# Technologies Change

I still remember dabbling with my father's first computer in the mid-90s when I was around 7 or 8 years old. Back then, the computer "unit" took up the space of a small desk, and the big CRT monitor was placed on top of the unit.

My very first interaction with programming was when I opened a random exe file, saw a bunch of weird characters in the editor, and started editing it. To my surprise, the file didn't run anymore, so I edited more and more characters until, at one point, when I executed the file in the CLI, it turned the prompt green.

That was the magic moment for me. After that point, I wanted nothing more than to sit in front of that IBM 80286 all day long and figure out what made that prompt switch to green; and then I discovered DOS BASIC.

Fast forward to the early 2000s, I discovered web development with HTML4, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP v3. This journey continued until around 2010 when Node.js was released. In 2007 I founded my software development company, and then around 2015-ish, I had a client project requirement to be done in ReactJS on the front-end and Go on the back-end; and the rest is history.

Along the way, I used almost all major programming languages in some form or another, either professionally or just as a hobby, ranging from C and Pascal in high school to Ruby, ASP, C#, modern PHP, Java, and the list could go on.

My point is that in all these years, the technologies have changed radically, but more importantly, what remained constant were the [general programming principles I learned on my journey.](https://primalskill.blog/10-books-every-programmer-should-read)

I wasn't using the same technologies in the 2010s as I was in the 2000s, and I'm not using the same tech now as I was a decade ago. If I had focused only on the technology, I would probably still be stuck in BASIC.

**I tell every developer I work with, to learn the general programming principles and they will be fine for the rest of their life.**

If you learn technologies instead of programming, you will become obsolete when (and not IF) that technology falls out of trend or is replaced by some AI automation.

A decade ago my tech stack looked totally different than today and in the next ten years it will look radically different I'm 100% sure of it.

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*Cover photo by* [*seowoo\_lee*](https://pixabay.com/users/seowoo_lee-21601663/)