[gregjor]

The "shiny stuff" is almost all retreads and new clothes on old ideas. Containers and VMs? Around for decades in various forms. Cloud? That was mainframe computing years ago. CI/CD? Had it back in the '70s. Same with TDD. A hallmark of the software industry: almost nothing truly new gets introduced, but old ideas and technologies get a new coat of paint, a buzzword, and make more sense today because the hardware and networking have improved by orders of magnitude.

Anyone who learned C back in the '70s or '80s can pick up most newer languages quickly. Relational databases, the core of every non-trivial business application, date from the '80s.

My advice: don't worry about or focus on your age, don't make excuses, don't try to persuade people you haven't turned into a dinosaur. Focus on business needs and how you can solve problems and add value. Ageism in tech certainly exists but you mainly run into it when a team of younger people interview someone their dad's age and don't see a good fit with the team. And they're right about that -- I won't work 18 hrs/day for free pizza and beer anymore, and I don't play foosball or need a nap room.