How do you handle your Aging in IT?

I'm 70 this year, older and slower but still interested in CS. Everyone will have a different background, but here are some things that have helped me.

I keep most of my books. I now have a technical library of several thousand books acquired over half a century of doing math, programming, and CS. I remember where to find things in books better than online since the online territory shifts constantly. So, if I'm looking for a "modern" quicksort I use Sedgwick and if I want to review Prim's algorithm I use Cormin, et. al. Books are easier to read and carry around the house. Books are quicker to skim though than YouTube videos. I can see my old margin notes in books. Even mundane books, like my Assembly Language reference for the CDC 6600 mainframe, can come in handy many years later. I recall pulling it out and looking at it's unique ASM language just a couple of year ago for some idea I had.

I've programmed in somewhere between 40 and 100 programming languages. Some, I've lost track of because I didn't keep my books, but when HN has an active thread on Prolog I can go back and look at the half dozen books on Prolog programming I've got.

The younger me didn't realize how I might want to review the now classic IBM 360 Principles of Operation manual many years later; sadly, there a lot of books I wished I had kept but didn't.

Keep reading. I'm currently working through An Invitation to Applied Category Theory by Fong and Spivak.

Take classes. I found that taking real university courses really help me refresh things I learned years ago. Some are available online, but I am lucky enough to have a world class university here in town where I have taken maybe six courses over the years, usually just one or two per year. I'm able to register there for real math and CS classes at the undergrad and graduate level and these have been great experiences. Not everyone will be able to do this, but there are online alternatives. There is a big disadvantage though, universities expect the students to conform to their schedule. So forget about taking a trip to Europe with your partner in the middle of a semester. One can generally only take a university class in person if you have complete control over your own schedule (i.e. self-employed or semi-retired).

Become a member of the ACM and at a minimum read the monthly Communications of the ACM. The unique value of the ACM for me is access to their Digital Library of every past ACM article published. Want to read Dijkstra's famous "Go To Considered Harmful"? It's in the Digital Library.

Do personal projects. Solve the "Bomb Lab", for example. Write programs to generate mazes, there is a book for this. Implement a ray-tracer, there is a book for that too. Write a compiler for Pascal (many books for this) in Common Lisp. Write a program to play Othello. Write a 2D game using Open GL. Some of these can be a bit daunting, but I find writing programs are the best way to learn new programming languages. Some of this will depend on your background.

Learn Python. Many programmers will already know Python, but if not, it's very easy to pick up. It's perfect for one-person projects: easy to get into, concise and expressive. When a project needs better performance try go. It's also easy to get into and is a great programming language for typical professional systems work. These two languages will allow you to stay relevant and to do a wide variety of personal projects.

Get a big monitor. It's much easier on my eyes to have a large monitor sitting farther away from me than a laptop sitting close to me.

Exercise seems to keep my mind sharp. In my late 50s I did marathons. This was hard on my body so I might recommend half-marathons as reasonable goals. Now, I've switched to swimming (I don't really like it as much as running, but it is easier on my knees).

It's striking that this dark truth got two downvotes. I'm curious what the downvoters thought they were saying.

Speaking as a geezer dev, I am very confident that age is an obstacle. I am also confident that it doesn't have to stop us. It is a handicap and if we excel we can beat it.

Isn't hard to get a job at a university if you don't have a PhD or are a candidate (at least in US)?

Thanks for this. Lots of good information to ponder. Reflecting, I'm still active and doing things I'm interested in (putting a modern engine in a 60's motorcycle because I wanted to, and it was the most expedient way to do so), I get on the road bike every other day, and there's plenty of plans and things to work for.

I think the part that's been making me hyperventilate is that I'm at an inflection point in my career, adapt or die, and the things I've been great at and paid well for...I won't be. I've got good skills and intuition at handling security data at scale and need to lean into that. Creating and maintaining the infrastructure to do that is what's going away.

I was in incident response and occasionally miss it. It was VERY interesting, but If I'm honest, I don't think I was enjoying it at the time. I certainly didn't enjoy the schedule the attackers made me keep.

Your observations on having a library are things I've seen in other people in the field, I shied away from it because it always seemed like the things I was interested in hadn't fully gelled yet, And it always seemed that way. So now the internet is my library, with no margin notes and many more hits returned to overwhelm.

I hear ya on the Monitor front. Working on cars/motorcycles has gotten a lot more difficult lately as things are too dim, too close to see with my glasses on, and just far enough away to see with my glasses off.