I've sometimes marveled at how different the code I write today looks when compared to the code I wrote just a few years ago. Apparently I'm not alone - Scott Hanselman just posted about rescuing his C#-based TinyOS from the doom of GotDotNet, commenting that he was "shocked and offended" with himself after review the code a few years later. Man, I know that feeling. Here's the comment I posted to Scott:
Hey Scott, nice new theme! I apparently missed the rollout of it since I usually read everything via my feed reader.
I have to take the bait on your comment about telling you how our five year old code looks. Five years ago, I would have been at Commerce Bank for a little over a year, and hoo-boy, did I write some embarrassingly bad classic ASP and VB in that era. Those first couple years at Commerce were a crash course for me in a lot of things - web technology, pseudo-OOP (realizing that we're talking about VB 6), COM, enterprise development, etc. Five years later, I can say with confidence that this code is amazingly bad; Especially anything where I tried to use XML for no reason other than because it's what the cool kids were doing at the time. Any of the code I wrote in that timeframe should be treated as hazardous material and properly disposed of. Thankfully, the programmers who maintain that application today have long since replaced most of my offending code - except the nifty little VB app I wrote to bridge our contact center softphones to our ASP-based web app via DDE.
Prior to coming to Commerce, my start was as a subcontractor for an independent consultant who had a thing for XBase languages. When I started as his apprentice at the age of 12, it was Clipper. Then FoxPro 2.6 for Windows. Then Visual FoxPro 3.0, 5.0, and, by the time I graduated from college and went to work for him full time, Visual FoxPro 6.0. If I were to look around my home office today, I could probably find some code left over from that bygone era, but that begs the question: Why on Earth would I want to? :)