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I'm not 'old', but I'm not young anymore either, though I still remember it. My biggest personal gripe is my brain slowly slipping. It's just not as fast as i

by axaxs 6y ago

I'm not 'old', but I'm not young anymore either, though I still remember it. My biggest personal gripe is my brain slowly slipping. It's just not as fast as it used to be, and my memory not anywhere as good. I was always a person who could remember everything, even playback full conversations in my head. Now I barely remember what I had for dinner a couple days back. This has affected my work as I used to just be able to sit and code for hours in Vim as I'd have all the function signatures memorized, but now I spend a lot more time in the docs and have to use a proper IDE. I now write more helpful comments, so I can remember why I did something. Also, I find myself having to take notes to come back to later. I wish it was a skill I'd picked up when I was younger, rather than having to learn now.

cgriswald 6y ago
I’m experiencing the same thing with regard to memory. I’m not sure the cause. While I used to be able to recite full conversations, tell you the color of the trim of that car I was in one time nine months ago, and tell you the shape of the dust lying on the convenience store counter, etc. I can’t do that anymore. But I also think a lot more about a lot of other things that either didn’t concern me when I was younger or weren’t my responsibility. Maybe now I can’t remember things because I’m not experiencing them as thoroughly because I’m always thinking about something else. Or maybe I just realize a lot of details don’t matter. Or maybe it’s just age and my brain doesn’t work as well. Or maybe it’s accumulated damage of twenty years of occasional consumption of alcohol.
- axaxs 6y ago
  Yeah, you might be right...maybe we just store so much we start evicting the LRUs so to speak. One other phenomena I've noticed is that I've begun misspelling words a lot. Not like poor spelling, but using their/there/theyre incorrectly, homophones like fill/feel, or plural is vs plural are, etc. I know these things, it's like my brain goes into autopilot. Probably payback for always correcting people when I was a smartass of a younger person.
greenyoda 6y ago
> Also, I find myself having to take notes to come back to later. I rely on notes too. I'm not sure it's entirely due to my memory getting worse with age. It's also that as you progress to more senior or leadership roles over the course of your career, the rate at which you become interrupted by questions or meetings increases, and the number of different issues you need to juggle also increases. I use my notes as a non-volatile memory to save my current mental state so I can resume after these interrupts. If I'm coding uninterrupted and in a state of "flow", I can still remember details of my code from years ago. Cartoon about interrupting a programmer: https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-a-programmer https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt...

by axaxs 6y ago

cgriswald 6y ago

I’m experiencing the same thing with regard to memory. I’m not sure the cause. While I used to be able to recite full conversations, tell you the color of the trim of that car I was in one time nine months ago, and tell you the shape of the dust lying on the convenience store counter, etc. I can’t do that anymore. But I also think a lot more about a lot of other things that either didn’t concern me when I was younger or weren’t my responsibility. Maybe now I can’t remember things because I’m not experiencing them as thoroughly because I’m always thinking about something else. Or maybe I just realize a lot of details don’t matter. Or maybe it’s just age and my brain doesn’t work as well. Or maybe it’s accumulated damage of twenty years of occasional consumption of alcohol.

axaxs 6y ago
Yeah, you might be right...maybe we just store so much we start evicting the LRUs so to speak. One other phenomena I've noticed is that I've begun misspelling words a lot. Not like poor spelling, but using their/there/theyre incorrectly, homophones like fill/feel, or plural is vs plural are, etc. I know these things, it's like my brain goes into autopilot. Probably payback for always correcting people when I was a smartass of a younger person.

greenyoda 6y ago

> Also, I find myself having to take notes to come back to later. I rely on notes too. I'm not sure it's entirely due to my memory getting worse with age. It's also that as you progress to more senior or leadership roles over the course of your career, the rate at which you become interrupted by questions or meetings increases, and the number of different issues you need to juggle also increases. I use my notes as a non-volatile memory to save my current mental state so I can resume after these interrupts. If I'm coding uninterrupted and in a state of "flow", I can still remember details of my code from years ago. Cartoon about interrupting a programmer: https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-a-programmer https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt...