A recent conversation with Raymond Oyondi on Peerlist made me rack my memories a bit and reflect on how much software and infrastructure have changed over the years. I joined the industry back when cloud still felt more like a concept than a default. A lot of systems were still being built and maintained in environments where the infrastructure was very much in your hands. You knew the machines, the network, the limits, the weak points. If something needed scaling, it was not a button click and a dashboard graph. It meant spinning up another server, configuring it, wiring it into the network and load balancer, deploying the application, syncing state, setting up monitoring, and making sure the whole thing did not fall apart under pressure. We had automation in places, of course, but nowhere near the kind of convenience people now take for granted. A lot has changed since then. But the funny thing is, the biggest lesson for me is that the old principles never really went away. Cloud changed the speed.…