I wrote my first programs in Notepad. Not VS Code, not Sublime — plain old Notepad. No IntelliSense. No Stack Overflow. No internet, actually. Just a blinking cursor and whatever you remembered from the last book you read.
That was the world I grew up in.
Over 25 years, I've lived through the entire arc of modern software — C, Oracle PL/SQL, Microfocus COBOL, and then Java. Java is my life. I've watched it evolve from version one, through every awkward phase, every reinvention, every "Java is dead" headline that turned out to be wrong. I was there for all of it.
Then came XML. Oh, the hype. XML was supposed to be the next revolution. Every conference, every whitepaper, every vendor pitch — XML this, XML that. And then we collectively realized what it actually was: a data format. A really verbose one. We moved on.
But here's the thing — through all of that, we learned real software engineering. Design patterns weren't buzzwords to us; they were survival tools. And the quality of people was different back then. When I used to interview three candidates, I'd hire two. By 2014–15, it became one out of twenty-five — and these were from the company bench pool, already hired consultants. In the last five years, hiring in India has become a nightmare. Sometimes it takes close to six months to find the right match. Six months. For one person.
Back in those days, UI developers were treated as the low end of the food chain. Like dentists in medicine — technically skilled, but never quite considered "real doctors." Everything that mattered was server-side. If you weren't writing backend logic, you weren't a serious engineer.
We were ahead of our time, and I don't say that lightly.
By 2002, we had implemented XMLHTTP as a feature in our application — the same undocumented capability Microsoft had quietly introduced. Others were reporting it as a security vulnerability. We saw it as power. It wasn't until 2005 that Jesse James Garrett coined the term "AJAX," legitimizing it as an architectural pattern. Then Gmail and Google Maps showcased it to the world, and suddenly everyone wanted it. That one shift — from static websites to dynamic web applications — took a solid decade to fully transform the industry, but we were there at the start.
We built a core J2EE server between 2001 and 2003. We achieved things that the rest of the industry wouldn't mainstream for another fifteen years. And then, honestly? It went relatively quiet. The fundamental problems were solved. The rest was iteration.
But through all those years, I carried one frustration that never went away. For very complex tasks — the kind that live in your head as architectural visions — I could never express myself well enough to get even the brightest teams to build exactly what I saw. The gap between what I imagined and what I could communicate was always there, no matter how talented the people around me were.
Then 2018–19 happened.
Something genuinely exciting started brewing. Something that was going to transform this industry in ways we hadn't seen since the birth of the web itself.
And suddenly, a window opened — the one I'd been waiting for my entire career. The window to become a creator on my own terms, without depending on other humans to translate my vision into reality.
Fast forward to now, and here we are.
AI has given people of my generation unlimited wings. Not because AI knows more than we do about how software should work — it doesn't. But because we have twenty-five years of understanding how things evolved and why they became what they are. We know the fundamentals. We know what good looks like. We know what questions to ask.
And that changes everything.
I no longer have to hire someone, spend months training them, bring them up to speed, pour my energy into getting them to see what I see — only to watch them jump ship for the next offer. That thankless cycle is over for me.
Now I have unlimited agents writing core software to my specifications, exactly the way I want it. Things that used to take years are done in days. I might not remember every API. I might not know every new framework feature. But these tools — when you ask the right questions — they do everything for you. Everything I had lost interest in actually sitting down and writing myself, because the overhead of getting it done through teams was just too exhausting.
Now, I'll be honest — AI has made things worse for a certain crowd. The folks who were already confused about fundamentals now have tools that make things even more confusing. They hallucinate for months trying to find answers to problems they don't fully understand. AI amplifies what you bring to it. If you bring depth, you get depth back. If you bring confusion, you get chaos.
But if you know your stuff? AI gives you unlimited engineers writing some of the best code that can be offered.
The coming time is incredible for creators. For those of us who've spent decades understanding the why behind the code, not just the how — this is our moment.
Happy writing beautiful software.
We're still writing the awesomeness. Every single day.
And if any of this resonated with you — whether you're an experienced developer looking to harness AI the right way, or a business trying to figure out how to actually get complex software built without the six-month hiring nightmare — I'm happy to talk.
I consult, I architect, and we build. Twenty-five years of depth, now supercharged with the best tools this industry has ever seen.
If you want to have a conversation, grab a slot on my calendar:
๐ Book a time with me
Let's build something worth building.