16 years ago I took on my first “proper” job. I’d done manual labour, I’d made websites for friends and family, but 16 years ago I got chatting to someone over Twitter DMs (this brand new feature) followed by CoD4 lobbies and started working with them.

I knew nothing back then. In some ways I still know f-all.

It was making WordPress websites, something I continued doing for nearly ten years. Very quickly we went from version 2.5 with basic functionality to having it run a million-visitor local radio network.

I learnt how PHP worked, how WordPress didn’t work. What memcached and Varnish were and where each worked well.

Sometimes I don’t feel like I’ve been doing this long, still finding new things. But then I realise I’ve been doing this for so long, long enough dare I say, to become jaded. I’ve seen frameworks come and go, ideas come and go, but what’s getting to me the most nowadays is seeing things that have gone (normally because they were a Bad Idea), come back again.

So much magic, syntactic sugar, build processes, great ideas that are just re-wrappings of something that just leads to MUD.

Some things are the same though. Writing code is not important, knowing what code to write (and not write) is the hard part. Clients will always be clients. Never get attached to your work product (also true for drug manufacturers).

I have no idea what I’ll be doing in another 16 years. Entering my 5th decade. Still writing APIs or tilling fields.