I was a young developer in a major US city, but on the other side of the country from Silicon Valley.
The best part was a feeling of hope. The industry was full of "evil" companies like Microsoft and IBM but there was a pervading sense that everything was headed in a fun and open direction which would surely lead to a better tomorrow. Nobody loved Microsoft per se but they were absolutely more open and fun than IBM, and Linux and the interwebs were on the horizon and surely we'd have a decentralized digital utopia in another decade or two.
You felt like you were on the cutting edge of that, even if you weren't working on something particularly cool. Kind of like Neo's boring day job vs. his night life.
processes
Source control and automated tests were rare/nonexistent at many companies.
They were surely standard at larger software companies but not in smaller shops.
design principles
It was an inversion of today, in a way.
In the 1990s developers had a more solid grasp of computer science-y fundamentals like algorithms and data structures. But we were far less likely to know anything about best-practice design patterns, architecture, and that sort of thing.
People (including me) complain about how modern software engineering is less programming and more a matter of choosing a framework and fitting existing bits together like lego bricks without really knowing how anything works.
What gets talked about less is how frameworks like Rails, React, etc. are generally (generally!) built around tried and true paradigms like MVC, and how this is something that was much more likely to be lacking in software development projects 30 years ago when everybody just sort of "rolled their own" version of what architecture ought to look like.
You had genuinely smart people trying to do things like separate app logic from presentation logic, with varying degrees of success, but even when it was a success it was like... some random nerds idea of what an architecture should look like (possibly loosely based on some architecture book) and it was a big learning curve between projects.
work-life balance
Working from home wasn't a thing, which was both good and bad.
A lot of late nights in the office. This was perhaps more true for folks like me doing early web stuff. The technology was changing so quickly under our feet, and was so inconsistent between browsers and browser versions, everything was a mess.
It was probably a little more sane for the guys working with Visual Basic, Delphi, FoxPro, whatever.
And when I say "guys", I really mean guys. It was incredibly rare to see women developing software. It was cranky old greybeards and pimply-faced college geeks who drank a lot of Mountain Dew. Just way more nerdy in general and not necessarily the good kind of nerdy.
The best part was a feeling of hope. The industry was full of "evil" companies like Microsoft and IBM but there was a pervading sense that everything was headed in a fun and open direction which would surely lead to a better tomorrow. Nobody loved Microsoft per se but they were absolutely more open and fun than IBM, and Linux and the interwebs were on the horizon and surely we'd have a decentralized digital utopia in another decade or two.
You felt like you were on the cutting edge of that, even if you weren't working on something particularly cool. Kind of like Neo's boring day job vs. his night life.
Source control and automated tests were rare/nonexistent at many companies.They were surely standard at larger software companies but not in smaller shops.
It was an inversion of today, in a way.In the 1990s developers had a more solid grasp of computer science-y fundamentals like algorithms and data structures. But we were far less likely to know anything about best-practice design patterns, architecture, and that sort of thing.
People (including me) complain about how modern software engineering is less programming and more a matter of choosing a framework and fitting existing bits together like lego bricks without really knowing how anything works.
What gets talked about less is how frameworks like Rails, React, etc. are generally (generally!) built around tried and true paradigms like MVC, and how this is something that was much more likely to be lacking in software development projects 30 years ago when everybody just sort of "rolled their own" version of what architecture ought to look like.
You had genuinely smart people trying to do things like separate app logic from presentation logic, with varying degrees of success, but even when it was a success it was like... some random nerds idea of what an architecture should look like (possibly loosely based on some architecture book) and it was a big learning curve between projects.
Working from home wasn't a thing, which was both good and bad.A lot of late nights in the office. This was perhaps more true for folks like me doing early web stuff. The technology was changing so quickly under our feet, and was so inconsistent between browsers and browser versions, everything was a mess.
It was probably a little more sane for the guys working with Visual Basic, Delphi, FoxPro, whatever.
And when I say "guys", I really mean guys. It was incredibly rare to see women developing software. It was cranky old greybeards and pimply-faced college geeks who drank a lot of Mountain Dew. Just way more nerdy in general and not necessarily the good kind of nerdy.