A decade is nearly a century in IT land. But a good system can stand the test of time.
I had a friend visiting this weekend who I used to work with back in NZ. I had a big hand in designing parts of the CAD/CAM engine of the application, and managing the team we all worked on together. He still works there and happened to have a development environment setup with said application. Firing it up was like seeing an old long lost friend, the grey matter was reconnecting the interface and parts that I designed, they were still there and working - 10-12 years later !
Remember those old friends who it's just like yesterday when you see them ? This was just like that. Smiles all round as I was fumbling my way through it and remembering, "whoah .. that's still there", "would you look at that", "hang on, wow, I remember what the document that specced that was called!".
One of my favourite interview questions is "What's your proudest moment?" I think that's it. Right there. Over a decade ago I helped design something, and today, thousands and thousands of users across the world are using this application day in day out to design and manufacture parts of buildings.
What's something you put built, designed, sketched out, built, qa'd, pm'd years ago and is still there to this day ? Go and dig up your old applications, you might be pleasantly surprised...
