40-yrs in software — what did I learn?

Forty years is a long time to do any career, and to be honest, I’m not quite done yet; I’m not retired. I thought it might be interesting to look back at that time. What can we learn?

Nothing remains the same

Few industries have changed year after year like the tech industry. When I started, computer memory was measured in Kilobytes. Now a terabyte is small. Floppy disks were used by everything except the handful of mainframes, and those were 8” floppys too, before the 5.25” and finally the 3.5” hard-shelled floppys. Processors ran at 1 MHz if you were lucky, and with a single core with no such thing as L caches.

I started programming in interpreted BASIC without any graphical capabilities at all. Then came COBOL, Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, Java and maybe a dozen other languages. On top of all that I became fluent in 8 processor instruction sets.

In my career I’ve seen the advent of the internet, TCP, UDP, the web, databases, SQL, numerous language frameworks (frontend and backend), noSQL, cloud computing, micro services, serverless, and along the way, now-forgotten solutions such as SOAP, CORBA, SNMP and STL.

One guarantee in the software industry is that you will never stop learning as technologies roll by month after month. Blink and you’ll miss it.