PTSD programmers

I’m a child of 90s computing. In the meantime, I’ve become a hacker/programmer/software developer.

I’ve stayed pretty much updated with the latest development trends. Even though I’m a startup funder, I keep coding, and I understand a wide variety of technologies (from frontend dev, to data engineering).

But there’s one thing I can’t escape from: my PTSD of how brutal and limited computers were in the 90s/00s (and how crappy OSs were until I discovered Open Solaris, but that’s a story for another post).

For example, I’m TERRIFIED by filenames that contain whitespaces. In reality, any character outside of letter/numbers/dashes (_, -) gives me chills. I very well understand how Unicode works, but I’d never use a strange character in a file name (or variable name). What am I, a monster? I still have a bad feeling with Mojo’s.🔥 file extension.

Also, my “acceptable” size both for network transfer and file storage is completely outdated. Today I generated a CSV report and the result was 8KBs worth of data. I FUCKING gzipped it before downloading it! The time that it took me to type tar -csvf report.tar.gz report.csv was probably 5 times more than what it’d have taken to download the 8KBs.

The good news: we’re the “frugal” programmers

Also today, a friend who is traveling Europe sent me the following screenshot:

I honestly think that 14Mbps is not a bad connection, at all. I can manage with a lot less. I have 1Gbps fiber at home and I usually think it’s just a waste of money.

Which speaks to the “advantage” of being a child of the 90s.

We have learned how to use awk, sed or less, instead of a GUI editors. We dominate lightweight programming environments (give me any code editor and any shell and I’m good) and we can fix the most subtle issues with our ability to descend to thread the finest line of computing.

It gave us freedom, as we remember the old times, but we have a lot better technology today.

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