I got my first job out of college 29 years ago. For the first 10 years or so, the process was I guess you could say agile-like in that we certainly didn't do waterfall, we just talked about stuff, built stuff and banged it straight into production. Testing was not an official thing at all, somebody had a quick look-see if they felt like it.
My first 10 years on the job was Turbo Pascal and Delphi for various shops. Working in that old DOS-based Turbo IDE felt like magic, I remember plumping for a shocking blue, yellow and pink colour scheme - I miss Pascal. The move to Delphi was a huge change, OOP, native strings over 255 long and some truly unbelievable drag-and-drop GUI building functionality.
We had no source control until we started using Delphi, I think it was Subversion but there might have been something before that. Prior to SVN it was a case of baggsying report.pas for the day.
Thinking back, and maybe I've forgotten, but I don't think we shipped anything that was particularly worse than stuff I see getting shipped today. Yeah, stuff went wrong, but it still does. Without reviews, Git, CI, etc we still shipped something that largely worked and kept customers happy.
Code quality was bad. No standards were followed across the team, so files all had different styles. It wasn't uncommon to see procedures that were 100s, maybe 1000s, of lines long. Turbo Pascal's integrated debugging was a life-saver.
Unit testing was not a thing.
I think we wrote far more stuff ourselves, whereas today there's a lot more libraries and systems to use instead of building.
Obviously there was no Stack Overflow, I signed up to that when it first came online, it has been a game-changer. I read a lot more programming books back then, you had to. I think there was a lot more try-it-and-see work going on, I used to write many small apps just to work out how some thing needed to work before touching the main codebase, that's something I still do a lot today, I'm not sure the new-bloods do?
Work-life balance was absolutely fine, there was no pressure to work extra hours but I don't find that there has ever been. I've always prioritised family-time over work, I put in full effort for my contracted hours, the second they are up, I am gone.
I certainly enjoyed programming a lot more back then, it felt closer to the metal, it felt like a voyage of discovery, I couldn't just Google to find out how to pack a file down to 50k whilst keeping read-time quick, I mostly had to work it out myself, read a book or ask colleagues. You had to work harder to learn stuff, and I don't know, it felt like that hard-won knowledge stayed with me more than something I googled last week.
Moden languages have abstracted away a lot of the complexities and that is of course a good thing but I kind of miss the pain!
My first 10 years on the job was Turbo Pascal and Delphi for various shops. Working in that old DOS-based Turbo IDE felt like magic, I remember plumping for a shocking blue, yellow and pink colour scheme - I miss Pascal. The move to Delphi was a huge change, OOP, native strings over 255 long and some truly unbelievable drag-and-drop GUI building functionality.
We had no source control until we started using Delphi, I think it was Subversion but there might have been something before that. Prior to SVN it was a case of baggsying report.pas for the day.
Thinking back, and maybe I've forgotten, but I don't think we shipped anything that was particularly worse than stuff I see getting shipped today. Yeah, stuff went wrong, but it still does. Without reviews, Git, CI, etc we still shipped something that largely worked and kept customers happy.
Code quality was bad. No standards were followed across the team, so files all had different styles. It wasn't uncommon to see procedures that were 100s, maybe 1000s, of lines long. Turbo Pascal's integrated debugging was a life-saver.
Unit testing was not a thing.
I think we wrote far more stuff ourselves, whereas today there's a lot more libraries and systems to use instead of building.
Obviously there was no Stack Overflow, I signed up to that when it first came online, it has been a game-changer. I read a lot more programming books back then, you had to. I think there was a lot more try-it-and-see work going on, I used to write many small apps just to work out how some thing needed to work before touching the main codebase, that's something I still do a lot today, I'm not sure the new-bloods do?
Work-life balance was absolutely fine, there was no pressure to work extra hours but I don't find that there has ever been. I've always prioritised family-time over work, I put in full effort for my contracted hours, the second they are up, I am gone.
I certainly enjoyed programming a lot more back then, it felt closer to the metal, it felt like a voyage of discovery, I couldn't just Google to find out how to pack a file down to 50k whilst keeping read-time quick, I mostly had to work it out myself, read a book or ask colleagues. You had to work harder to learn stuff, and I don't know, it felt like that hard-won knowledge stayed with me more than something I googled last week.
Moden languages have abstracted away a lot of the complexities and that is of course a good thing but I kind of miss the pain!