[lmm]

I'm 30 and feel like I've been in decline for at least 6 years. I used to be open to new ideas and techniques; now I'm so confident I know what works that I usually can't even bring myself to consider the alternatives. I used to be able to hold the whole system in my head and change things fearlessly; now I rely on the types to do that for me and check in an embarrassingly high number of errors whenever I try to work in Python (a language I used to be very productive in).

Perhaps our industry moves so fast that experience genuinely is a net negative?

[mythrwy]

Hahaha. At 30-32 I felt I was getting old.

Looking back I believe the reason was there is a subtle physical slowdown between late 20's early 30's, you are indeed slightly past your physical prime.

Then I hit 40 and felt young again.

But really, one shouldn't feel they are mentally slowing down at 30 or even 39. If that's the case you might need to check environment or what you are doing or some external factors.

[sametmax]

> now I rely on the types to do that for me and check in an embarrassingly high number of errors whenever I try to work in Python

But you can write type hints in Python and get your tooling to tell you when something is wrong.

Personally I got mypy as a pre-commit hook, and vscode run it on each save, making my code lighting up like a xmas tree if I mess up.

[dep_b]

Sounds really weird. If you know what works then you know you need something new sometimes. Never used a NoSQL database but I know when it's time to start using one. I might not, as some younger people would, default to MongoDB.

Also checking in errors seems a bit weird. Are you sure you are still motivated in what you do?