I was a pretty lightweight developer, coding mostly in Powerbuilder and Visual Basic. What I really enjoyed was getting to know the language/platform deeply and being able to deliver full stack solutions quickly. Back then the client would hook directly to the DB, so you created the UI using pre-built components, added some logic to the ui events and then ran the SQL to update the db. Felt good to create something useful in a day and since they apps were usually for internal company use, you would work directly with the person's who needed it.