Indeed! Great to be back! Congrats to the development team for getting a great developer resource back online! It has been missed.

I recently helped a customer move a self-hosted web application to a new server, also self-hosted. With a few tweaks, it was working but a couple of pages needed additional tweaking. A week later and we replaced 2 files. Suddenly, the app started crashing on those 2 pages only...all other pages worked flawlessly.

My first guess was incorrect...it was not a permissions issue. (30 minutes wasted)
My second guess was also incorrect...it was not a configuration issue. (20 minutes wasted)
My third guess was correct, but logically, it didn't make sense at the time, so I talked myself out of it.

Of course, there was only a generic 500 to start with, so walked a tech through enabling detailed errors.

We finally discovered that an include file used by 80% of the pages in the app, had somehow gone missing. The unchanged files apparently pulled it from cache while the changed files triggered a new request. Doh!

Confession: This is the last Classic ASP app I have running in the wild. It is down to 1 customer and not worth the effort of a rewrite. That said, it actually reminds me a lot of blazor, mixing tags and code. Also, it says alot that this app has mostly remained untouched for years, but still gets the job done. (earns money)

I learned BASIC on a TI/994a sometime in 1982 I think. At first it was fun and games, making the screen change colors, playing sounds, etc...then I realized that this thing can actually help with my geometry homework!

I was a CS major until '88 when I got burned out on school and spent a decade in box plants. When I came to my senses and went back to school, I was delighted to find that the world had changed...no more waiting for lab terminals...I could now write, debug, and compile code at home...in the middle of the night! I got my first windows PC (98 1st ed.) and a copy of Visual Studio 6. Within a year, I was working part-time on a new project that I am still maintaining to this day. It's been a great ride, wfh for the last 20 years.

The earlier days of writing code were probably the most fun...the nights staying up until 2AM because you were 'on a roll', building new stuff and learning new stuff every day. This was before Google when I accumulated lots of big thick books and anxiously awaited the arrival of the quarterly MSDN CD.

Fast forward a couple of decades, and although I still find joy in solving problems, I wouldn't call it fun. There's a lot less building new stuff and a lot more maintaining/migrating old stuff these days and that's definitely not fun!

One difference is that back then, you could actually get away from it all just by leaving the house/office. Cell phones have now made that impossible. Now we are constantly bombarded by spam calls, bored retired relatives, emails, text messages, group texts, game notifications, fb notifications, etc. Back then, I could code in peace for hours and hours...nowadays, I code in 20-minute sprints if I'm lucky, even on weekends.

You are right, it's not really the same atmosphere as the old version. One thing I miss is the expressiveness we had with the emoticons and special icons. (:elephant: || :beer:) It's been so long I've forgotten how to use them!

Ah! I've just found the composer which has quite a bit of functionality, but I can't get the emoticons to work.

We lot a lot of the regulars in the migration. Anyone heard from Jeremy?

That said, there are things about the new place that I like. My visiting patterns have definitely changed since the Great Blackout. I've gotten used to only checking in just a few times a day.

Not sure what you mean by 'rolling your own'? How about none? I've never needed an ORM for CRUD.

I'm now moving into .Net core and just about all the samples rely on EF.

BTW, what's theworst key ona keyboard tostartfailing? That's right, it's thespacebar!

I tried reddit for a while when CP went dark, but never joined...too many rabbit holes there! I have to admit that during the 10 or so months that CP was down I got a lot more work done!

I actually joined bluesky but lost interest after a few days.

Well there goes my productivity! :) :elephant:

@code-witch Have you seen some of the old haunts that they've re-opened? Soap Box, Back Room, Clever Code...that last one sounds perfect! Good to see everyone is getting back! :)