[nvln]

I'm in my early 40s, love programming, still very productive. The only trouble with being older is that you can see through the hype as new frameworks and libraries keep chasing their tails. If you aren't as hyped about those things you may find it hard to fit in. If you can find your clique or be a generalist and can build stuff as a solo engineer/designer/janitor, programming can be a lifelong craft that you meticulously develop, creating your own personal tools and libraries along the way. It can be very lucrative as well.

> I'm 30 and missed my chance to be a kid prodigy in programming or math

Programming is one of the most empowering things in human existence. You always have a chance to build something that impacts millions and you have to do the work only once. So, forget about the bygone chances, drop out of the race, build cool things and have fun. You may yet change the world for the better :)

[rjh29]

I have been dealing with the framework hype train since my mid-20s to be honest. It's difficult because any opinion like "why can't we just run a couple of daemons on a VM" or "this site could be server-side and mostly static" gets laughed at or emoji'd to death. Then I watch as the web world is slowly moving back to server-side and realising you don't need to use Kubernetes or NoSQL for -everything-. Sigh.