Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

There's engineering challenges in frontend but they only apply to Facebook-tier scale. There's also cooler stuff like data visualization, advanced animations/design and WebGL but those seem to be done by designers. For most of us, it truly is gluing X framework to Y backend over and over again.

I'm about to hit 40 as well, and I completely identify with the pressure to keep up to date with new languages and frameworks, with the fact that I've lost memory of many things I haven't used recently, and that despite the proliferation of the new new thing, there really aren't that many new ideas out there.

But the thing is, I really like that I must always be learning. I just have that kind of brain that is attracted to learning new things, so for me this career has always been a natural fit.

In the last few years I learnt Meteor.js and built an issue tracker from scratch; I made several attempts at gaming projects using C++, C#, Swift, and others; I played Microcorruption and Cryptopals and Starfighter to learn a bunch about assembly, reverse engineering, crypto and security; I learnt Go and built a compiler with it; and right now my attention is moving towards lua to do some pico8 games. I did all this on the side of my boring corporate java developer job, and for no other reason than I wanted to learn new things. (OK, maybe I had big dreams of a startup with the issue tracker, but the others were purely for fun.)

I'm probably never going to be well known for any of those things, and I really haven't built up the chops to be considered an expert in any of them. But I'm content being a dilettante. Perhaps one day I'll get exhausted of exploring new things, but until then it's just fun to just dabble in whatever takes my fancy.

I started programming when I was 7, I'm 45 next month :)

The one thing in the programming world that is almost 100% applicable to almost every article like this ( and many other topics ) is..... it depends.

I'm fortunate in that for most all my career I have spanned many technologies from embedded systems to the latest crazes on the web. Mostly what becomes redundant is language syntax and framework. If your programming career is largely centered around these then you become redundant pretty quick (or super valuable when critical systems are built with them then need maintenance forever ).

Frameworks come and go so if you spend a lot of time creating solutions that shuffle data from a DB to a screen then shuffle data back into a DB.... then a majority of your programming skills will become redundant relatively quickly. ( maybe a half life of 4 years? ). But often when you are doing this, the real skill is translating what people want into software solutions, which is a timeless skill that has to be built over a number of projects.

If you work in highly algorithmic areas, then not a lot of your skills become redundant. Though you may find libraries evolve that solve problems that you had to painfully do from scratch. However that deep knowledge is important.

Design, the more complex a system is to engineer (that isn't provided to you via a framework), the more likely you will have skills that won't go redundant. Design knowledge is semi timeless. My books on cgi programming circa the mid nineties are next to useless, but my GOF Design Patterns book is still full of knowledge that anyone should still know. OOSC by Betrand Meyer is still full of relevant good ideas. My books on functional programming from the 80s are great. The Actor model which has its history in the 70s is getting appreciated by the cool kids using elixir/erlang

Skills in debugging are often timeless, not sure there's any technique I'd not use anymore. ( though putting logic probes on all the data and address lines of a CPU to find that the CPU has a bug in it's interrupt handling is not often needed now )

This doesn't directly to the statement you're refuting, but he explicitly mentioned half-life.

The author does basically ignore the core knowledge aspects of a programmers career, and he bases his entire argument on the half-life of usefulness of detailed knowledge about specific technologies.

Sure, if you like 3-month contracts.