At 37 I'm in the transition zone right now, having both management and coding experience (now coding), and have thought about this quite a bit. I'm eager to (an

At 37 I'm in the transition zone right now, having both management and coding experience (now coding), and have thought about this quite a bit. I'm eager to (and do) maintain my skills, and really don't see myself morphing into the old fuddy-duddy (completely not my nature, and even my youngest colleagues agree). That said, there are some significant life-style challenges that work against simply keeping one's skills sharp. Out of college I wanted to change the world, had all to gain and nothing to lose, just moved and had no family obligations, was surrounded by likewise eager entrepreneurs who were plugged into technology, and I could spend all day and night burrowing into whatever the latest thing was. In short, I could easily commit the vast amount of my time to tech and was naturally on top of things. Not so today! Wife, kids, and a mortgage means drastically reduced time for such endeavors, and a much greater responsibility to provide a stable income (hopefully with benefits too). Add to that, I'm not hanging out in bars after work surrounded by other sources of tech insight, which was always a great way to learn of new things and get a feel for where things are heading. Instead, I'm heading home, because there are a lot of non-tech things to take care of. This doesn't mean I throw in the towel. I carve out time where I can and work my ass off to stay abreast of changing technology, including working on side projects for more real-world practice. I burn some of my much-valued vacation time to get to a conference each year. And I'm cool with the way things are going. But I'm also realistic... Am I going to be burning whole weekends in 48 hour hackathons? Not likely, and least in my situation. I had to come to terms with the fact that I couldn't emulate the behavior of an early 20's developer in Silicon Valley. But I can do things that I think keep me reasonably useful to employers. Most important: this is not at all due to age, but rather due to life circumstances that often come with getting older. When I'm 45 or 50, I will not be the genius who is cranking out the next Node.js in a weekend, but I highly doubt I'll be sitting at city hall waiting for f*cking Promatch to find me a job either.