No more coding, gone fishin’…

TL;DR; – This is a no-content post, so feel free to ignore. And I am not drunk, this time.

I haven’t blogged since ages but I have been collating my to-be blogged thoughts in Evernote. Among all those collected items, this topic was the last sequentially but I thought it to be the first to be written down. I believe it is just a natural phenomena that during our younger days, our birthdays got us thinking about parties, the gifts we would get, the celebrations, cake, trumpets, elephants, giraffes (alright I am losing here…). A part of the natural phenomenon is also that once we are around our thirties, we do get some of the above thoughts, and one more with it… I got older by a year! I mean come on, its just a friggin birthday, every one has it. But somehow recently one word popped up in my mind which took me by a bit of a surprise. Retirement.

Hah… No way I am 33 there is shit load of time, so many years to go, so many new things waiting for me somewhere. But then I think, I have not seen a single retired software developer. I do not know where to find them. I am talking about someone who started as a computer science graduate and then pursued software engineering as a profession and has been with it all his/her life. Now dont bring in some big shot in our industry who is now donating all his money, I am talking about an average developer, got it? It might be a dumb thought because our industry is far too young compared to other disciplines like architecture, medicine etc. Somehow I am able to imagine my parents retiring in their profession which is one of those matured ones, but not myself. This thing comes in my mind because for sure I do not want to see myself on stack overflow searching for an efficient way to find duplicate letters in a string in C language. That’s right, I started with C#, then did some Java, now doing Javascript, next I have a feeling its going to be C++, and if I do not get a good hold of myself then around 40 Ill be reading Kerninghan & Ritchie while my kids play super mario on my laptop (yes there will be super mario then). Seriously I am not drunk today. Some out there have retired at my age (go Google them), if I do such a thing my family would abandon me, which is cool in a way .

On a serious note, what should a developer do when such thoughts start creeping his/her mind. Surely I am not worried about something that is not an issue at all. I think if we are unable to see ourselves something may be 5-10 years down the line then it is like rowing your boat without knowing where you want to go. Its fun for now, but later time will catch up with you. I am afraid to say I am rowing my boat pretty hard, learning cool new hip hop things which will get pretty old tomorrow (especially in javascript), but I do not know where I should be heading. I do not want to be coding at 40, period. But then what, move into management is one of the obvious thoughts. Meh…, may be not. There are so many monkey managers around me I hardly want to see myself as one of them. But hey dont remind me of this blog post if you see me as a manager somewhere! Doing something out of the box and something completely unrelated to software is a thought I think every software guy/gal holds somewhere in a tiny corner of their brains. I have made many friends in different countries, some want to start a dairy farm, some want to start a restaurant (I do), some want to live in a van down by the river…These are things that we developers feel are not as hard as writing code, but I know they will be much tougher to even start, maintaining it is a different game all together.

So this is where I am, I am 33 doing good coding, liked by many, hated by some (mostly wife) and thinking what the fuck I should be doing before I turn 34. I think I will be coding, what do you think!

Happy Programming!