There were very few ready-made frameworks and libraries to get things done, so it was fun writing those meta libraries that runs your business. Of course, purely from a business point of view, this is not ideal and is extremely wasteful. At the same time, it really helped me understand the systems that we use. Maybe that's why people survived without Stackoverflow :)
In comparison, modern software development is almost all about composing or stitching together a bunch of different services. There are other complexities around orchestration and breadth of the systems involved, but very rarely one goes deep into a particular technical problem.
After a really long time, I'm getting a kick out of working on a highly technical problem: an open source search engine from scratch (https://github.com/typesense/typesense). It has been deeply rewarding and definitely something that's missing in a typical web oriented software development career today.
In comparison, modern software development is almost all about composing or stitching together a bunch of different services. There are other complexities around orchestration and breadth of the systems involved, but very rarely one goes deep into a particular technical problem.
After a really long time, I'm getting a kick out of working on a highly technical problem: an open source search engine from scratch (https://github.com/typesense/typesense). It has been deeply rewarding and definitely something that's missing in a typical web oriented software development career today.