A few things to keep an age programmer in mind
- Transfer
If you are one of those who “worked there-to-do!” And “did that-to-do!”, And now have a happy retirement, this article is not for you. Just thank you for your work and congratulations. But if you, like me, even getting a little older, still feel a passion for programming, rejoice at the look of the code and cannot resist the urge to write something else, then continue reading.
Most of my life I worked as a software developer. But once, at the end of my fourth decade, I fell for the bait of entrepreneurial profit. I then believed that creating your own companies is cool. I found some venture capital and organized a couple of small startups to implement my own ideas. And so I became, as it seemed to me, a normal CEO and not such a bad manager. And, although I didn’t write the code personally, I could hire good programmers, manage the quality of projects and implement innovations.
I put up with the idea that my best code has already been written - in the past. I was already 54 years old (a lot!) And I probably could no longer write code as well as before. Who knows - maybe my memory has already begun to refuse, well, or I just learned everything that I was able to learn in life. My attitude was reinforced by observations of the reality surrounding me. All new technologies looked faddish for me. I hated Node.js. I found all web development frameworks terrible. And I complained that the classical methods of software development have collapsed and turned into a set of clichés, which nowadays blend in under smart names like Agile or “extreme programming”. I missed the days when people wrote a specification for future software, programmed it, and then carefully tested it. And when in each article there were not a thousand slang words.
One evening we watched the good old Star Trek and James Kirk said that he was getting old and running out of steam. Spock objected to him right away, as usual, in his confident and logical style:
I missed the rest of the film - I thought about this phrase. Did I not do the same thing? Is it not in vain that I switched to the work of a manager (in which I was only moderately good), instead of surrendering to my fate and talent? Fortunately, I soon found the answer to this question and it was: "Yes, in vain." I forgot that writing the code was my very “only and best fate possible”, and the code I wrote was my most important creation in life. My first company was built around a piece of code I wrote, and even today, some of it still works. And after some period of self-digging, I threw out all my stereotypes that “the industry is not the same”. I began to learn new programming languages. I was lucky and even before I was 57, I finished developing one of the best software components that I had a chance to write in my life. It was a product for a small local startup. He was good: he had an idea, architecture, implementation. He, in the end, really meant something!
In the end, I decided to write a few thoughts for those people who, by virtue of their profession and age, are already in the same boat with me or will be there sooner or later.
As we get older, we all get tired. We get tired of the endless waste of time with minimal results. We get tired of seeing the same mistakes that happen over and over again. We begin to say things like "life is too short for that." And as our friends approach retirement, we often catch ourselves envious of their reliable, boring work, which will soon give them the opportunity to go on a well-deserved rest. The very idea of starting all over again, spending the next 20 years on this journey again seems ridiculous, does not find understanding among the family (especially if its members are not involved in software development).
Yes, when we recall the times when we were just starting to write software, it was incredibly exciting. Technologies were created and changed on the fly. So many problems still had to be solved, new challenges arose every day, and I had to invent and reinvent something. Software development was the new frontier of knowledge of mankind, where discoveries and opportunities arose constantly. For many of us, staying on this sparkling spearhead of progress has become a highlight and experience in life. It attracted us. And now, my friends, we have arrived. We are no longer young and we have enough experience, mistakes, and we have much more knowledge about how computers work at a low level than the average for people in our field. To stay on the horse, you need to learn to think differently from what you are used to doing. You should not be scared by the need to get out of your head everything that you knew before and learn a new language like Swift, Python or Go. Yes, it can take years. You will make mistakes, new mistakes that you never had to make before. You will have to linger and understand in order to understand which tools are currently the most relevant. And you will observe how young people are overtaking you, not because they are smarter or more insistent, but because they are not afraid to plunge into some new-fangled technology, which 3 months ago did not exist at all. But this is exactly the atmosphere that you need. Again. Just as it was when you were just starting out. You will make mistakes, new mistakes that you never had to make before. You will have to linger and understand in order to understand which tools are currently the most relevant. And you will observe how young people are overtaking you, not because they are smarter or more insistent, but because they are not afraid to plunge into some new-fangled technology, which 3 months ago did not exist at all. But this is exactly the atmosphere that you need. Again. Just as it was when you were just starting out. You will make mistakes, new mistakes that you never had to make before. You will have to linger and understand in order to understand which tools are currently the most relevant. And you will observe how young people are overtaking you, not because they are smarter or more insistent, but because they are not afraid to plunge into some new-fangled technology, which 3 months ago did not exist at all. But this is exactly the atmosphere that you need. Again. Just as it was when you were just starting out. that he’s not afraid to plunge into any new-fangled technology, which 3 months ago did not exist at all. But this is exactly the atmosphere that you need. Again. Just as it was when you were just starting out. that he’s not afraid to plunge into any new-fangled technology, which 3 months ago did not exist at all. But this is exactly the atmosphere that you need. Again. Just as it was when you were just starting out.
This is what you signed up for. If you really want to be a programmer - cast aside doubts, cast off fear of aging and do not worry about the fact that your choice is different from the choice of your peers. Just get back to the start of this treadmill and enjoy the fact that life doesn't exactly end while you run. She's just getting started!
There is an old saying: “the more everything changes, the more obvious that everything remains unchanged.” Programming is still programming, right? In fact, things are not changing as dramatically as many of us expected. For example, we thought that programming by this time would become completely understandable and deterministic. This forecast has not been fulfilled. We thought that the time of bugs would be a thing of the past, but bugs still live in modern programs. And we also thought that it would take much less time to sort through possible solutions and discard deadlock options. But all this is still with us.
But from a different perspective, much has changed. When I wrote my first programs, they were launched on a scientific calculator from HP, all the programmers that could be seen wore white lab coats, and the Unix operating system (the latest at that time) consisted of 20,000 lines of code. Even in the mid-80s, software development was a rather strange, rare, and isolated subject area. Home computers, although they already got enough power for software development, still did not give access to the tools, knowledge and tools necessary for effective programming training.
I don’t know how many programmers were in the world when I started doing this in the 80s, but there weren’t that many of them. Until 1988, their number was not even reflected in the statistics collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By that time, 100,000 people had become professional programmers in the United States, and only 7,000 were senior.
The industry I joined was a specialist industry. Commitment and discipline were basic requirements. Today, the latest IDC study has counted 18 million programmers in the world and about half of them are not professional developers. The kernel of the Linux operating system consists of 9.8 million lines written by more than 6,000 authors. And besides him, there are 10 million more repositories on the Github, in the Google code base - 2 billion lines of code. Today, a lot of code is being written. Awful of code.
These staggering numbers show a general level of interest in programming and computer literacy. Stackoverflow reports about 32 million active users per month, and only 26% of them are from the USA. And you know what? Only 5% of these people are over 55 years old. Once access to the world of software development required discipline, dedication and expensive equipment, but today 80% of Americans have access to everything they need right from the comfort of home. And the younger generation takes advantage of this, displacing their parents from the profession.
Today's industry is completely different from the one I remember. Today, software development is a bit of an extreme sport. Anyone can start doing this, write some code, be careless, fall off a cliff and break to hell. It is no coincidence that modern Agile uses terms like “sprint” and “scrum”. You better get used to them, because coding skills are already becoming basic literacy. If every school on the planet teaches children programming from 10 years old, soon the current 18 million programmers will be a drop in the bucket. Those of us who have some experience understand what this means. On average, every application that you have to deal with will be a piece ... not of very high quality. As in any mass sport, most of the participants will be amateurs, only some of them will show promise, and only a few will reach the level of participants in the Olympics. To succeed today, you need to drop all prejudices about software development and embrace chaos.
Because of all this chaos, the software development world today is a hefty mess. People invent bicycles that we successfully used decades ago. They write obviously redundant libraries. They create new techniques that are not necessarily better than the old way of doing something like this.
But in addition, there are also amazing new ideas invented by people who thought outside the well-known basis. Languages like Go eliminate a number of complexities that were once introduced by the classic OOP and open the way to new, beautiful simplicity. Coroutines are changing the very paradigm of how people think about multithreading. We live in a golden age of software development and work tools are available to everyone.
To stay in the game, you need to jump onto the field, grab the ball and start playing with the rest of the players, even if they are 30 years younger. I will even say more: we, the older generation, have the responsibility to add our experience and wisdom to all these modern code bases and new projects. This can reduce chaos at some local points and increase the chance of success of some projects. Maybe even ours.
Thus, instead of perceiving each new term and technology that you hear about from a young programmer who has just re-invented something obvious, update your internal filters. Learn to see future winners and learn to help those who will become Olympic champions - you can do this with your own experience. I am sure that the topic of stupidity of the young generation of programmers will be hot at the next congress of Old Programmers, but I personally am not going to participate in this congress. And I do not advise you.
My favorite proverb says: “Software often gets better from removing code than from adding it.” The same goes for life, especially the life of a programmer. The number of things that should be studied is breathtaking. Everything that stops you from doing this, whether it’s your old program or an old idea, slows down your progress.
If you are already an experienced programmer, there are already many things in your toolkit that are time-tested and work just fine. This is your luck and at the same time your huge problem. Often I can write a function to parse something faster than find and connect the appropriate library. And besides, even if I decide to use the library, I want to be sure that it does its job correctly and by "right" here I mean "the way I would have done." And gradually, I began to notice that my instincts were becoming obsolete. I have to import the open source library and try it. And if it turns out that she is doing something wrong, I should try to improve it in order to create some artifact of the reused code, a little better quality than it was before my intervention.
The approach “it is time-tested and works well” is most often the main enemy of innovation. The only real way forward is to subject everything you know to constant doubt. Only after you try some new way to solve the problem, find out its pros and cons, will it be possible to decide whether to take the old proven method or prefer a new one. This creates in your brain an effective and flexible filter “I know because I just tried it” instead of the ineffective bunker “I know because I did and worked for many years.”
Often, this approach will cost you time and push you back to old habits and approaches. Often new items will really be less stable or flexible and you decide not to deviate from the classical path. And sometimes it will be the other way around. And, as I said before, this is what you subscribed to when choosing the path of a programmer. In the end, when using this approach, you will suddenly find that in your usual set of tools a couple of good libraries, several useful utilities, suddenly, one and the other, the third have suddenly added up. So - it was not in vain.
Imagine for a moment that you are 20 years old again. Somewhere in your second year at a university, you find that you not only enjoy learning to write programs, but you can even write something. And sometimes it even works out pretty well. Around you, you see people of your age who are looking ahead with enthusiasm. Some of them even start working or create their own applications, with the hope that business will someday grow out of this. When John Meyer was 19 years old, his company TapMedia already had about 40 applications in the Apple App Store.
Rewind forward.
What was that 20 year old guy that you don’t have today? Here's what: fearlessness and boundless enthusiasm. But today you have no less useful things: experience, knowledge, all your mistakes and all your successes are the most valuable basis!
If a 20-year-old can graduate and have a successful start-up even before he turns 25, then you can do it all the more! You do not need to check all the possible paths - some of them you have already passed and you know that there will be a failure. Do you have any idea not only about programming, but also about management, risks, money.
It doesn’t matter how old you are, your next successful software product is only a couple of years from you if you set yourself the right goal and go to it. Send your demons to the attic of consciousness. Yes, you are getting older, everyone is becoming, this cannot be stopped. But why, in the course of this matter, not yet achieve something meaningful? It won’t get any worse.
Achievements not only for young people. Arthur Rubinstein, one of the greatest pianists in the world, delighted the world with his wonderful game of 80 years. Julia Child (chef, author of cookbooks and host of cooking TV shows) never cooked until she was 40 years old. Roger created his famous thesaurus only in 73 years.
Thus, if you think that creating companies and writing software is only for young people, you should realize that this barrier is only in your head. There is, however, one point that with the advent of age cannot be ignored. Which brings us to the next point.
Remember those times when you could write code all night long and it didn’t bother you at all? The immersion in the code was complete, and there was enough energy until the very morning, and even for the whole next day. A table littered with cans of cola and leftover pizza, remember?
This will never happen again.
Your work today will not be built as it was then. Yes, it was amazing, but then your body allowed it to you, but now it is no longer. Today your body is like a partner in business: sometimes it helps, and sometimes it does not allow you to do something dangerous. This is a factor that you need to consider in your plans.
Signs of this are obvious to most of us. Muscles begin to hurt, about which you did not even know that you have them. The doctor insists that you lose weight and do more exercises. And when the optometrist first says the word “glasses” the time around is slowed down and you see the movement of his lips in slow motion, while you ponder what you hear.
If you do not have any serious illnesses, all these signs are symbolic. Every well-informed person knows that many physical problems can be solved by exercise, discipline and some change in the usual way of life.
Aging brings with it a whole new set of challenges, but taking care of your health makes the solution of all other problems easier. Good health makes any burden easier, and any risk less frightening. Yes, for this you have to work on yourself. It will take discipline.
Sometimes a serious obstacle may be the need to take risks again. After all, we already have such a responsibility - our families, children, financial obligations. With age, all this is taken more and more seriously. Going back to where you started years ago may seem irresponsible. But think about this: going back to the basics of programming in adulthood means you never have to go to bed. There will never be “I'm too old for all this” - there will always be things to learn, and there will always be things to do. That shining admiration with which you once wrote your first lines of code in your first language may be with you again in the future.
I hope all this brain food reminds you that it's never too late. It doesn’t matter what you had there in the past - in the field, programming will always be something to learn, and there will always be something to work on. If you are a business programmer, then do you not know in what chaos today the development of all business software is. If you are a web designer, then I’m sure that even in Web 8.0 everything will still be wrong. And if you are an iOS developer, then maybe you will finally write me a normal email client, huh? I would love to look at this.
Most of my life I worked as a software developer. But once, at the end of my fourth decade, I fell for the bait of entrepreneurial profit. I then believed that creating your own companies is cool. I found some venture capital and organized a couple of small startups to implement my own ideas. And so I became, as it seemed to me, a normal CEO and not such a bad manager. And, although I didn’t write the code personally, I could hire good programmers, manage the quality of projects and implement innovations.
I put up with the idea that my best code has already been written - in the past. I was already 54 years old (a lot!) And I probably could no longer write code as well as before. Who knows - maybe my memory has already begun to refuse, well, or I just learned everything that I was able to learn in life. My attitude was reinforced by observations of the reality surrounding me. All new technologies looked faddish for me. I hated Node.js. I found all web development frameworks terrible. And I complained that the classical methods of software development have collapsed and turned into a set of clichés, which nowadays blend in under smart names like Agile or “extreme programming”. I missed the days when people wrote a specification for future software, programmed it, and then carefully tested it. And when in each article there were not a thousand slang words.
One evening we watched the good old Star Trek and James Kirk said that he was getting old and running out of steam. Spock objected to him right away, as usual, in his confident and logical style:
“Accepting the promotion was your mistake. Commanding a ship is your only and best fate. ”
I missed the rest of the film - I thought about this phrase. Did I not do the same thing? Is it not in vain that I switched to the work of a manager (in which I was only moderately good), instead of surrendering to my fate and talent? Fortunately, I soon found the answer to this question and it was: "Yes, in vain." I forgot that writing the code was my very “only and best fate possible”, and the code I wrote was my most important creation in life. My first company was built around a piece of code I wrote, and even today, some of it still works. And after some period of self-digging, I threw out all my stereotypes that “the industry is not the same”. I began to learn new programming languages. I was lucky and even before I was 57, I finished developing one of the best software components that I had a chance to write in my life. It was a product for a small local startup. He was good: he had an idea, architecture, implementation. He, in the end, really meant something!
In the end, I decided to write a few thoughts for those people who, by virtue of their profession and age, are already in the same boat with me or will be there sooner or later.
1. Did you know what you were going for
As we get older, we all get tired. We get tired of the endless waste of time with minimal results. We get tired of seeing the same mistakes that happen over and over again. We begin to say things like "life is too short for that." And as our friends approach retirement, we often catch ourselves envious of their reliable, boring work, which will soon give them the opportunity to go on a well-deserved rest. The very idea of starting all over again, spending the next 20 years on this journey again seems ridiculous, does not find understanding among the family (especially if its members are not involved in software development).
Yes, when we recall the times when we were just starting to write software, it was incredibly exciting. Technologies were created and changed on the fly. So many problems still had to be solved, new challenges arose every day, and I had to invent and reinvent something. Software development was the new frontier of knowledge of mankind, where discoveries and opportunities arose constantly. For many of us, staying on this sparkling spearhead of progress has become a highlight and experience in life. It attracted us. And now, my friends, we have arrived. We are no longer young and we have enough experience, mistakes, and we have much more knowledge about how computers work at a low level than the average for people in our field. To stay on the horse, you need to learn to think differently from what you are used to doing. You should not be scared by the need to get out of your head everything that you knew before and learn a new language like Swift, Python or Go. Yes, it can take years. You will make mistakes, new mistakes that you never had to make before. You will have to linger and understand in order to understand which tools are currently the most relevant. And you will observe how young people are overtaking you, not because they are smarter or more insistent, but because they are not afraid to plunge into some new-fangled technology, which 3 months ago did not exist at all. But this is exactly the atmosphere that you need. Again. Just as it was when you were just starting out. You will make mistakes, new mistakes that you never had to make before. You will have to linger and understand in order to understand which tools are currently the most relevant. And you will observe how young people are overtaking you, not because they are smarter or more insistent, but because they are not afraid to plunge into some new-fangled technology, which 3 months ago did not exist at all. But this is exactly the atmosphere that you need. Again. Just as it was when you were just starting out. You will make mistakes, new mistakes that you never had to make before. You will have to linger and understand in order to understand which tools are currently the most relevant. And you will observe how young people are overtaking you, not because they are smarter or more insistent, but because they are not afraid to plunge into some new-fangled technology, which 3 months ago did not exist at all. But this is exactly the atmosphere that you need. Again. Just as it was when you were just starting out. that he’s not afraid to plunge into any new-fangled technology, which 3 months ago did not exist at all. But this is exactly the atmosphere that you need. Again. Just as it was when you were just starting out. that he’s not afraid to plunge into any new-fangled technology, which 3 months ago did not exist at all. But this is exactly the atmosphere that you need. Again. Just as it was when you were just starting out.
This is what you signed up for. If you really want to be a programmer - cast aside doubts, cast off fear of aging and do not worry about the fact that your choice is different from the choice of your peers. Just get back to the start of this treadmill and enjoy the fact that life doesn't exactly end while you run. She's just getting started!
2. Accept Chaos
There is an old saying: “the more everything changes, the more obvious that everything remains unchanged.” Programming is still programming, right? In fact, things are not changing as dramatically as many of us expected. For example, we thought that programming by this time would become completely understandable and deterministic. This forecast has not been fulfilled. We thought that the time of bugs would be a thing of the past, but bugs still live in modern programs. And we also thought that it would take much less time to sort through possible solutions and discard deadlock options. But all this is still with us.
But from a different perspective, much has changed. When I wrote my first programs, they were launched on a scientific calculator from HP, all the programmers that could be seen wore white lab coats, and the Unix operating system (the latest at that time) consisted of 20,000 lines of code. Even in the mid-80s, software development was a rather strange, rare, and isolated subject area. Home computers, although they already got enough power for software development, still did not give access to the tools, knowledge and tools necessary for effective programming training.
I don’t know how many programmers were in the world when I started doing this in the 80s, but there weren’t that many of them. Until 1988, their number was not even reflected in the statistics collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By that time, 100,000 people had become professional programmers in the United States, and only 7,000 were senior.
The industry I joined was a specialist industry. Commitment and discipline were basic requirements. Today, the latest IDC study has counted 18 million programmers in the world and about half of them are not professional developers. The kernel of the Linux operating system consists of 9.8 million lines written by more than 6,000 authors. And besides him, there are 10 million more repositories on the Github, in the Google code base - 2 billion lines of code. Today, a lot of code is being written. Awful of code.
These staggering numbers show a general level of interest in programming and computer literacy. Stackoverflow reports about 32 million active users per month, and only 26% of them are from the USA. And you know what? Only 5% of these people are over 55 years old. Once access to the world of software development required discipline, dedication and expensive equipment, but today 80% of Americans have access to everything they need right from the comfort of home. And the younger generation takes advantage of this, displacing their parents from the profession.
Today's industry is completely different from the one I remember. Today, software development is a bit of an extreme sport. Anyone can start doing this, write some code, be careless, fall off a cliff and break to hell. It is no coincidence that modern Agile uses terms like “sprint” and “scrum”. You better get used to them, because coding skills are already becoming basic literacy. If every school on the planet teaches children programming from 10 years old, soon the current 18 million programmers will be a drop in the bucket. Those of us who have some experience understand what this means. On average, every application that you have to deal with will be a piece ... not of very high quality. As in any mass sport, most of the participants will be amateurs, only some of them will show promise, and only a few will reach the level of participants in the Olympics. To succeed today, you need to drop all prejudices about software development and embrace chaos.
Because of all this chaos, the software development world today is a hefty mess. People invent bicycles that we successfully used decades ago. They write obviously redundant libraries. They create new techniques that are not necessarily better than the old way of doing something like this.
But in addition, there are also amazing new ideas invented by people who thought outside the well-known basis. Languages like Go eliminate a number of complexities that were once introduced by the classic OOP and open the way to new, beautiful simplicity. Coroutines are changing the very paradigm of how people think about multithreading. We live in a golden age of software development and work tools are available to everyone.
To stay in the game, you need to jump onto the field, grab the ball and start playing with the rest of the players, even if they are 30 years younger. I will even say more: we, the older generation, have the responsibility to add our experience and wisdom to all these modern code bases and new projects. This can reduce chaos at some local points and increase the chance of success of some projects. Maybe even ours.
Thus, instead of perceiving each new term and technology that you hear about from a young programmer who has just re-invented something obvious, update your internal filters. Learn to see future winners and learn to help those who will become Olympic champions - you can do this with your own experience. I am sure that the topic of stupidity of the young generation of programmers will be hot at the next congress of Old Programmers, but I personally am not going to participate in this congress. And I do not advise you.
3. What you throw away is more important than what you leave
My favorite proverb says: “Software often gets better from removing code than from adding it.” The same goes for life, especially the life of a programmer. The number of things that should be studied is breathtaking. Everything that stops you from doing this, whether it’s your old program or an old idea, slows down your progress.
If you are already an experienced programmer, there are already many things in your toolkit that are time-tested and work just fine. This is your luck and at the same time your huge problem. Often I can write a function to parse something faster than find and connect the appropriate library. And besides, even if I decide to use the library, I want to be sure that it does its job correctly and by "right" here I mean "the way I would have done." And gradually, I began to notice that my instincts were becoming obsolete. I have to import the open source library and try it. And if it turns out that she is doing something wrong, I should try to improve it in order to create some artifact of the reused code, a little better quality than it was before my intervention.
The approach “it is time-tested and works well” is most often the main enemy of innovation. The only real way forward is to subject everything you know to constant doubt. Only after you try some new way to solve the problem, find out its pros and cons, will it be possible to decide whether to take the old proven method or prefer a new one. This creates in your brain an effective and flexible filter “I know because I just tried it” instead of the ineffective bunker “I know because I did and worked for many years.”
Often, this approach will cost you time and push you back to old habits and approaches. Often new items will really be less stable or flexible and you decide not to deviate from the classical path. And sometimes it will be the other way around. And, as I said before, this is what you subscribed to when choosing the path of a programmer. In the end, when using this approach, you will suddenly find that in your usual set of tools a couple of good libraries, several useful utilities, suddenly, one and the other, the third have suddenly added up. So - it was not in vain.
4. You will never be "too old"
Imagine for a moment that you are 20 years old again. Somewhere in your second year at a university, you find that you not only enjoy learning to write programs, but you can even write something. And sometimes it even works out pretty well. Around you, you see people of your age who are looking ahead with enthusiasm. Some of them even start working or create their own applications, with the hope that business will someday grow out of this. When John Meyer was 19 years old, his company TapMedia already had about 40 applications in the Apple App Store.
Rewind forward.
What was that 20 year old guy that you don’t have today? Here's what: fearlessness and boundless enthusiasm. But today you have no less useful things: experience, knowledge, all your mistakes and all your successes are the most valuable basis!
If a 20-year-old can graduate and have a successful start-up even before he turns 25, then you can do it all the more! You do not need to check all the possible paths - some of them you have already passed and you know that there will be a failure. Do you have any idea not only about programming, but also about management, risks, money.
It doesn’t matter how old you are, your next successful software product is only a couple of years from you if you set yourself the right goal and go to it. Send your demons to the attic of consciousness. Yes, you are getting older, everyone is becoming, this cannot be stopped. But why, in the course of this matter, not yet achieve something meaningful? It won’t get any worse.
Achievements not only for young people. Arthur Rubinstein, one of the greatest pianists in the world, delighted the world with his wonderful game of 80 years. Julia Child (chef, author of cookbooks and host of cooking TV shows) never cooked until she was 40 years old. Roger created his famous thesaurus only in 73 years.
Thus, if you think that creating companies and writing software is only for young people, you should realize that this barrier is only in your head. There is, however, one point that with the advent of age cannot be ignored. Which brings us to the next point.
5. Your health is your new business partner.
Remember those times when you could write code all night long and it didn’t bother you at all? The immersion in the code was complete, and there was enough energy until the very morning, and even for the whole next day. A table littered with cans of cola and leftover pizza, remember?
This will never happen again.
Your work today will not be built as it was then. Yes, it was amazing, but then your body allowed it to you, but now it is no longer. Today your body is like a partner in business: sometimes it helps, and sometimes it does not allow you to do something dangerous. This is a factor that you need to consider in your plans.
Signs of this are obvious to most of us. Muscles begin to hurt, about which you did not even know that you have them. The doctor insists that you lose weight and do more exercises. And when the optometrist first says the word “glasses” the time around is slowed down and you see the movement of his lips in slow motion, while you ponder what you hear.
If you do not have any serious illnesses, all these signs are symbolic. Every well-informed person knows that many physical problems can be solved by exercise, discipline and some change in the usual way of life.
Aging brings with it a whole new set of challenges, but taking care of your health makes the solution of all other problems easier. Good health makes any burden easier, and any risk less frightening. Yes, for this you have to work on yourself. It will take discipline.
Sometimes a serious obstacle may be the need to take risks again. After all, we already have such a responsibility - our families, children, financial obligations. With age, all this is taken more and more seriously. Going back to where you started years ago may seem irresponsible. But think about this: going back to the basics of programming in adulthood means you never have to go to bed. There will never be “I'm too old for all this” - there will always be things to learn, and there will always be things to do. That shining admiration with which you once wrote your first lines of code in your first language may be with you again in the future.
conclusions
I hope all this brain food reminds you that it's never too late. It doesn’t matter what you had there in the past - in the field, programming will always be something to learn, and there will always be something to work on. If you are a business programmer, then do you not know in what chaos today the development of all business software is. If you are a web designer, then I’m sure that even in Web 8.0 everything will still be wrong. And if you are an iOS developer, then maybe you will finally write me a normal email client, huh? I would love to look at this.