Stories From 25 Years of Software Development
By Susam Pal on 06 Feb 2026
Last year, I completed 20 years in professional software development. I wanted to write a post to mark the occasion back then, but couldn't find the time. This post is my attempt to make up for that omission. In fact, I have been involved in software development for a little longer than 20 years. Although I had my first taste of computer programming as a child, it was only when I entered university about 25 years ago that I seriously got into software development. So I'll start my stories from there. These stories are less about software and more about people. Unlike many posts of this kind, this one offers no wisdom or lessons. It only offers a collection of stories. I hope you'll like at least a few of them.
Contents
Viewing the Source
The first story takes place in 2001, shortly after I joined university. One evening, I went to the university computer laboratory to browse the Web. Out of curiosity, I typed susam.com into the address bar and landed on its home page. I remember the text and banner looking much larger back then. Display resolutions were lower, so they covered almost half the screen. I knew very little about the Internet then and I was just trying to make sense of it. I remember wondering what it would take to create my own website, perhaps at susam.com . That's when an older student who had been watching me browse over my shoulder approached and asked if I had created the website. I told him I hadn't and that I had no idea how websites were made. He asked me to move aside, took my seat and clicked View > Source in Internet Explorer. He then explained how websites are made of HTML pages and how those pages are simply text instructions.
Next, he opened Notepad and wrote a simple HTML page that looked something like this:
HELLOYes, we had a FONT tag back then and it was common practice to write HTML tags in uppercase. He then opened the page in a web browser and showed how it rendered. After that, he demonstrated a few more features such as changing the font face and size, centring the text and altering the page's background colour. Although the tutorial lasted only about ten minutes, it made the World Wide Web feel far less mysterious and much more fascinating.
That person had an ulterior motive though. After the tutorial, he never returned the seat to me. He just continued browsing the Web and waited for me to leave. I was too timid to ask for my seat back. Seats were limited, so I returned to my dorm room both disappointed that I couldn't continue browsing that day and excited about all the websites I might create with this newfound knowledge. I could never register susam.com for myself though. That domain was always used by some business selling Turkish cuisines. Eventually, I managed to get the next best thing: a .net domain of my own. That brief encounter in the university laboratory set me on a lifelong path of creating and maintaining personal websites.
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