five years ago? heck, i’m amazed at the stuff i did 3 months ago 
A text game version of the Bridge Of Death scene from Monty Python And The Holy Grail in C++.
I was the coolest kid in class.
Five years ago I was writing ASP and MTS applications in Visual Basic. Yucky part: we were hitting a Microsoft Access database. Not my design, mind you. Scariest part: It was a portal application for a massive Web application. I don’t know who the genius was that decided to put an entire online store in a Microsoft Access database, but…whatever.
It didn’t last long.
The code was horrific. Deployment was a nightmare. I didn’t stay involved in that too long. I moved into the Release Manager role and wrote a different piece of software that automated the build process. THAT software was far more rewarding. It drove the branch/get latest/label/pin process for Visual SourceSafe (shudder), build, installer creation, and notification process all at the click of a button. Not bad for something written in VB 6.0.
I think that today, that remains one of the best pieces of software I’ve ever written. I wish I had a copy of it.
@Russ C:
"I love that a platform can do all my data for me, I simply pop a text box here, a column there and hey presto!!!
Sorry, I don’t trust it - it’s snake oil."
How is this any different from dragging a control from the toolbox in VS.NET onto your WebForm and watching the “magic” happen? Can you dig into the source code of ASP.NET and figure out how/why that magic is happening? Didn’t think so.
I make my living with .NET but have been using Rails for about a year and a half. When I look at code I wrote 5 years ago, I’m struck that I could refactor it in Rails in less time, less code and more fun. FWIW, I actually did that with a classic ASP app that took 3+ months to write. It took 2 weeks in Rails (as a newbie) and it had more features than the ASP app.
Five years ago huh? Well I wasn’t coding, that’s for sure. I was spitting out HTML left and right, more than once, and all over the place! That’s basically what happens when you don’t have a clue what’s going on and don’t have a notion for refactoring code. Now, I use .Net to do all my coding, and I only spit out what .Net tells me I can spit out.
For even more fun, get assigned to update some software you worked on a few years ago, and haven’t seen since.
I’ve come back around to my first big .NET project, and it is very hard to resist the temptation to refactor the whole thing.
I looked at code I did five years ago in VBA and what took me about 30-40 lines and a giant array set I was able to cut down to 10 lines and a quick recordset.
I was embarrassed that someone else might see that code. But the large majority of the rest still stands strong.
Five years ago I was writing VB Applications for my employer at that time.
Even though Delphi was since 1995 my prefered tool of choice. (Bummer 
)
Guess what? I’m my own boss now, and happy coding in Delphi once again.
Things look very promissing at Borland/Devco once again 
to be honest, sometimes the code I wrote 6 months ago makes me scream. 3 years ago when I thought I knew asp+html (not .net) I wrote a slick report system. I just spent the last week re-writing most of it just for w3c compliance sake. OMFG! what was I thinking back then. Everyday I look back at old code an cringe, and make mental notes that this has to be re-written, soon.
thank god I work at in a department where my boss still has no clue what I do, but as long as I show results he is happy.
Five years ago I was hand-coding databases in Perl. (And yes, it was about as successful as it sounds.)
The application (CRM) that I support was using VB6 5 years ago and it still uses VB6 today. (starting to support some .NET but not until the next big release). Since it’s mostly API driven the code really hasn’t changed too much. But over the past 5 years, it has been more of an exploration of what can I get the app to do that it wasn’t meant to do. I guess that is a must when the world keeps moving but the application/language stays the same.
Five years ago I was writing VBScript for ASP. That system still lives, but is being converted to C# on ASP.NET with much better architecture. A real data layer and business logic layer with disconnected UI.
Going back to do a bug fix on an unconverted page hurts.
Kind of related: I usualy say that if you read your 3 years code and think is ok, you should probably worry.
It means you did not evolve at all, so go read a technical book and learn something, or give up programming and do something else.
I recently visited my old employer and met some of the guys maintaining my code. I always cringe inside when this happens because I imagine that underneath their smiles, they are thinking “So this is the guy who wrote this crap.”
I want to say, “Hey, I was under some tight constraints and did the best I could. I know a lot more now.”
5 years ago I was a rookie writing code for Cisco’s manufacturing testing platform (Autotest) in a proprietary language (Klemspeak).
in 2001, I was coding in Delphi, working as a contractor in Dallas, TX. It was a lot of fun, as the late 90s and early 00s were the heady years for Delphi. I worked at a company where they had a ping-pong and a foosball table. So, long days of coding with brief spurts of great hilarity!
The code that was written was written by many who were better than me, and I learned a lot. It was a good time to be had by all!
I decided to check a piece of code written 5 years ago. Best I could come up with was 4.5 years. It’s a perl script that stores subrouties me and a co-worker wrote, into our database. It’s doesn’t offer a search capability (the idea was we’d search it in SQL), it doesn’t grab the routines and automatically store them for you, it makes you type it all in (web page).
This catastrophe cost me weeks of my time and is a svelt 636 lines of code. One of its subs is called “idiot” and I wish I had realized then that that sub would have defined the entire concept of the project 5 years later.
Five years ago, I was a cutting-edge batch program developer using DOS “Edit”. So much has come to pass since then, however, and the learning curve has been outrageous. Now that I’ve gotten up to speed with Notepad, the possibilities seem endless.
Fire years ago, I was doing java applet games/demos in my spare time, and that was probably at that time I had most fun coding. At that time I had my first full-time job with ASP. I made some very crappy code, but it was easy to get things done and it was easy to change things. The company had for political reasons decided to move our site to London to a Pearl/Oracle solution, and I was trying with arms and legs to stop it, but it never helped. They newer managed to pull off what we wanted, so we used WSH to http-post/get content to their system, to sort of “hack” our own administration system. Very stupid indeed, but it worked at that time. Today they run as Asp solution, just a little too late.
Actually I can and often do, There’s a neat program by Lutz Roeder called Reflector that allows you to pretty much see the C# code for anything in the CLR.
So yes, in my inquisitive nature, I do like to see what’s going on.