It’s ok to grow old, to be passed by, to ignore the industries of triviality
I was birthed to the thud of a dull pulse, then the electric buzz of cathodes warming up; my vocal cords thrust forward their first notes in tentative strokes across the keyboard; my mind grew as ideas interacted with the simplicity of GOTO run.
I was 12 when I saw the neon glow of a batch file, that served to provide as my families guide to the programs preinstalled on our new computer. I was also twelve when I discovered what it was after accidentally deleting it. My best friend and I spent more time in the guts of that system than my parents did even launching one program. It was a grand time! We had energy, qbasic, all the time in the world, and the world of random read/writes at our door to explore! Our first “programs” consisted of making basic text adventure games with backdoors that only one of us knew about, and the other would constantly try to figure out. There was no one to tell us how to code (our parents being fairly digitally illiterate), no one to tell us what a bad idea was, not a soul to code review or test our codes performance: we had only our wits, a built in language manual, and a dot matrix screeching away as it printed said manual for days on end.
My best friend had a TI-80 we would lug around as well, coding on it and learning some assembly and soldering skills for repairs. Betwixt the two we would stay up late in the night, shrouding our screens with blankets to hide the fact that we weren’t sleeping from our parents.
We also lived out in the country and had several other friends around us who were learning. One of these friends had a friend in college. We would often walk 6 miles to his house for the night, spending it around many bowls of plain popcorn and picking apart C/C++ programs that his friend would pass on for study or to improve. Being slightly older and wiser now, I secretly think we were doing some of his assignments.
I was 14 when I started seeing computers pop up at stores and small businesses in my the small towns around me. I knew enough to see the problems others were having, and was just stupid enough to jump in and build applications to help them without knowing anything about business. Deadlines? Insurance? Intellectual Property? …
My best friend and I started toying with contracts, partnerships, and other business related tools. Much like the backdoors and secret incantations that were built into our games, we started toying with complex ownership clauses, intellectual property, and exit strategies. Road trips consisted of us often huddle in the back of a van with our folders scratching out ways to screw each other in business, or new game ideas to map out. My friend was a shark! Often I’d have a game idea, we’d build a publishing agreement, and go to building the game. A week later as we’re in the heat of developing the game, he’d argue over some subtle point in the agreement and claim majority ownership of the game, just to get me going. I learned through trial by fire, and he was the fire.
Moving forward past the awkward phase where I left my computer behind under duress, fleeing said best friend in the cover of the night, and where I got desperate enough without a computer to consider writing code via a typewriter for future compiling…
38 That’s my magic number these days. Twenty-six years from where I began, twenty-four years from my first sale, and two years from the magical programmer age of forty. I’ve spent a fair half of that working with startups and the rest mostly running my own businesses — throw in a few corporate years that I mostly hated just for kicks. By all accounts, I’m either going to throw in the towel or somehow make it through the aging out period… but I think those accounts are biased and I’m in this for the long haul.
So while busily growing my gray beard, and mentoring others, I’ve noted a lot of things are changing. I’m not as energetic, not as willing to throw myself into projects on hope alone, and definitely not willing to not implement something a certain way just because it’s what a conference speaker thought was the new hotness. I often feel bad that I am not keeping pace with the younger coders around me in terms of sheer code they churn out. On the other hand, I don’t scrap as much work as they do and almost always know the right approach to solve a problem without having to hit Google or SO first.
Experience means something here damnit! It means that I’ve seen the same ideas come and go before, having often been in the implementation of some of them; I can look at a problem, solve it, and then see a new framework pop up that solves it in almost the same fashion validating my solution; I can evaluate new languages and quickly pull my understanding of how languages work in general, and apply that to shortening the ramp up time into said languages.
There’s more than that though. I can spot a bad idea from a long way off, while newer coders and business people spin the wheels for months on them. I know how to sell an idea, put together a crew, and implement the idea from the ground up. Do you need to bootstrap a startup while working a full time job? I’ve done that over and over again.
So here’s where I get to the point. As I watch the world of excited new coders buzz around me, I recognize my ability to not keep up with the same stamina, and that’s ok: I’m still effective, still on the cutting edge, and I don’t need to run the race they’re running — They are running in a staggered set and I’ve already run the shift before. I can ignore the battles over new frameworks that come up (ignorantly reinventing the old), new flame wars that begin over the tendencies of languages or patterns, and new forms of running old businesses through the same tired hoops: I have carried my own sword into the fray of my youth, having come out more confident that the emergency is hyperbole and not of any substance. I can rest knowing that I will never leave the edge: the edge provides me a better view with which to see where we are headed — to research new possibilities that the youth would often run pass in their efforts to learn the proper way to work. I can teach, research, and watch with pride as new generations of programmers grow up around me.
It’s ok to grow old, because I have so much to share;
To be passed by, because others now tread the ground I’ve already walked;
To ignore the industries of the trivial, because there is more important work to be done.
