I disagree a little. 10 years after you start painting you’re still doing the same thing mechanically: putting paint on the brush on the canvas. But you are in a whole new game.

Too many programmers measure themselves by whether they’re leveling up in the tools they’re using and the kinds of problems they’re solving. In some cases I think they’re deluding themselves. They’re on easy mode, creating a sensation of movement for themselves without ever getting into the hard stuff, which is not glamorous, it’s things like naming and restraint and kindness and caching patterns.

I have kind of spent my whole career learning how to solve the same problems better. It’s still the same DIVs and HTTP requests I was manipulating 20 years ago. But the game I am playing within an organization and within a platform is fundamentally new.

I can see how from the outside it might not look like I have “leveled up” but I think I have leveled up in my methodology.