Good software thinking doesn’t age. Tools do

Source: Dev.to

I built an informatics quiz back in 2009. At the time, it was just a small student project — nothing official, just something interactive and fun for new students. Recently, I revisited it. Not the code first. Not the technology. But the questions. And surprisingly… many of them still feel relevant today.

Sample questions

• What is steganography?
• The Diffie‑Hellman algorithm is used for?
• Which of the following is NOT a characteristic of Object‑Oriented Programming?
• The predecessor to the C language was?
• Alexey Pajitnov received nothing from $800 million earned from?

Some of these test fundamentals, some test history, and some are just there to trick you a little 😄. Together, they reveal something interesting: the core knowledge hasn’t changed that much.

What changed (and what didn’t)

Back in 2009

• We used Flash for interactivity.
• Questions were loaded from XML.
• State and logic were handled manually.

Today

• We use React / modern frameworks.
• Data comes from APIs (JSON).
• State management is abstracted.

But if you look closely, the data is still structured and the logic still exists — just hidden behind abstractions. Fundamentals like memory, algorithms, and architecture remain key.

The interesting part

Some of the questions are arguably more important today:

• Security concepts like Diffie‑Hellman.
• Understanding of low‑level concepts.
• Awareness of computing history.

Modern tools often hide complexity — but they don’t remove it.

A small technical twist

The quiz was originally built in Adobe Flash (.swf), which is no longer supported in modern browsers. Yet it still runs today thanks to Ruffle, a Flash emulator written in Rust. Instead of rewriting the project, I preserved it and made it runnable again in the browser.

Try the full quiz

Curious how you’d score? No Googling 😄

• Live Demo:
• GitHub Repository:

About language support

The quiz includes both Bosnian and English content. I translated the quiz questions and answers while keeping the original structure intact. Note: Only quiz questions and answers are translated; menus and other on‑screen text may remain in the original language.

Final thought

Technologies change. Frameworks come and go. But the underlying way we approach problems — breaking them down, modeling data, and structuring logic — remains largely the same. What changes is how much the tools hide. What stays is the thinking behind them.

Good software thinking doesn’t age. Tools do.