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Wow! That was a nostalgia moment. My first professional gig was in 1988 when I took over writing dBase code for an NSF sponsored evaluation project. That taught

Wow! That was a nostalgia moment. My first professional gig was in 1988 when I took over writing dBase code for an NSF sponsored evaluation project. That taught me enough to work internationally for USAID writing dbBase code for all kinds of projects around the world, and still make it back to the US in time to catch the beginning of the dotCom boom, Linux, and all of the other great stuff over the past 30+ years. It was an awesome time. Folks laugh at all of the tech now, but QuickBasic 4.5, Turbo C++, and dBase were amazing tools for building stuff that was very cool at the time.

dmix 6y ago
Makes you think there is always that niche of usecases between newbies and a full blown developer. And we've somewhat lost that today, you have to be a coder with knowledge of an esoteric language (hire one) or nothing. Businesses have managed to fill this with some (sometimes crazy and fragile) uses of excel, the larger with over complicated ERP and entprise systems, and what not but the late 80s and early 90s were the hayday for the best tooling for this sort of thing. The Golden Era for the hacker sort, building a quick and effective system without anything fancy or boilerplate or requiring the equivalent to a CS degree. The software that makes software without having to fully know programming has always been the pipe dream product I guess. Many have failed down this route. The sort of incentive where every simple CRUD app eventually turns into a CMS. Or how B2B software just becoming data managling pipelines (like Zapier), each slightly customized for every industry and plugging into their wider system. There's probably a few small set of archetypes all software fits into, these being two I've come across most often in my career. There's always plenty of overlap at a high abstraction like that with all of these apps, but the devil (and money) is often in the details (ie, making it accessible and relevant to their business use case with proper sales, documentation, and design).

dmix 6y ago

Makes you think there is always that niche of usecases between newbies and a full blown developer. And we've somewhat lost that today, you have to be a coder with knowledge of an esoteric language (hire one) or nothing. Businesses have managed to fill this with some (sometimes crazy and fragile) uses of excel, the larger with over complicated ERP and entprise systems, and what not but the late 80s and early 90s were the hayday for the best tooling for this sort of thing. The Golden Era for the hacker sort, building a quick and effective system without anything fancy or boilerplate or requiring the equivalent to a CS degree. The software that makes software without having to fully know programming has always been the pipe dream product I guess. Many have failed down this route. The sort of incentive where every simple CRUD app eventually turns into a CMS. Or how B2B software just becoming data managling pipelines (like Zapier), each slightly customized for every industry and plugging into their wider system. There's probably a few small set of archetypes all software fits into, these being two I've come across most often in my career. There's always plenty of overlap at a high abstraction like that with all of these apps, but the devil (and money) is often in the details (ie, making it accessible and relevant to their business use case with proper sales, documentation, and design).