[kypro]

This period latest until the mid 00s. I remember trying to learn Java in the early 00s and it was really hard and I needed a textbook.

No blogs, no SO, no autocomplete, crappy IDEs, no AI, etc...

I miss that difficult focused learning. The smallest successes felt like huge accomplishments.

[minkeymaniac]

I remember using usenet newsgroups (outlook express anyone :-) The Wrox books had a mailing list where you could reply or ask questions by email... I used those a lot.. in the beginning to ask and in the end I was answering more and more

[kypro]

Oh man, I would have loved to have known about those mailing lists...

I was so young at the time and had no idea where to find info on anything. I was in school so no one I knew knew how to code. All I really had access to was some cracked software and whatever books I could get from school.

Everything was basically trial and error + a lot of trying to reverse engineering any snippet of code I could find online.

I set up a hosting service when I was in my teens and to do that I remember the docs said that I needed to use telnet to communicate from my webserver to my hosting server. Only issue is that I had no idea what this telnet thing was. I was so confused and frustrated for weeks trying to figure out how that worked... It seems so silly now but back then I didn't even know what TCP/IP was and I had never used a terminal... Had to teach myself the basics of networking then figure out how to get it all working programatically.

I often think about how I wish I was born a decade earlier. Computers were such magical things full of discovery when I was growing up in the 90s. When I started my professional career in the late 00s the internet and software had already started to mature and by the early 10s so much of that magic had disappeared.