How do you manage yourself and your time as years pass on?

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48 comments, last by taby 1 week, 5 days ago

Would like to ask about your personal experience and possibly if you can suggest a few tips.

I'll describe my situation a bit:

Been programming for quite some time now and relatively recently I've been hit by ageing (i.e. getting older).
Unfortunately, not everyone is equal in terms of health/body response to time passing and/or possible conditions.

So in short, I clearly felt the extra years: gained weight, more fatigue, need to sleep more, working more slowly, etc.
In the beginning it was hard to cope with body reaction, but eventually over the months I stabilized myself.

Overall, although I work slower than before, I take better decisions than, say, when I started coding.
Basically, having less energy than before forced me to rethink my global strategy, had no other choice.
Can't say I'm 100% in the right direction but one has to re-adapt itself to keep things going, survival instinct I guess…

Hope that makes sense to you and maybe you can provide a few coder's daily life tips/time management.

(posting in beginner section as I couldn't think of a better place)

🥳😁

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Aybe One said:
Overall, although I work slower than before, I take better decisions than, say, when I started coding.

Yes, that's how we aging people self-confirm we are still useful :D

The increased experience can compensate the loss in performance for quite some time.

But not forever. Our days are counted…

Aybe One said:
maybe you can provide a few coder's daily life tips/time management.

Probably all we can do is keep coding, avoiding longer breaks.

I can relate this to musicians. People who stop playing the instrument daily notice a quick decay of skill at higher age, and at some point conclude they just can't get back to it and give up completely.
Others, who keep playing daily, notice a decline too, but can keep some level of virtuosity even til high age, if there are no serious body issues preventing it.

I guess it's the same for us, but we are more lucky not requiring precise body control.

I used to code using C#, couple of decades ago, since then I have address my carrer to managerial position, leaving behind the code skills and become obsolete, now I am struggling trying to catch up. How do you managed being updated and stay ahead of the tech trends and be able to just code the way it is today?

@JoeJ

Back then I remember seeing old guys, I guess 60+ or something that would still do coding on some obscure mainframes… There are a few stories online where few grandpas were back to business, mainly in the banking industry; with a generous offer as younger talents were literally nowhere to be found for these environments.

But yes, world has changed, sometimes I think about it and think what am I going to do in, say, 20 years? Most likely I wouldn't be doing C# anymore, let alone Unity… What also changed is the expendability of people, this along loss of interest in quality work. Remember how rock solid would a fridge or TV used to be ?

I second you, it's pretty clear that past a certain age, one simply won't be able to do X or Y no matter what.
Even if by magic that person would still be fit, society isn't going to let that person do it because of XYZ…

Although most of the time I spend more than 8 hours/day, I realized that over the long run you can end up in some physical breakdown where your body can't handle it anymore. I tried to do ‘less is more’, it does work to some extent. But when it comes to coding, you need time, a lot of it, there's no way around that fact…

@hugo_msp.dev@outlook.com

Personally, I always do some small side projects, generally using live unit testing and R#, i.e. the project targets last framework/language version, VS analyzers and R# hint me on the newer features, etc. With these tools constantly hammering you with that, you pick up the changes very quickly.

Also looking at my GH timeline, it tends to be all green, i.e. weekends spent coding…

As for staying ahead of ‘tech trends’, honestly I don't even know if that means anything... To me, coding hasn't much changed and isn't likely in the near future IMO. Said differently, as the ‘trend’ constantly changes, I simply don't bother because I'd have to constantly bother with it.

Not sure if last sentence I wrote actually makes any sense, 🤣

Aybe One said:
Remember how rock solid would a fridge or TV used to be ?

What i really miss about analog tech is ease of use. E.g. on an old TV you can adjust volume or brightness within microseconds by turning a simple knob. Modern tech is much harder to use and makes me angry.

I expect future tech will be controlled all verbally. ‘TV-set, go silent to 10%!’.
Magic. I can only hope it will understand better what i try to say than my wife does. :D

You can be on the cutting edge with C++ and the Standard Template Library.

@taby

What I don't like with C++ is how horribly complex it can be with its rules and crazy syntax…

One can witness that on many repositories, author(s) try to be smart with a ‘smart’ coding approach but from a practical standpoint not only it makes it very hard to read but also refactor as things end too intertwined.

Best tip I learned over the years in programming is that one shall stay simple, readability is a must.

C++ can be great when its complex syntax is used sparingly but it's not what most people are doing.

As its author said, when you shoot yourself with it, you blow your whole leg compared to C. 🤣

@JoeJ

LOL!

If you look throughout history, innovations happen at end of centuries. We witnessed that, today although we have so-said modern technology, it hardly brings any benefits. Sure it looks nice but that's pretty much it.

Recently bought a supposedly good laptop (~$3.5K) but it's truly stupid, I press power on, it turns on depending its mood. Sometimes, I turn the room lights on, it decides to wake up… Then I discovered ‘modern standby’ (S0), devices stay on and fans run at full speed… truly ingenious!

After 30 years of service, my CRT resigned… Haven't been able to fix it and these servicing shops are no more… I don't like that I'm going to have to throw it away because it's still in pretty good shape otherwise…

Bullshit. LOL 95% of all coding problems require nothing more than vector, string, and map.

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