Ode to The Young Software Engineer I Once Was

I, once, was a young and pure Software Engineer.
Who named variables by the Hungarian notation.
Who constrained variable scope.
Who removed warnings.
Who commented the code thoroughly, without swearing.
Who set up tools for the code to compile automatically while I was sleeping.
Who enabled email notifications from Hudson,
and paid attention to them.

I, once, was a young software engineer who kept interrupt handlers small and lean.
Who wrote down state machines before implementing them.
Who did not lose any bytes out of recv().
Who steered clear from manipulating LEDs for debugging purposes.
Who wrote tests without giggling.
Who put the oscilloscope probes back in the drawer.

I, once, was a young software engineer who had good memory allocation discipline.
Who remembered the difference between calloc() and malloc() without googling.
Who used free() relentlessly.

I, once, was a young software engineer who looked forward to presenting slides.
Who created diagrams for them, with arrows and colors.
With lines of different thickness.
Who stared at people in the room right into their eyes,
one by one—seeking their buy-in.

I, once, was a young software engineer who remembered his JIRA password.
Who created and followed up tickets.
Who contributed in the comments section,
long before I started just pasting 'RTFM'.

I, once, was a software engineer who tolerated JavaScript and its (what’s the opposite of lucid?) syntax.

What happened to you, young software engineer me? Are you still there?