SF was exe + source code as zip file. And an admin that made all the decisions and had to for a project,
I do not agree with details, because it was for me before and after git.
So the hidden denominator here is and still is git, which sparked a tooling frenzy with reversing flow by being online server first (it wasn’t named cloud back then).
So even today, all splinters are doing something around git. That hasn’t changed.
What I really miss is the some sort of standardization that GitHub provided for a brief period of time. Projects would get no love aka stars when you couldn’t easily be used even for the experts. Some convenience as well as tooling evolved, devops became a thing.
I think of the future of a concept called cocooning. The JavaScript expert of today would be puzzled to write code on a notepad in a html file, because it has become so meta, being TypeScript essentially.
There is so much tooling going on that especially Python before AI already felt like I would miss something out if I would code more than 100 lines and that there must be libraries that abstract this all away and instead of coding I should google better.
AI is one thing, but the cluttered tech stacks aren’t really sparking any interest or joy in me, I think it is the not invented here syndrome or because I can story.
I miss the die hard coders, who stick to a tech stack which simply worked, not optimizing for weird use cases which are contrived at worst and rarely needed at best.
This became evident with the decline of data sheets, because Grunt, Gulp etc. as build tools were great but slow. We JavaScript devs couldn’t any longer joke about the compile times of the Backend dudes. And besides that, build times costs you focus, money, cpu time. But this was the main currency.
With AI I stopped trying out lots of tools because they feel like a weekend project by some dude who blasted his Claude budget.
Over are the fork and commit wars. Until AI battles itself this hard for quality source code I will stick to GitHub.