Advise him to prepare a budget to get started with a JetBrains All product pack subscription, and subscriptions to some ebook services for reference material an

Advise him to prepare a budget to get started with a JetBrains All product pack subscription, and subscriptions to some ebook services for reference material and good quality source material. Make sure the machine and monitors don’t become a reason to stop the process of learning and doing. Approach this as a series of goals and don’t expect overnight miracles. Make copious notes. It could be useful to focus on programming for a particular field or set of applications, if he has core knowledge. For example, tools that could have helped him in his previous roles. Don’t worry if these aren’t original nor large. Be organized but don’t let the organizing obscure the hands-on coding and use of the tools. Find sympathetic people and groups, for support, mentoring, ideas, and reference. I suspect that he has developed good strategies for networking and communicating with people and groups. Now is the time to take advantage of those skills. I know that he knows that he doesn’t feel like he’s 61 and that’s important. In my experience the roadblocks are erected by reacting to other peoples inevitable ageism. Ageism is real. But it’s not going away, so work around it and work with it. Having groups to work with, and support each other helps immensely. So, approach programming as a member of a group and don’t try to do everything himself. Languages and platforms? That’s a different discussion, and I’ll avoid the inevitable arguments in this open forum. And document the process and journey. Make the documentation process part of the journey too, of course, and use the IDE and YouTrack to help manage this process too. Other people will want to know about these experiences.