Programming After 40
I’m 40 years-old and I’ve been working on dev of some sort or another for two-and-a-half decades. I have a reliable career, but still have time to work on toy projects for fun when I want, and yet lately…I have not been interested.
Now what?
Now that I’ve been 40 for about 4 months, perhaps it’s finally hitting me: I’ve been coding computers to do things I want since the mid-1990s. Sure, the technology and frameworks and systems change, but I’m still mainly adding or updating text with qualifiers so that things appear on a screen somewhere for a human to look at.
What’s Been Done?
So what do I have to show for myself after 25 years? Some highlights:
- Nebyoolae Music
- Raffler
- Rorasuketo
- Gem Warrior
- Feep
- Utterly
- Axeracer
- Oh, and this site, itself, of course
What’s Going On?
Most of my programming lately continues to be work-related and for Drupal 8. I’m no longer scared of making core patches or delving into config files or messing with custom themes and modules. So, there’s that.
Personal programming has largely been relegated to minor updates on existing projects. Imagining starting on a completely new project just feels like a huge thing, and inspiration has been sorely lacking for a while.
I got the official book on redstone by Mojang and it’s definitely ignited my curiosity. Redstone has always been one of those “well, I sorta know how it works” kind of things, and I’d love to be better at it.
What’s To Be Done?
There’s always the potential of making another game, since that idea is always bubbling around. In other news, we got a fancy Sony TV to replace an ailing Vizio model, and all the remote apps to control it are unacceptable for various reasons. Maybe I could get back into Swift and actually finally make an iOS app?
For now, I guess I don’t really need a project, right? I mean, the push to constantly create has been monopolized by music for a while now and maybe there’s just no room currently for a dev project.