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I'm 52, started writing code professionally in 1985. Started my career on 68K assembler. In the 90's I was a Windows SDK developer (then COM/ATL, etc.), In 1999

by gjmacd 9y ago

I'm 52, started writing code professionally in 1985. Started my career on 68K assembler. In the 90's I was a Windows SDK developer (then COM/ATL, etc.), In 1999 started a company but chose Linux and embraced FOSS and built a company on a Lamp stack (sold it in 2014). The only thing that can hurt you in this industry is that you stop learning and stop growing. I tell my employees to always learn something new every month. Pick something cool, learn it. This industry changes too fast to stick in one area of technology. Two years ago, nobody was talking about Node.js as being "important", now you can't see a company or startup not looking for Node/MEAN stack developers -- that's how quick this industry moves. But hey. I am old... I use Emacs (still), but have moved to Visual Code on my Mac (with Emacs bindings of course...). I do most of my work in the ZSH, but use Bullet Train and Powerline Shell... So I embrace "new" and am open to things that make it easier and better. Personally? How do I keep pace being the old man? I take 3-6 months off and learn a new technology. What I mean about "learn" is that I actually build an app that's useful or used by customers (people). I don't just play with something, I learn it to become productive and then move to the next thing... Right now, I've just got to the point of feeling "productive" in Elixir. Which I think is going to be the "game changer" on the full stack side and love functional programming (after being an OO guy for what, 25 years!?)... Elixir is my new love and haven't been this excited about a stack in a long time. Learn, learn, learn... write code, keep your brain active. Age means nothing in this field other than when you show up for an interview and the rest of the employees are wearing Skinny Jeans and you've got Dockers on. I like to call it "Dad coding".

cyberferret 9y ago
Snap! - your programming life (and age and timeframes) matches mine almost to a 'T'. Totally agree about constantly learning new stuff, but also doing it the right way (i.e. real world apps rather than another 'Hello World' or simple blog post/commenting app).
- gjmacd 9y ago
  Excellent! Here's to gray hair Docker wearing developers! Until you've built a useful application on the stack, something that can be utilized for something, you've not spent enough valuable time to be productive on it... just something I learned a long time ago and stuck with.
gaza3g 9y ago
Can you tell us a bit more about 'taking 3-6 months off' to learn new things. I'm thinking about doing that myself. Did you take a sabbatical? Is your current company ok with this? What did you work on?
- gjmacd 9y ago
  When I say "take 3-6 months off", I mean from distractions of life around you. Most people working, it's not reasonable to take that much time off. What I mean is, focus for 3-6 months on something new, spend 3-4 hours a day -- even if you have to box out some time at night to learning something. Often times over my life, I've told my wife, "OK, I'm going into hunker down mode..." which she new that I wasn't going to be counting on me for "free time" all that much for the next several months because I'll be in a mode of heads-down and learning. Like going to the gym or class, you need to carve out time and make time (weekends, nights, etc.). Make the time mandatory in your day. If you DO have the luxury of taking 30 days off (I know people who do have that), use that time for possibly going to an on-site bootcamp. Another thing I've done is take that 3-6 months and attend a class or bootcamp. With Bootcamp's becoming so much the rage these days, you can go 2 or 3 nights a week and learn a technology in 3 months. It's awesome.
defined 9y ago
> The only thing that can hurt you in this industry is that you stop learning and stop growing. I tell my employees to always learn something new every month. I am lucky enough to work in an environment where we work with many technologies in a rapidly-evolving area, and most of us have multiple responsibilities, so I can say without fear of hyperbole that, on average, I learn something new every day, be it how to find the signing cert needed to verify an ADFS OAuth2 JWT, or configure Gitlab EE correctly to authenticate with an LDAP server. I think I would simply croak if I had to do a conventional job. -- 58 year old attack dev

by gjmacd 9y ago

cyberferret 9y ago

Snap! - your programming life (and age and timeframes) matches mine almost to a 'T'. Totally agree about constantly learning new stuff, but also doing it the right way (i.e. real world apps rather than another 'Hello World' or simple blog post/commenting app).

gjmacd 9y ago
Excellent! Here's to gray hair Docker wearing developers! Until you've built a useful application on the stack, something that can be utilized for something, you've not spent enough valuable time to be productive on it... just something I learned a long time ago and stuck with.

gaza3g 9y ago

Can you tell us a bit more about 'taking 3-6 months off' to learn new things. I'm thinking about doing that myself. Did you take a sabbatical? Is your current company ok with this? What did you work on?

gjmacd 9y ago
When I say "take 3-6 months off", I mean from distractions of life around you. Most people working, it's not reasonable to take that much time off. What I mean is, focus for 3-6 months on something new, spend 3-4 hours a day -- even if you have to box out some time at night to learning something. Often times over my life, I've told my wife, "OK, I'm going into hunker down mode..." which she new that I wasn't going to be counting on me for "free time" all that much for the next several months because I'll be in a mode of heads-down and learning. Like going to the gym or class, you need to carve out time and make time (weekends, nights, etc.). Make the time mandatory in your day. If you DO have the luxury of taking 30 days off (I know people who do have that), use that time for possibly going to an on-site bootcamp. Another thing I've done is take that 3-6 months and attend a class or bootcamp. With Bootcamp's becoming so much the rage these days, you can go 2 or 3 nights a week and learn a technology in 3 months. It's awesome.

defined 9y ago

> The only thing that can hurt you in this industry is that you stop learning and stop growing. I tell my employees to always learn something new every month. I am lucky enough to work in an environment where we work with many technologies in a rapidly-evolving area, and most of us have multiple responsibilities, so I can say without fear of hyperbole that, on average, I learn something new every day, be it how to find the signing cert needed to verify an ADFS OAuth2 JWT, or configure Gitlab EE correctly to authenticate with an LDAP server. I think I would simply croak if I had to do a conventional job. -- 58 year old attack dev