At 25 I got the first job I was good enough enough to have a real positive impact in my company. I'd been programming video games since I was 7, then got my fir

At 25 I got the first job I was good enough enough to have a real positive impact in my company. I'd been programming video games since I was 7, then got my first professional job at 16. Building business software in the late 90s exposed me to a bewildering sea of horrible technologies, overcomplicated architecture and process, and a lot of people much older than me pretending they knew what they were doing--and I didn't know any better at the time. The software world at that time was beige, mean, boring, and way, way too complicated. Moats at this time consisted of massive proprietary projects with vendor lock-in the main objective. The magic of the tight knit 80s hacker scene the had enchanted me as a child had faded and the excitement of the post dot-com bust was still to come. But the dot com bubble burst and just a few shitty years later I turned 25 just as a new era was starting, there was so, so much I had still to learn, but now I had 18 years under my belt and secured a senior position at an energy company a few days after my 25th birthday. I wrote an important control system, the first program I'm still somewhat proud of/not completely embarrassed by over the next few months, today the oldest software I have written still in production now, 11 years later. It was the start of a beautiful age of software development, of increasing simplicity, openness, and kindness, and the world we developers live in has bloomed with color and been framed in elegant design. The logos of the companies we work for, our offices, our computers, our IDEs and our code are a delight for the senses. Code has bled into popular culture, and the social stigma that being a programmer once carried has been replaced by a certain amount of respect. It is an amazing time right now to be a programmer, and at 25 you missed a lot of misery. Having said that if I could go back I'd say to myself, enjoy yourself more. Figure out where you want to live and move there as fast, put down roots, make good friends. Friends get very difficult to make past your 20s. Don't waste your time on people/projects/technology/companies/features that aren't worth it. The greatest asset you have is time, it is easy when you have so much to squander it. Get really good at your core skills. A job you are really good at and people respect you for is 1000% more fun than the same job you suck at.