Long time tech folks, what's your story?

How long have you been in tech?
Been in Web Dev/Designer for 11 years.

What are you doing now?
Right now I'm working for a small studio specialising in e-commerce.

How has tech changed since you started?
I'd say Web has changed from "coding" to "programming". When I was at university web development was a creative industries degree, alongside graphic design and mulitmedia. Now I think its a computer science faculty degree.

If you could change tech today, what would you do?
Better documentation, better tutorials, less dependencies and assumption of prior knowledge.

What are some negatives and positives of the current tech landscape?

Netgatives:

• In some cases it feels like the industry standard is way too overcomplicated for what the project needs.
• Getting help online is harder. Sites like Stackoverflow have become way less friendly.
• There is way, way, way to much to learn and so little time. Web development as am industry should be fragmented and specialised more. Being a "full stack" developer today and covering so many bases and languages is really hard - I'd rather be really good in one particular area, then be just scraping by in all areas.
• Personally, I found pivoting to big, programmatic JS libraries, like React, incredibly difficult.

Positives:

• Automation is great!
• Plenty of ways to skin a cat.
• Browser issues are no longer issues.
• Heaps and heaps of handy tools.
• Lots of decent tutorials out there.

What advice do you have to give to others?
Really try to figure out your work/life balance. Web requires you to always learn new things. Pace yourself and set aside time to do it. Don't spend 14hrs a day in front of a screen. You'll burn out.

*How long have you been in tech? *
32 years

In what capacity?
Developer/tester/Architect/Analyst/Trainer

What are you doing now?
Trainer/Senior Software Architect

How has tech changed since you started?
I think software is more vaporware now, because the times is going faster, it's all valid now but invalid within just a few years.

If you could change tech today, what would you do?
Make software that will generate software (like a 4 / 5 GL)

What are some negatives and positives of the current tech landscape?
negative: less new ideas
positive: room for startups

What advice do you have to give to others?
Never give up

Or just chat about your experiences in general. I love reading them

1. Back in the days, we program EEPROMS ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EEPROM) to have machines do some dull work.
2. I told my grandma that I became a developer (I was 18) and she asked me (after explaining what it was) how long it would take that a developer would invent a program so that developers became out of jobs. I'm now 56 and still surprised it doesn't really exist yet.