Look How Far We've Come!

I used to be very active in the community, back in the early days (circa 2000). Lately, I’ve taken to being a fly on the wall and learning from others and their posts.

That said, a recent issue from a post 14 years ago (my signature from back then got imported into Discourse) got me to looking at what I actually wrote back in the day. All I can say is, what the hell was I thinking back then and look how far I’ve come as a web professional since!

Anyone else look back at their old posts and think/appreciate the same?

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All the time! I remember finding code I wrote over a decade ago and wondering what kind of ejit I was back then! Why did I write it like that?! That doesn’t make any sense? That is actually impractical by today’s standards.

However, I’m then quickly reminded that I obviously learned from those mistakes/novice attempts, and that makes me feel better.

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You said that right.

Some of the stuff I have read from me (on another forum)…“What was I snorting?”

LOL

Buddy

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Looking at some of the code I wrote 35 years ago - looks like a completely different language from what I use now.

Looking back at the posts I made when I was 16/17 when I first joined Sitepoint…it’s pretty cringeworthy…code isn’t TOO bad but dear God, my design skills were attrotious. Fixed width sites…man it’s amazing to see how far we’ve come as coders (when we look back at our beginning.)

I don’t think I want to look back… It would be too embarrasing and I suspect that I’ll be completely ashamed. Hey, I don’t even want to read what I wrote yesterday… or 5 min ago :wink:

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I’m embarrassed by what I’m typing right now. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Yup. I’ve thought back to some early forum participation by me, and realized how wet behind the ears I was. I’ve also been looking through some really old code of mine, and wondering what I was doing back then :smile:

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oh yeah, looking back can be both humbling and inspiring. A friend of mine actually dug up a site I did 10 years ago. Nice use of tables I must say…

I look at a lot of old code and cringe. Especially when I look back at the beginnings of concepts I hadn’t fully understood yet.

I can find my first .com page on the Web Archive and I think it’s pretty impressive for something done in 2002 by a 17yr old using a bunch of absolute positioning. The cringe part of it comes from the fact that it came from my “hacker” phase and some of the embeded Sublime music. Photoshop was also a new concept to me at the time and a lot of the graphics are pretty pukey.

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