I started writing front-end around 27, and I started doing it professionally at 31. I'm 38 now and I'm a principal solutions consultant. Career-wise I've peaked — unless I decide to jump to management or to start my own company.
Browsers change fast. There's new frameworks every few weeks. JavaScript changes every year. New CSS stuff all the time. New NPM packages every few minutes.
I mean, this is all a given in our industry, but this is on my mind a lot because it makes me wonder how much longer I can keep up. And thinking about how much longer I can keep up makes me think about retirement — at least from writing code professionally.
I figure I might have another 5 years in me as a professional developer. Maybe 5 after that focused on purely architecture. After that, "retirement" from writing code professionally at 48.
After that time, I might write code for funsies in my spare time. After all, that, "writing code for fun" was how it became a profession. But I won't be building stuff and shipping it. I won't be up late at night because production's down. I won't be doing pull requests. I won't be installing linters and running npm audits.
My relationship from code will go back to what it was in the beginning: an appreciation for how wonderfully useful it can be to know how to talk to computers.
But to be honest, I yearn for the day where I don't have to care about knowing what the latest hawtness is in web development.
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I started writing front-end around 27, and I started doing it professionally at 31. I'm 38 now and I'm a principal solutions consultant. Career-wise I've peaked — unless I decide to jump to management or to start my own company.
Browsers change fast. There's new frameworks every few weeks. JavaScript changes every year. New CSS stuff all the time. New NPM packages every few minutes.
I mean, this is all a given in our industry, but this is on my mind a lot because it makes me wonder how much longer I can keep up. And thinking about how much longer I can keep up makes me think about retirement — at least from writing code professionally.
I figure I might have another 5 years in me as a professional developer. Maybe 5 after that focused on purely architecture. After that, "retirement" from writing code professionally at 48.
After that time, I might write code for funsies in my spare time. After all, that, "writing code for fun" was how it became a profession. But I won't be building stuff and shipping it. I won't be up late at night because production's down. I won't be doing pull requests. I won't be installing linters and running npm audits.
My relationship from code will go back to what it was in the beginning: an appreciation for how wonderfully useful it can be to know how to talk to computers.
But to be honest, I yearn for the day where I don't have to care about knowing what the latest hawtness is in web development.