Been coding professionally since the mid-80's. I still sit in front of 3 computers (win10, mac, linux) every day writing code for various projects. Mostly embedded on NXP/Renesas for ODMs (lots of security and ML these days), but also device drivers on Linux/Windows, native windows tools, and as a bonus SPA dashboards for IoT/cloud (Vue/Node). I use python+excel extensively for behind the scenes analysis.
To stay current, I read multiple newsletters because HN tends to skew to the web and misses large parts of the industry. It is rather myopic that way.
People talk about tech leaving grayhairs in the dust, but that discussion always seems to be related to web front-end, which is like a fraction of the industry. Sure there will always be a need for a fast flashy website that scales to billions of users, but optimizing C in embedded space, or debugging a Windows bulk USB endpoint, or customizing UDP for multicast, etc. will always be necessary, too.
Realize as you older that you are going to be charging a premium for experience, so you have to build breadth while you are young to compete when you are old. If you just stick with one tech your whole life you won't be able to leave it.
And you can only get that kind of breadth from decades of experience.
Me also, still rolling code for custom embedded hardware at 65. Started in the mid 1980s, in embedded, running proprietary RTOS, then later, commercial RTOS (pSOS, vxWorks, ThreadX, QNX), then NetBSD, and now Linux.
The amount of Python code I have written in the last three years, when I really only learned Python six years ago....
My current mentor is 67 and pretty much knows everything. His coding style is shit, and he's slow as molasses, but he has an insane memory that can recall obsolete architecture ISAs, compiler quirks (for dozens of compilers), and tribal knowledge for just about every kind of trick and technique. That's probably why he is so slow: if I had to navigate 5 decades of lossless knowledge I probably wouldn't be able to walk.
I don't know my machine's specs: it doesn't really matter anything off-the-shelf from Circuit City or Best Buy is fast enough for what I do.
I have a windows desktop machine from 5 years ago that I run Visual Studio and dozens of embedded IDEs on.
All my networking / cloud dev is done on three different linux laptops (all Dells that were repurposed): Qubes, Ubuntu, and FreeBSD. (FreeBSD has a few other images on it with Grub including Win10.)
And then I have two macbook pros, an x86 and an M1 that I remote desktop/VNC to the other machines.
I prefer laptops because they take up less space and are portable.
By embedded I mean products based on Arm Cortex-M and -R, Renesas RZ/RL/RX, TI 430, Synopsys ARC, PIC, Atmel, etc...
Been coding professionally since the mid-80's. I still sit in front of 3 computers (win10, mac, linux) every day writing code for various projects. Mostly embedded on NXP/Renesas for ODMs (lots of security and ML these days), but also device drivers on Linux/Windows, native windows tools, and as a bonus SPA dashboards for IoT/cloud (Vue/Node). I use python+excel extensively for behind the scenes analysis.
To stay current, I read multiple newsletters because HN tends to skew to the web and misses large parts of the industry. It is rather myopic that way.
People talk about tech leaving grayhairs in the dust, but that discussion always seems to be related to web front-end, which is like a fraction of the industry. Sure there will always be a need for a fast flashy website that scales to billions of users, but optimizing C in embedded space, or debugging a Windows bulk USB endpoint, or customizing UDP for multicast, etc. will always be necessary, too.
Realize as you older that you are going to be charging a premium for experience, so you have to build breadth while you are young to compete when you are old. If you just stick with one tech your whole life you won't be able to leave it.
And you can only get that kind of breadth from decades of experience.
There's literally no short-cut to age.