Before Facebook & whiskey

Doing the spring cleaning on a server of mine today, I keep stumbling upon artifacts of the good old times. Hidden deep inside the UNIX directory structure are remains of awesome projects, logs of chats with brilliant people, user accounts not used for years and long forgotten Subversion repositories containing projects so hackish I wonder why did I ever write them.

Such was the technology world before I discovered Facebook and whiskey. Once I did, I was out of the game for some years.

Fast forwarding to today, everything seems to be made of AWS, Heroku and Github. We see neither the machines nor the people behind them. Experienced UNIX engineers seem to be a dying breed, being quickly outnumbered by overzealous unit test writers.

Has the world changed, or is it just me?