One of the greatest things about the internet is that nothing is forgotten. Of course this has also turned into one of it’s greatest risks with the rise of social media.
I used to run my own website starting in 2003 until around 2013, when I removed the site. It was written by myself in PHP with a MySQL database. Everything was hand coded from scratch including all the HTML, CSS and PHP. That’s what you can do before you have kids!
Fortunately the Wayback Machine has cached copies of almost the whole site so it’s easy to look back and see what I was playing around with back then. A virtual trip down memory lane.
I was using Fedora Core 6 back then (I started on Fedora Core 4 if I remember correctly) which came on either as a DVD iso or spread across 6 CD iso files. You can still download it from their archives although I wouldn’t recommend it.
I was heavily into Linux at the time and had many pages on very specific Linux issues, mounting external logical volumes, installing Linux, installing VNC and SSH. Really nerdy stuff 🤓
There was also lots of general low level stuff. Connecting to IMAP and POP mail boxes using the command line. Not something you need to do every day. I also spent quite a bit of time compiling my own Linux kernels with the main aim being to decrease the boot time on my laptop. I got it down to about 15 seconds in the end 🔥🔥
I don’t spend as much time with the details these days and often choose products that ‘just work’.
I’ve got older and my time is more valuable now so I feel the need to focus more on what really gives value to learn.
The key is that these years spent ‘playing around’ taught me an enormous amount and gave me a much deeper understanding around technology. This has been immensely valuable to me in my career even if that was not the prime driver at the time.