I was working in Pascal, C and assembly about 30 years ago, mostly in DOS and Windows 3.
By 1995 I started dabbling with websites, and within a couple of years was working mostly with Perl CGI and some Java, on Windows and Linux/NetBSD.
Most of my work was on Windows, so that limited the available Perl libraries to what would run on ActiveState's Perl.
I gave up trying to do freelance because too many people didn't seem to understand the cost and work involved in writing software:
- One business owner wanted to pay be US $300 to fix some warehouse management software, but he'd up it to $500 if I finished it in one month.
- A guy wanted to turn his sports equipment shop into an e-commerce website, and was forward thinking... except that none of his stock of about 20,000 items was in a database and that he could "only afford to pay minimum wage".
I interviewed with some companies, but these people were clueless. It seems like a lot of people read "Teach yourself Perl in 7 days and make millions" books. The interview questions were basically "Can you program in OOP with Perl?".
I got a proper developer job on a team, eventually. They were basically happy that I could write a simple form that queried stuff from a database.
Some other people on my team used Visual Basic and VBScript but I avoided that like the plague. I recall we had some specialized devices that had their own embedded versions of BASIC that we had to use.
When Internet Explorer 4 came out that we started having problems making web sites that worked well on both.
Web frameworks didn't exist yet, JavaScript was primitive and not very useful.
Python didn't seem to be a practical option at the time.
> ... terms of processes, design principles, work-life balance, compensation. Are things better now than they were back then?
We didn't have an official process or follow any design principles. There were small teams so we simply had a spec but we'd release things in stages and regularly meet with clients.
I had a decent work-life balance, a decent salary but wasn't making the big dot.com income that others were making.
I think overall things are better, technology-wise as well as some awareness of work-life balance, and more people are critical of the industry.
The technology is more complicated, but it does a lot more. The simplicity was largely due to naivety.
By 1995 I started dabbling with websites, and within a couple of years was working mostly with Perl CGI and some Java, on Windows and Linux/NetBSD.
Most of my work was on Windows, so that limited the available Perl libraries to what would run on ActiveState's Perl.
I gave up trying to do freelance because too many people didn't seem to understand the cost and work involved in writing software:
- One business owner wanted to pay be US $300 to fix some warehouse management software, but he'd up it to $500 if I finished it in one month.
- A guy wanted to turn his sports equipment shop into an e-commerce website, and was forward thinking... except that none of his stock of about 20,000 items was in a database and that he could "only afford to pay minimum wage".
I interviewed with some companies, but these people were clueless. It seems like a lot of people read "Teach yourself Perl in 7 days and make millions" books. The interview questions were basically "Can you program in OOP with Perl?".
I got a proper developer job on a team, eventually. They were basically happy that I could write a simple form that queried stuff from a database.
Some other people on my team used Visual Basic and VBScript but I avoided that like the plague. I recall we had some specialized devices that had their own embedded versions of BASIC that we had to use.
When Internet Explorer 4 came out that we started having problems making web sites that worked well on both.
Web frameworks didn't exist yet, JavaScript was primitive and not very useful. Python didn't seem to be a practical option at the time.