I still remember dabbling with my father's first computer in the mid-90s when I was around 7 or 8 years old. Back then, the computer "unit" took up the space of a small desk, and the big CRT monitor was placed on top of the unit.

My very first interaction with programming was when I opened a random exe file, saw a bunch of weird characters in the editor, and started editing it. To my surprise, the file didn't run anymore, so I edited more and more characters until, at one point, when I executed the file in the CLI, it turned the prompt green.

That was the magic moment for me. After that point, I wanted nothing more than to sit in front of that IBM 80286 all day long and figure out what made that prompt switch to green; and then I discovered DOS BASIC.

Fast forward to the early 2000s, I discovered web development with HTML4, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP v3. This journey continued until around 2010 when Node.js was released. In 2007 I founded my software development company, and then around 2015-ish, I had a client project requirement to be done in ReactJS on the front-end and Go on the back-end; and the rest is history.

Along the way, I used almost all major programming languages in some form or another, either professionally or just as a hobby, ranging from C and Pascal in high school to Ruby, ASP, C#, modern PHP, Java, and the list could go on.

My point is that in all these years, the technologies have changed radically, but more importantly, what remained constant were the general programming principles I learned on my journey.

I wasn't using the same technologies in the 2010s as I was in the 2000s, and I'm not using the same tech now as I was a decade ago. If I had focused only on the technology, I would probably still be stuck in BASIC.

I tell every developer I work with, to learn the general programming principles and they will be fine for the rest of their life.

If you learn technologies instead of programming, you will become obsolete when (and not IF) that technology falls out of trend or is replaced by some AI automation.

A decade ago my tech stack looked totally different than today and in the next ten years it will look radically different I'm 100% sure of it.

Cover photo by seowoo_lee