[cshipley]

I am 49 and have a CS Degree, ~25 years experience. I run my own mobile/web development company out of my home, making more money than I ever have before. I've been in business for about 3 years and each year my revenue increases by 20-30% I am principle architect and coder.

In order to do this, I have had to learn new languages, frameworks and new ways of thinking about things. Some of those "new" things weren't difficult, they just required tweaking old ways of looking at things.

For example, older mobile devices are resource constrained. Having to think about conservation while coding isn't new. I started my career coding on shitty MS Dos system where if you had 640K of memory, it was a high-end machine. The tweaking comes in with the addition of other constrains such as battery life, coalescing radio usage and the fact that the OS can decide to shut down your app and restart it at any time, but the user's expectation is it should be the way the just left it.

Continually learning and reinventing myself is just the way things are now. If you haven't had to deal with that yet, just wait. It will come.

[pcurve]

You are a hero. I won't be hitting your age for more than a decade, but you are giving me hope.