I remember talking to my Grandfather shortly before he passed away about the changes he’d seen in his lifetime. Born in 1911, the thing he said that really stuck with me was that when he was a child people were barely puttering around off the ground in aeroplanes; A few years before his 60th birthday, men walked on the moon. When I look back at the simple 8-bit microcomputers of my childhood, compared to the modern world in which my daughter is growing up, I can’t help but feel like I’ve seen a similar step change. But just as my Poppa said “When it’s happening you don’t notice it. It’s only when you look back you see how much everything has changed.”

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A developer reflects on 40 years of computing and 25 years of maintaining a personal website, tracing the evolution from ZX Spectrum and BBS systems through early Linux, LAMP stacks, Solaris, virtualization, Docker, Kubernetes, and modern cloud-native infrastructure. The post serves as a personal time capsule covering tech trends, tools, and communities that have come and gone, from hand-crafted HTML and Dreamweaver to GitOps and Terraform pipelines.

It’s Only When You Look Back