My friend, it happens to everyone.

I typed in my first BASIC program in ‘89. I dropped out of high school in the late 90’s to program uh… high quality adult entertainment websites. I had a small e-commerce site for a while selling weird stuff. I eventually finished school and tried to move on but I got back into programming for a living to this day.

Twenty some odd years of doing it professionally. For fun. For curiosity. And looking at trying to keep at it for twenty more. Life’s a trip.

"My friend, it happens to everyone."

Indeed. When you were typing in your first BASIC program, my younger daughter was two years old.

My daughter is 11 now and just getting into creating her first Minecraft mods. Life is wonderful!

The oldest possible HN might have been a great grandparent at that point

> I typed in my first BASIC program in ‘89.

I created my first program on punch cards in '79. I can't even remember what the programming language was although I suspect FORTRAN. I wish I'd kept a listing.

Tangentially, my valued copy of The Lord of the Rings that I loved as a child has the date 'Christmas 1973' inside the front cover. I'm going to read it again this Christmas, 50 years later. I've been avoiding anything Tolkien-related since about 2017, when I last re-read it (and noticed the upcoming anniversary), to come to it as fresh as possible, accepting that I know the story backwards.

If we're lucky, it does.

When you were typing in '89, I was on a mainframe in college.

That was my first thought too - but my second was "there are people who were BORN after the internet who are now adult members of society and we're still managing software projects the exact same braindead broken way we were doing it back then".

Isn't it even worse now because we need JIRA tickets that all start with, "as a user," before continuing on to describe something like obtrusive ad placement that a user absolutely does not want?

My oldest niece (who is my little sister's daughter) graduated college two months ago and wasn't born until after 9/11. I think that was the most recent thing to make me feel old. I'm class of '99 and currently rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, depicting kids who were also class of '99, and I now identity with Giles the school librarian, and in fact I'm exactly the same age as Anthony Head was when he took the role. Charisma Carpenter and Nicholas Brendon have now both been over 50 for years and Alyson Hannigan will be 50 in 7 months.

I do enjoy, Whedon revelations notwithstanding, that BTVS is in some ways evergreen.

I do not enjoy that one of the defining moments of my adult life -- 9/11, which happened when I was 31 -- is now long enough ago that there are adults who do not or literally COULD not remember it. Time marches on.

Fun fact - if someone was born 9/12/01, they've been old enough to drink for about a year now.

I think I’m general projects are managed worse than they were 25 years ago. As the years go by and Agile gets further entrenched there is more time lost to ceremonies and rituals and less time spent solving real problems that provide value.