How I learned to code in my 30s
I've been programming for 13 years.
I started when I was 14 years old and studied software engineering at university. These days, when I take on well-paid contract work, sometimes I find myself working alongside people who only started learning to code at around 25 and never went to university.<p>It's upsetting for me to think of all the fun I missed out on in my early life because I was learning programming and pushing myself through university and it turns out that it doesn't even get me a higher pay check in the end.<p>These days, nobody cares that I'm proficient in all of ActionScript 2 , ActionScript 3, C/C++, C#, Java, Python, AVR studio (microcontroller programming), MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, RethinkDB, PHP, Zend, Kohana, CakePHP, HTML, CSS, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, JavaScript, Node.js, Backbone, CanJS, Angular 1, Angular 2, Polymer, React, Artificial Neural Networks, decision trees, evolutionary computation, times/space complexity, ADTs, 3D shaders programming with OpenGL, 3D transformations with matrices, image processing... I can't even list them all. I could wipe out 95% of these skills from my memory and get paid the same.<p>It only gives me extra flexibility... Which it turns out I don't need because I only really need two of these languages (C/C++ and JavaScript) and a couple of databases.