How to code for 60 years
I had an interesting encounter recently. Our next door neighbors invited us over for dinner. They’re Russian, and the husband’s mother Marianna was there - I don’t know exactly how old she is, but I think in her 80’s.
She is an incredible engineer! She graduated from Moscow university in the first class that allowed women as electrical engineers, and then started work in computers. It wasn’t really coding then - she literally started with flipping switches on the front of the machine to set bits of memory. But the fun part is: she’s *still* a professional coder. This conversation also included her throwing shade on React and talking about how young coders don’t understand the full stack very well (it’s true! The same week another friend told me he had amazed some younger coders by doing hex math in his head to debug something). It completely blew my mind, just the scope and breadth of what she’s seen and done - it’s pretty much the whole field, start to finish (well, so far anyway).
I asked if she would be willing to be interviewed, and she said no (I’m still working on this). She said “I’m a soldier, no one interviews soldiers”. We’ll see about that!
Her sense of craft and learning and humility was really striking, and humbling, to me. How many of us have both the patience to code for 60 years, and the mental ability to be that flexible and learn - all the way from bits in hardware out to JavaScript! I’ve never heard of a journey like it. There’s something in it for each of us - if you’re burned out, or jaded, or just think you know it all….remember Marianna.
(I’m going to take a few weeks off to spend time with my kids. See you next year!)