January 1, 2001. Another day, another year in the old millennium. I look out my window at the gray sky, wondering if this will be any different from yesterday or tomorrow. The dot-com bubble has burst, and with it, a lot of excitement but also some sobering lessons.

I’ve been working on a project for one of our internal tools that we use to manage user accounts across multiple systems. This tool is supposed to make our life easier by automating the provisioning and de-provisioning process for users. However, I’ve spent most of my morning debugging an issue where user data was being lost during account deletion.

I’m in my small office, which is cluttered with old monitors and servers from yesteryear. A couple of years ago, this would have been state-of-the-art equipment, but now it feels like we’re running on outdated hardware. I open up the code for our internal tool and see that the issue lies in a Perl script using Apache mod_perl. The script had some race conditions where the user data was not properly deleted from one of the systems.

I remember when this project started, just before the Y2K scare faded into the background. Back then, everyone was worried about the transition to 2001 and whether the world’s computers would crash at midnight. I can still picture the news reports from that time, but it feels like a lifetime ago now.

As I delve deeper into the code, I think back to when Linux on the desktop was starting to gain some traction. The idea of using a Linux box as a server seemed wild and exciting then. Now, it’s just part of our stack. I wonder what new technologies will come along in another decade.

I spend the rest of the day fixing the race conditions, trying not to let my frustration show too much. It’s moments like these that make me question why we chose Perl for this project. Maybe it was the only choice at the time, or maybe I just picked the wrong tool for the job. In any case, the issue is fixed by the end of the day.

Later in the evening, I decide to take a break and check out some tech news from the era. The headlines about the dot-com bust are still fresh, and there’s talk of Linux on the desktop being taken seriously. VMware was around, but it felt like something for server virtualization only. Napster, with its early P2P drama, is still in the news.

I can’t help but think about Sun Microsystems and their relevance to our work. They were giants back then, with Solaris and Java making waves. But even as I type this, I know that in another few years, they will start to lose ground to more nimble competitors like Google and Amazon.

As the year ends and a new one begins, I reflect on the technologies I’ve worked with and those that are yet to come. The tools we use now—Apache, Sendmail, BIND—are still holding strong, but it’s clear that change is coming. IPv6 discussions are just beginning, and who knows what new protocols or languages will take hold in the next few years.

On this New Year’s Eve, I raise a glass (or rather, click through to an online calendar) to another year of challenges and lessons learned. Here’s to hoping 2001 brings us closer to solving some of these technological issues and moving forward with new innovations.

Happy New Year, everyone. May the old millennium be a stepping stone towards a better future.