Engineer vboykis Nostalgic for the Tech Industry of 2013

On September 11, well-known AI engineer Vicki Boykis (vboykis) posted a series of threads reminiscing about the tech industry around 2013 and venting about the current AI-era climate, striking a chord with many practitioners.

Confirmed

Across multiple posts, vboykis catalogued the iconic culture of the tech scene circa 2013: stickers on laptops, kanban boards, services named after Roman gods, Python-vs-Ruby debates, and GitHub still being the new kid on the block.
She recalled that the biggest technical controversy back then was "should we replace Hadoop with Spark," startups favored .ly domains, companies had cute icons, and technical knowledge came from O'Reilly and Manning books plus Joel Spolsky's essays.
She also missed when blogs were written for humans, when you could meet like-minded people on Twitter, learn senior-level knowledge from code reviews, when VSCode just worked, NYT had essentially no paywall, the internet felt more open overall, and "AI" meant scikit-learn.
As for today, vboykis complained that AI discourse is all cyber threats, math proofs, IPOs, loops and charts, while nobody writes code anymore — "we've lost the plot."

Why it matters

This wave of nostalgia isn't just personal sentiment; it reflects many engineers' dissatisfaction with how AI-era tech culture has shifted: discussion has moved from writing code and building products toward capital narratives and grand themes, and the open, sharing-oriented technical community is fading.

2026-09-11 ~ 2026-09-11 · 5 related posts

Primary sources

A engineer's ode to tech in 2013: stickers, kanban, and when Google was useful — vboykis · 2026-09-11 09:30 (UTC+08:00)
vboykis laments that nobody writes code anymore amid AI hype about threats, proofs and IPOs — vboykis · 2026-09-11 09:36 (UTC+08:00)
Engineers wax nostalgic for an open web: blogs, code reviews, and free pizza Fridays — vboykis · 2026-09-11 09:32 (UTC+08:00)

Well-Known AI Developer Nostalgic for the Tech Industry of 2013 — vboykis · 2026-09-11
[source] A engineer's ode to tech in 2013: stickers, kanban, and when Google was useful — vboykis · 2026-09-11
[source] Engineers wax nostalgic for an open web: blogs, code reviews, and free pizza Fridays — vboykis · 2026-09-11
Dev recalls the Hadoop-to-Spark era: blogs written by humans and knowledge via code reviews — vboykis · 2026-09-11
[source] vboykis laments that nobody writes code anymore amid AI hype about threats, proofs and IPOs — vboykis · 2026-09-11