I started to learn programming on my own back in the late 1970’s when the first microcomputers (MITS Altair, Sol-20) began to appear. I fell in love with it and couldn’t teach myself fast enough. I have a Ph.D. in economics and was teaching at a university at the time. I built 10 kits for the College of Business and used the “computer lab” to teach statistics and modeling (using Lotus 123). I learned enough to write a C compiler that my software company marketed plus wrote a total of 20 programming texts along the way. I retired from the CS department at a Big 10 university. Now I’m 80 years old and teaching myself about AI. There’s no secret to keeping a programming job. All you have to do is keep renewing your skill set.
“All you have to do is keep renewing your skill set.”
All you have to do is keep upgrading your skill set.
Bingo! You can't be a one-trick pony. You must constantly learn the latest technology that customers are willing to support. You can't master everything that is flooding out. Javascript frameworks come and go. Some are good enough to be adopted and required by a customer. That's where you spend your training time.
Same here. My first love was the Motorola "D2 Kit" for programming the 6800 processor. I taught myself 6800 assembly language during the commercial breaks of one episode of "Saturday Night Live". A few days later, during our computer science lab, our instructor was called out of the lab to address a "computer emergency". When he returned several minutes later I was in front of the class teaching.
I'm working on a little programming project using Claude now. It's something I've wanted to do for years, but not had time - a web app to create a graphical timeline by combining any number of JSON-formatted "timeline files". What I'm discovering is that AI-driven programming is not a all "ready for prime time", and that the obstacles remaining are formidable.
Max neurons firing daily (weekends?) to massage your grey matter. Has kept you ultra sharp :)