[hliyan]

I'm 43 now. I was never a "born hacker". In fact, I only started getting good at coding toward my late 20's. And I began to develop some serious chops by my mid thirties. Of course, the sheer amount of coding I do has gone down -- I do a lot more code reviews and architecture reviews. But during those code reviews, one thing became apparent to me: while younger programmers excel in small, isolated areas of complex code (e.g. some sort of matrix/vector algo), I can run circles around them when it comes to larger code bases, thinking about dependencies when making changes, implications on non-functional requirements (performance, security, fault tolerance) etc.