🔗 The forty-year programmer

In 2024, I’ll have been a programmer for 40 years. I’m not quite there yet, but I’ll get there. That’s different from making the most money developing software, or starting a software company. I do make good money. But that’s not what all this is about.

I think you might want to be a software developer for a long time, in the same way that some people are musicians for a long time, or artists for a long time, or roofers for a long time. If not, you can hit “back” in your browser. It’s cool, no harm no foul. But I think maybe you would like to be a twenty-year programmer, or forty-year, or more.

I’m not going to tell you what language or framework to learn. If you’re good at the basics you can learn anything you want. Until then, you can be bad at whichever one you want. That’s what I did, anyway.

Instead I’ll talk about things that didn’t make sense to me when I started, and now they’re the guiding stars in my sky. That means it’s not about specific technologies. Technologies come and go. Languages come and go. They can’t be your sky.

Let’s start with this: software is young.