GoKawiilEvery once in a while, something from the early days of my software development journey resurfaces and brings with it a flood of memories. Recently, I came across a PlanetSourceCode.com archived GitHub page that lists some old code submissions I contributed more than 20 years ago.
Seeing my name there, attached to Visual Basic 6 and early .NET samples from 2002 and 2003, is a fun little time capsule.
The page lists a handful of submissions I posted under my name, including things like:
These were small pieces of code. Utilities. Examples. Tips. The kind of thing you wrote because you had just solved a problem, and you figured someone else might eventually run into the same problem too.
Looking back now, what strikes me most is not necessarily the code itself. Some of it may have been interesting for the time. Some of it was probably rough. Some of it might make modern developers laugh a bit. But what really stands out is the era those submissions came from.
This was before GitHub.
This was before Stack Overflow.
This was before NuGet, npm, modern package managers, ubiquitous blogs, YouTube tutorials, Discord communities, GitHub Discussions, and all the other places we now take for granted when looking for programming help.
It was a different time.
Sharing Code Before GitHub
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