Ask HN: Resources for older developers?

Do you have a special pair of glasses for the normal computer distance? I ask for them every time my prescription updates. I have two pairs of glasses, one for driving and one for computer/around the house, and my headaches/eye strain have gone way down since I started wearing those regularly.

Not sure if that helps at all. Kind of sounds like you're not wanting to wear glasses at all. I've been wearing mine since I've been six years old, so I don't really know any other way (tried contacts for a year and they were just too annoying to deal with).

I'd say IRC still using it since the 90s from Blender, the times where Php was hot, Javascript, nowadays mostly Rust and Bash. Of course I have no idea how old other people are, but considering the "nicknames" I see online for more then a decade or two, its very likely that some people are about my age if not more.

Check https://libera.chat/

I have to confess that I've been more conscious about my age, for the first time ever. I am 40 years old and a couple weeks ago, during a bank holiday in the UK, sunny and nice, took my skateboard to attempt a board slide in a grind rail on a ramp angled down. My first few attempts were almost there, I was tired and thirsty but decided to give it another go and injured my knee (not yet clear what it is), but I'm a bit worried that it might be serious and that this might have been the last big trick attempt on my skateboard. I've also started Muay Thai about a year ago and was planning to fight in the next few months.

Some of my colleagues at work are as young as 17 and the oldest about 31 :D

I've seen the internet in the early days.

Feel like I'm more knowledgable but only when hot in a certain topic, which might be anything during a certain period or project duration. But think it always been like that. In case of looking for work, usually take some time to study the stack of the company but this takes a lot of effort and time and people seem to not have empathy and find that most are time wasters.

I've never been the kind of person who goes to conferences or looks for code buddies and stuff, but get some contacts occasionally through my website https://punkbit.com or github account https://github.com/heldrida

To summarise, you can be on IRC and forget about your age :)

> What you really just lose is patience for BS :)

41 here and I agree with most of the comments from the elder. One thing though I think we older people have to acknowledge is that we might have changed the BS bar. It feels a bit to me like saying that there is no music like the one from 20 years ago.

I am trying to be positive and that is something I say to myself :)

You lose 10% of your ability to react and think quickly, not your ability to think. In fact, the older you get the more deep your thinking becomes. This is probably what you see when you think “John is slow to respond at times” (John being the older, 40+ developer). The reality is John remembers the last time someone suggested using MongoDB as a caching store and how well that worked out. John is recalling all those crunchtime meetings in the war room because someone wrote bad code or the software architecturally failed. The slowness to respond is them weighing all the options, for which they have more in the catalog than you. A binary search on 100,000 objects is fast (22 year old), a binary search on 1,000,000,000 is slow (a 40+ year old). Ageism is just fancy employment discrimination. I’m 40 and I continue to experience ageism and discrimination but I endure because I love what I do, others will find value in that, and the money is better than working at 84Lumber.