This year, in particular August 01., marks 10 years of my career as a professional software engineer in the industry. Looking back, our industry has changed so much in 10 years that I can’t even recognise it in 2026, when I compare how everything was in 2016.

So as a personal anniversary I will take you through a nostalgic trip back to the year 2016 and show you 10 things that were different back then!

1. Stack Overflow

So we start with the most obvious one: while in 2026 Stack Overflow is dead, in 2016 it was the place to go. Basically the first thing that I learned at work was how to properly Google, so that you find Stack Overflow results in Google that would cover your problem.

We would read through post after post about the problem we had at work on Stack Overflow, trying out code snippets, changing them and hoping it would work and solve our problem.

And you always knew: when you had a problem where there was no post about it on Stack Overflow, you were absolutely cooked.

2. GitHub

GitHub in 2016 was totally different than the GitHub we have now. For starters, Microsoft hadn’t (yet) purchased it. Oh and private repositories were only available to paid accounts.

While GitHub was popular for open source projects, it was only after the acquisition by Microsoft that it started to get the appeal it has today for corporates and enterprises.

3. No VS Code … But Atom!

Okay to be fair, VS Code was released in 2015 but in 2016 it still didn’t have the traction that it has today. However what you would use and what was extremely popular, was Atom.

Atom was kinda the forerunner to VS Code. It was released in 2014 and was the first project that was based on ElectronJS (in fact ElectronJS was developed for that purpose). Atom was fast, awesome and you would spin it up, whenever you wanted to make a quick edit to a source code file.

In 2022 Atom got sunsetted in favor of VS Code (rip).

4. JetBrains IDEs

Speaking of code editors and IDEs, as I said, in 2016 VS Code was pretty fresh and lacked many of the IDE-like features that it has today.

I would genuinely say that in 2016, if you entered a software company that worked on PHP, JS, HTML, it would have been nearly impossible to not see desktops with JetBrains IDEs such as PHPStorm or WebStorm open.

I will never forget the first time I started to use PHPStorm and how much easier life got (before that I was always programming in either Notepad++, Atom or Eclipse). To this day, I say that JetBrains IDEs have the best search I have ever used in an IDE.

And while JetBrains is still around today (in fact I still use their IDEs) it cannot be denied that VS Code ate a large portion of their userbase.

Oh and before I forget it: in 2016 JetBrains IDEs obviously had the old IDE design (you know, that one that started a major controversy in 2022).

5. Discussions about programming languages and frameworks

I remember how we would discuss for hours (esp. on lunch) about the newest programming language and the framework of the day. Everyone had their favourite and there were always guys who were into functional programming languages and were trying to convince everyone else.

I don’t think in 2026, with agentic coding now, there is much discussion about programming languages anymore. Or maybe we have all just grown older ;)

6. SPAs were still in their infancy

React, VueJS and Angular (does anyone use Angular anymore?) were a few years old, however the industry still hadn’t fully adopted them. When you were working on PHP projects at that time (like I was) in Symfony or Magento, server side rendering in Twig or similar SSR libraries was the way to go. We would actually write PHTML (PHP mixed with HTML).

And when we needed some sort of interactivity: it was either HTML5 or jQuery! And TypeScript was just four years old at that time.

7. Linux on the desktop

When I entered the workforce in 2016, we would use Linux (to be more precise: Ubuntu) at work. And I remember that many other tech companies at that time (and in the following years) would use Linux. The M-Chips of Apple MacBooks were still four to five years away and getting Docker to run on macOS was a pain. The alternative to that would be using Windows 8 or Windows 10.

Of course this was only true if you would work on web-stuff (in PHP, Python or Ruby). If you were stuck programming Windows desktop apps or some other kind of ASP.NET work, you would have been using Windows.

But these days I feel like nearly every software company is switching to MacBooks.

8. Remote Work

In 2016, the idea of remote work was basically alien to the entire workforce and the companies!

It was fulltime, five days a week in the office and no one questioned that.

We also didn’t have any notebooks, but regular tower PCs instead! And I remember how at the company where I worked, it was common for IT to assemble the tower PCs for developers and regular staff members from their parts.

9. A different job market

To be fair, at that time I was very young (22) and had absolutely no idea about the job market. But it was different, programming itself (but also Software Engineering) was extremely respected and programmers were treated like gods.

In general there was a lot of optimism in the industry itself that many people have lost in 2026.

10. AI

We absolutely had AI in 2016, but it was nowhere near what we would consider AI now. As I have written in the “About Me” section of my website, I have personally encountered AI in 2017 (and did Machine Learning for two projects in 2019).

But LLMs had yet to be invented (although OpenAI was founded a year earlier in 2015) and I remember reading somewhere on Reddit (in 2019) that we would never in our lifetimes see a computer program that is able to translate human language into executable, useful code.

And here we are today.