Before I built websites, I wrote tools for my own group on the Commodore 64 — the editors we made its releases with, and those releases were how a group built its name on the scene. I do not bring it up out of nostalgia — what a machine with 64 kilobytes of memory teaches you shows up in every site I hand over today.
I coded as Rime, in the group Feniks, later Motiv 8 and Vaudeville Crew. Everything from those years is still on CSDb, the scene’s public archive, which I neither run nor control:
Five of the seven are editors — the tools my group used to make its own releases. In 2011, seventeen years after release, someone left a comment under the Hires Interlace Editor saying he could have used it back in the day, and described exactly how the two-bitmap trick worked. It is the oldest review of my work that I have.
On the C-64 there was no room for “we’ll fix it later”. Every byte had an owner, and if something ran slowly you could not hide it behind faster hardware — the user had the same machine I did. Three habits came out of that, and I have not managed to lose any of them.
I measure before I optimise, because guessing what slows a page down ends with rewriting the parts that were fine. I add only what is actually needed, because every library included “just in case” has a price, and today it is paid by someone on a phone on a weak connection, not by me. And I test before I hand over, because a floppy disk had no hotfix.
The scene worked differently from how people picture it. I wrote the code, someone from another group wrote the music, a third person did the graphics, often from another country — and it all had to ship as one release, with one loading screen and one deadline. Material moved on floppies and by post. Once a year it stopped being correspondence: I travelled to Visual Party, the scene’s December gathering, where the people I knew only from credits suddenly had faces. The credits on my releases carry people from Airwolf-Team, Alchemy, Acheron, Fairlight and Albion Crew.
We did not call it distributed work or code review, but the mechanism was the same: take someone else’s material, fit it inside your own constraints, and hand it back in a state they are willing to put their name on.
I write WordPress plugins now, and it is the same job with more memory. The store locator runs on OpenStreetMap because I did not want a map that needs someone else’s API key, a billing account and third-party cookies. The sheet importer fills thirteen fields because otherwise a person types them by hand on every product. Tests in both run with php tests/run.php, with no build step, because a tool that demands a ritual stops being a tool.
My releases from the nineties: csdb.dk/scener/?id=6783