The Developer's Dystopian Future
I'm not even legally an adult, and I feel like things are moving too fast for me. At 17 years. I guess I shouldn't feel like that, but I can't help it.I started with VB6 as a kid, 6 years ago. I moved onto C++, then learned about 3D graphics and game engines, then learned HTML, CSS, JavaScript, gotten into web development, learned Photoshop, some basic design, working with Linux, PHP, a little of C#. Recently tinkered with MongoDB. Now I'm learning Common Lisp, but I feel I've missed so much, and slowly losing pace.All those frameworks, Angular, Ember, intimidate me. ZeroMQ. RabbitMQ. AWS, EC2. "Big data". Swift, Dart, even Python and Ruby. Responsive design. Scala. Backbone.js, underscore.js, Node, NPM. Neural networks. How do those things work?I'm freaking out a little, not even sure if I should continue pursuing this. I so love coding and new challenges, but I just fear it's moving too fast for me and one day I simply won't be relevant anymore. I take a look at HN's front page, and I don't recognize so many technologies mentioned in the titles of articles.And I'm feeling like one day it'll go over the top, I won't be able to keep up anymore (and I can barely keep up even now), and I'll just quit and go learn play drums. It would be heartbreaking for me, but I'm not even sure if computers are the right thing for me in the long term.So I understand this post, from the bottom of my heart. And there's this anxiety creeping up about it. Who knows if I'll still be able to do this in 10 or 20 years? And finding another craft which I love so much is also a scary task. I think I might never do.