Today on Twitter I was remembering that one time when an @OReillyMedia software book said that some code I’d written was “definitely worth a look.”
It started as a project for an internship at a local ISP, where they had a need to quickly browse, search or update a certain database using a web browser. I threw it together in a few days using Perl and the data dictionary info offered by PostgreSQL (and later MySQL and Oracle)
I called it DB_Browser, and it was basically what PhpMyAdmin became, but abstracted out enough to use with any of those three database systems. (Solid database abstraction layers used to be a real thing!)
It was almost certainly full of security vulnerabilities, relying entirely on the use of .htaccess rules to prevent total chaos. The UI was as ugly as sin, the code not much better. But it worked, and I believe it was used in some form until the ISP was acquired years later.
I took the time to package it up and publish it. I think I put it on “Freshmeat,” a site that was just a feed of newly released software, back when you could even try to track such things. It started getting downloads and people started using it.
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