At some point, the business world called, and I stopped spending time on IRC. And I haven't kept up, but I think something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right?

Those were simpler times, I suppose. We were working with all the new frameworks of the day, and it was the grizzled old engineers alongside the young hotshots — and none of it mattered, because all anyone saw was your nick and your code.

I don't know how kids these days learn about dependency injection, the downsides of singleton architectures, or the nuanced tradeoffs of using an ORM to abstract over a relational model. But I rather enjoyed learning it all on the mean streets of IRC.