Great article.

I turned 50 last year and have been programming since I bought a ZX Spectrum computer with my first wage packet in 1983. I’m a better programmer today than I’ve ever been and regard age as utterly irrelevant because I work independently. My brother, who’s 45, is a C# programmer in a corporate and he’s much more aware of, and worried, about his age.

My attitude is that you can either do it or you can’t. End users couldn’t give a toss about how old the developer of their web app, game or server backend is, they only care if it works. Employers might be more prejudiced, in their ignorance, but all the more reason to work for yourself and live off the efforts of your own labours fuelled as they are by the sheer variety of experience a programmer gets over the years. Coding is an amazing, ever changing landscape with, at its core, a limited set of eternal skills. I feel lucky to have grown up during a time when access to computing and communication became more or less universal.

I agree with the core message — learn, learn, learn. And do it because you love it.