more obscure tech stacks to blossom. Nineties and Early 2000s were dominated by C, C++, Java... - in the 90s and 2000s almost all consumer facing native software dev would be Windows. Some web app dev existed, done in Perl, Java, and gradually more PHP - remote work was not a thing. It was rare to have VPN access. Teams were heavily collocated. Outsourcing was brand new and just starting. - there were times where it was hard to get a job as a software dev if you can believe it! After the dot com bust in particular. - version control was relatively new and primitive, with tools like visual source safe and CVS. Gradually Subversions became a cool thing in the late 2000s - the posix command line was not the universal dev environment we assume nowadays. Instead it was often Visual Studio and a pile of bat files :) - software was not well understood by management, and treated akin to how machine learning is treated today: something mystical but the magic fairy dust we can sprinkle on everything About the current tech landscape? It’s very broad and diverse to say much about it. There’s much more of a long tail of low quality and low cost software development now. There’s many more jobs where coding is just part of the job. There’s few places that can do software engineering really well, and these places have increasing social power. On the plus side, the number of options and tools we have is exciting. We never have to worry about being out of interesting work. We have good middle to upper middle class careers. In some places software and the tech industry is having a positive impact If I could change anything about today it would be to increase tech and data literacy across all disciplines. Advice for others: don’t just learn the surface stuff. Get deep to how things really work. Be able to write and speak well. Work really hard on your empathy for customers and colleagues. Find and work on the hardest problems. Pick a niche. “software development” is so broad it now describes a significant percentage of the economy. This is why I focus now on search engines.