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Comment by Isamu | Hacker News Reader

Cheers! I turned 54 this year, still programming, still having fun. That's the key I suppose, being interested in learning more which for me right now is computational vision. There really are too many fascinating things in the world than I have time to learn properly.

On the other hand I often feel like the bar for keeping up can be extremely low ... at work I am back to using Unix-derived systems after some 30 years. And emacs, again 30+ years. And C++, over 20 years. You get the picture.

I usually have to resort to my own projects to learn something really different.

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Yes. Ageism is especially easy to beat if you enter technologies early, but that is something you have to do at home: For most problems, suggesting the shiniest and newest is often a disservice to project deadlines.

My latest example of this was learning Scala 5 years ago. Bet on something new, and then you get calls from all over the country to work on it, as most people are trying it, but few know what they are actually doing.

Yup, there's a delay. After a while, you develop a knack for picking the right horse. So you pick the right horse, learn it on your spare time ... and then wait. Eventually that new kid on the block will become mature, stable, and a good solution for projects. That's when opportunities start. Rinse and repeat.

Where do the opportunities come from? How do you market yourself?

Joining the various social networks, LinkedIn, Github, Twitter, HackerNews, etc is the place to start. Having your own website might be a decent idea too. If you post even the smallest of code samples you'be shown an employer two things that will not be true of all, or even most, candidates: that you can write working code in at least one language and that you use some of your spare time for skill development.

Beyond that, language/technology specific Meetups, mailing lists, github repos, and even IRC are a great way to be noticed.

The last thing is that, especially for a new or niche specific technology, it really helps to be in one of the tech hub cities. Remote work is often available however it requires more self promotion (IMO) than being on site.

Thanks, this might be the nudge that I need to actually start doing this stuff!

I also recommend Indeed; probably the most success I've had in job hunting came from putting my resume up there earlier this year.

>My latest example of this was learning Scala 5 years ago. Bet on something new, and then you get calls from all over the country to work on it, as most people are trying it, but few know what they are actually doing.

As a young dev, I really want to learn how to do this. I'm a newcomer to the Scala party, but I can definitely see it becoming a huge player and there are so many reasons - Odersky has basically a team of PhDs at EPFL constantly making awesome stuff for the language and they have made some incredible stuff - TASTY + scala-meta is one of the latest, Scala.JS is another, and really the list goes on and on.

But I'm only beginning to clue in on this now. Would've been great if I had jumped in earlier. If you don't mind me asking, how do you learn to pick the right horse? What were the signals for Scala? my guess now is the fact that Odersky was a major contributor to Java and built both a strong technical team and corporate backing, but thats hindsight ofcourse :)

I've picked up Scala four years ago. To see which technology is likely to rise, you need to think like big businesses do - in this case, Scala can be seen as a Java++(++++), whereas competing technologies, such as Clojure or Haskel, are a complete paradigm shift. Knowing that large businesses are risk averse, it was likely for Scala to win out. (although IMO the jury is still out on this, the adoption rate is not great and a lot of people who tried Scala got burned by it - it may very well be a forgotten language in 5-10 years).

You have nothing to be a shame , On the contrary c++ is still the most flexible + powerful programming ecosystem and UNIX's Linux's are the same. there is less and less real cross platform c++ developers.

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