Similarly, I turned 55 last month, but I have noticed a definite decline in some aspects of my intelligence with regard to software development. I work in a co

Similarly, I turned 55 last month, but I have noticed a definite decline in some aspects of my intelligence with regard to software development. I work in a company that's committed to pair programming: two of us working together on one computer to develop. In some ways it's like a footrace, me against a twenty-five-year-old, except it's software development, not a footrace. I marvel at my twenty-something pair's ability to hold a complex model in their head. I can do it, but it takes me longer, and usually I need to scratch notes on a piece of paper to help. Their memory has better retention than mine. "Remember we ran into that problem in November?" I'll have absolutely no recollection. And sometimes it takes me longer to figure something out. I remember last week waking up and realizing the reason why we hadn't been able to recreate a certain failure was that we were using a layer 4 load balancer instead of a layer 7 with a redirect — something I was confident I would have figured out sooner ten years ago. I also notice that, in respect to programming languages that I've picked up in the last ten years, I tend to rely on stackoverflow for syntax, even simple things like, "How do a write a for loop in {Ruby,Python,Golang,JS}?" whereas I know the syntax cold for my earlier languages (Perl, C++, C, Pascal). On the plus side I have 35 years of experience to draw upon, both from a development side as well as from a managing-expectations side. When I'm on a project with little oversight the project managers don't worry about it going off the rails. Still, I envy the elasticity of the minds of my younger fellow developers.