Ask HN: Software development after 40, how do you keep the fire?

I'm 47 and got my first programming job at 19. I still love it and look forward to a good number more years. I have a few guidelines/principles that seem to have worked so far:

* Do meaningful work, whatever that means to you. Maybe it's picking a domain that helps people or society, or maybe it's some other criterion. Ask yourself what meaningful work is to you.

* Be mindful about your craftsmanship and always work to improve it. Try to write solid, expressive, readable code that works, and be critical about your own code. Read other people's code closely and see what you can learn from it. Explore new technologies, not just for "variety" but for what you can learn from what led to their development and how they were implemented.

* Engage in mentorship of younger developers. Mentorship can really do a lot to renew your love of coding. If your employer doesn't have an established mentorship program try to help set one up. If that doesn't work, there are coding bootcamps that will let you work as little as an hour a week mentoring new developers as a consultant.

* Try to be that person within your organization that others want to come to with their thorny technical problems. Listen deeply and respond compassionately.

* Work on side projects. They don't have to change the world or "go somewhere". A side project can remind you why you love programming when the daily becomes a grind.

I noticed that about "Weird Al" Yankovic. He's in his late fifties and yet -- even as he works in a field where even long-lived artists peak in their 20s or 30s, his music just gets ever more sophisticated, and funnier.

Weird Al is essentially a comedian, and they only really get good after many years of life experience.

When friends try to pitch me on their million-dollar ideas, I feel that I have a much better ability to estimate the size and scope. So instead of starting construction, I'm more likely to say something like '3 full-time devs working 6 months for a solid prototype, another 6 months for something that could be released' -- who's paying for all of this?

One of the most helpful things that I've done in my life has been to make sets of friends who are different ages than I am.

It helps me understand that although there are certain states of life people tend towards, aging isn't as harsh for everyone.

When I was 25, I thought that people who were 50 were ancient. But I play with a blues band and the drummer is 73 and still gets under houses to do plumbing.

My friends in their 80s who are still working are often slow... we all become geriatric at some point if we live long enough.

But I've also met people in their 50s who are really, really old. And I mostly date women in their 40s, and one of the most interesting things has been how old some people in their 40s are and how young some people in their 50s are.

A second thing that has helped me is that I keep playing with new stuff, just for fun. I keep taking up new instruments (I've been spending a lot of time playing banjo and piano, but this year I built a modular synthesizer and have been enjoying that way of making noise quite a bit). I keep learning new technical skills and because of the business I am in I can have my boss sell projects that allow me to practice the ones I think will be more profitable. And all that has taught me how much we can actually learn if we're just spending a 20-30 minutes a day on a specific practice, over the course of years.

So, I just turned 40 a couple of months ago, I sent my kid off to list first day as a high school senior. And I've got enough time to do about 3 more careers in my life. I've been a university professor, a semi-professional musician, and right now I'm a pretty good programmer and all-around IT worker.

Knowing all those people older than me, I'm able to see how much longer I might be here. I stopped drinking, got down to a very healthy weight, took up exercises that are fun (a lot of yoga, mountain biking, and hiking). I've gotten a lot picker about how I have romantic relationships. I travel more to visit my friends who have their kids tying them to a locale.

And knowing how much progress we can make by constant, slow study has made me super excited about learning general things. I read a lot of philosophy and history, but I also do a lot of playing with technology.

I started learning math again, because I feel like that will be important for understanding the various kinds of statistics I'll have to do to work with statistical tools like machine learning. CRUD apps have paid my bills for a long time, but I don't know how much longer I'll get a thrill out of building them.

So that's what I do. I'm not worried about making it big as a musician or a programmer because I like the process and I can get enough remuneration from it to keep everything going as long as I feel like living.

And I suspect that I am actually a lot quicker witted, can pay attention longer, and have a better memory now that I occasionally fast, am not drinking every day. I suspect that a lot of my friends in their 40s aren't "slower", they just have kids and are dealing with it by drinking, like I did in my 20s. And I do know that we age, but I also know that how we age isn't the same for everyone... with good luck, we have a whole lot of time to learn and play with interesting ideas.