Seems like the poisoning of the internet is coming to a head. While searching earlier for a first principles reference to answer a question with, I came across an entirely obfuscated query.

"Codd's forms of normalization"

https://google.com/search/...

In the first four pages, there are 5 results that aren't ad farms, crappy pasta tutorial sites, brand building articles, poorly understood rote regurgitation of information, quora, or some combination of all of the above.

In 2005, the top 5 would likely have contained Bell Labs, UoI, Cambridge and Oracle. Mind you, I don't think the world is getting dumber, exactly, just that the signal to noise ratio in the information sphere is getting worse and the risk from that is the world becomes markedly "dumber". The only barrier to entry anymore is how well your SEO optimization competes.

I'm obviously getting old.

/rant

After my first ever "thing" I wrote (see story here: https://devrant.com/rants/2132057/...) fast forward 7 years to my first project when I /* thought I */ knew what I was doing and didn't write just for myself.
Preset:
I worked in a very small company distributing various materials for medical research, many of them bought from manufacturers and then relabelled as if we had produced it. One part of that was to indicate a production batch / lot number. Before I started there, they would just invent a random number on the spot and use that on the new label and somewhere write it down to document that, I at least used an Excel sheet to have numbers prepared and document it on the same line (still crappy but more than nothing). After some time my boss got the idea to have all of that documented in MS Access (because that was the only database he knew). I had just started with HTML, PHP and MySQL in apprentice school around the same time, so I proposed writing an appropriate solution using those and got permission.
-----

I started coding and learnt so much that I didn't need to pay attention at school anymore as I was years ahead of the curriculum (the others were struggling with If-statements and the likes).
When I was done with Version 1.0 of my web application, it was of course still crude as hell. I used html forms to save input (like editor.php -> submit to save.php, do save -> redirect to editor.php), but it did what had not been done before: keeping it all together and force people to do it properly. 2 years later I wrote a version 2, adding features that showed to be useful and with improved structure, as my last project before leaving, and as far as I know, they are still using it, which is at this point 2 years after I've left.
Looking back I would do it differently, but for what I knew back then it was not bad at all.