The Aging Programmer [video]

I haven't tried e-foil, but did I thoroughly enjoy learning to balance on a racing stand up paddle board last summer (only 23" wide). It took me many hilariously humbling weeks of constantly falling off before I could stay up for any distance. I loved feeling inept and awkward but with only benign consequences: failure means a mere dunk in warm water.

yeh, the poor neighborhoods are full of grocery stores with fresh food and not food deserts

AMA any better as a source? https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/how-use-bmi-fet...

I'm a software engineer maybe half the age of the speaker, probably less. But I am already gradually going blind. (No one knows whether I'll reach legal blindness in 5 years or 25, but its presence in my future is a certainty.)

It's striking, if not surprising, how relatable this talk is to me. My biggest difficulties are with contrast and brightness, and it's clear that dropping night driving will be the first major life change required by my degrading vision. Many-- maybe even most-- of the compensatory measures the speaker suggests for dealing with vision loss are already part of my life.

For me, these similarities and others feel very natural and very right, even a little comforting. My eye disease is genetic, with no treatments and no cure, and so part of what it has taught and reminded me is that bodies fail, and the terms of when and how they fail isn't up to us. One of the things I really like about this talk is how unsentimental it is (without being cold, either). Disability isn't a question of if but of when and how-- and that's not a tragic thing any more than the abstract fact of death, either-- it's just a part of nature, of life.

I like this talk because it reminds us that aging, injury, disability, and adapting to those things (individually and collectively) are common threads in human lives. They're something we should know to expect. We may not be fully in control, but we can prepare-- prepare ourselves, our families, our workplaces, our governments, our cities and towns and neighborhoods-- to accommodate the inevitability of various shades and varieties of disability in ourselves and the people around us. Embracing an awareness of the universality of disability can ground us even in the face of bodily changes that frighten and grieve us. We can know they're not the end of the world because they've always been part of the world around us.

This talk may be worth a watch even if you think it's not really about you. :)

I'm 40; you're fine. I put down Instagram last year, and I never even think of it anymore. Your mind evolved over millions of years, "short form content" is not going to rewrite that. Once you delete that stuff off of your phone, your brain will immediately free up that headspace, like Instagram never even existed.

I don't know about my concentration. I've got more non-negotiable responsibilities now, so I have less time to work on things, but I work on them harder, and I take advantage of the off time to let solutions bubble up.

I'm a better and faster programmer than I've ever been, though I'm probably un-hirable anywhere that filters by age (almost everywhere).

My problem in my role atm is not skill, it's the competition for bandwidth both inside the role, and outside it (i.e. that I have a life consistent with my age, which has a lot of moving parts itself).

22-year-old-me worked past midnight, but 22-year-old-me sometimes had to because they couldn't draw boundaries, manage scope, manage time, etc. I was smart then too but had fewer hacks burned into memory.

I rarely do late nights now, not because I don't want to—tearing myself away remains excrutiating—but because I can't.

Not because of ability, though I'm sure that's diminished objectivley; but because I have responsibilities which don't mesh with no-sleep or being cranky from lack of it.