With retirement on the horizon, I cannot wait to close my laptop lid and never touch it again unless it is an absolute necessity.
I'm not criticizing your desire - it's just that for me, the learning and exploration and building is the fun part. As long as it's still either useful for me, or I have the memories, it doesn't matter if it's still used by others, though that can be fun too.
I couldn't imagine having made this my career otherwise.
I just want to get to a time where I am not glued to the internet and do not carry a cellphone. The absolute freedom it brings to me is something that a lot of people are not familiar with today.
I don't want to get into too many details, but a side gig I have, when I bring people out into the field, I take their phones from them. And to watch the withdrawal that they have from the lack of dopamine hits is just sad.
Happy to provide my anecdote. In my 40s and I still live to build/create.
It is my soul. If it is not satisfied, who are you to tell me different? We all have to chop wood, carry water.
>it is not satisfying to _the_ soul.
Instead of writing:
>it is not satisfying to _my_ soul.
The first could be interpreted as you speaking generally (i.e. you think no ones soul can be satisfied by building tech or whatever), the second makes it clear that you are talking about specifically your soul not being satisfied.
I'm getting ready to explore ML applications on Apple systems, but first, I need to finally get around to learning SwiftUI as a shipping app system (I have only been playing with it, so far. Doing ship work is an order of magnitude more than the simple apps that are featured in "Learn SwiftUI" courses).
I'll probably do that, switching over to using SwiftUI for all of my test harnesses. My test harnesses tend to be fairly robust systems.
So far, it looks like I may not be using it to actually ship stuff, for a while. Auto Layout is a huge pain, but it is very, very powerful. I can basically do anything I want, in UI, with it. SwiftUI seems to make using default Apple UI ridiculously easy, but the jury is out, as to how far off the beaten path I can go.
BTW: I have been "retired," since 2017. I wanted to keep working, but no one wanted me, so I set up a small company to buy my toys, and kept coding. I also love learning new stuff.
SwiftUI is very bad at working with maps, and they still have a long way to go. Since most of the stuff I'm doing, these days, is highly location-dependent, I can't compromise.
I have been reading about people hitting these types of walls for a couple of years, and thought that Apple has worked around it. I suspect that the issue is with trying to use UIKit stuff inside of SwiftUI, and I was trying to avoid UIViewRepresentable (because it's a kludge).
Back to UIKit. This stinks. :(
And while some of the above had reasons, I am itching to rewrite more of my stack, and mostly for fun or out of curiosity than any need.
Things looking radically different is more likely to affect my enjoyment of it as a job than in general, though, because for my side projects I can build things as I please, using the tools I want (and mostly have written myself), and can ignore everything I don't like.
I absolutely agree things change, but I've been doing this for 42 years now, and so far it doesn't feel any different, so I'm going to guess I'll stick to this for some time still.
60-something here. I know exactly how you feel. I can't point at anything I've worked on in the last 30+ years that's still in use. It's very demotivating. When you first get into tech it's all shiny and new and exciting. But nothing lasts.
Time marches on, and our great efforts are as nothing once they are replaced by the next big thing.
1. https://support.avaya.com/elmodocs2/cajun/docs/p333t24ug.pdf
“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”
What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?
Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.
The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course.
All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again.
All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing.
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.
No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.
What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind! I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
It's incredibly sad how badly most programmers especially feel about tech. If I'll editorialize for a moment, it seems to most programmers actually hate software. Something about programming just makes people hate software.
It was expected to be empowering, democratizing, censorship resistant, decentralising. The reality is disillusioning.
I'd argue the latter two conflict with the first two. Making something decentralized makes it inherently harder to use (less empowering), making it censorship resistant runs counter to companies interests and companies fund everything (less democratized, i.e., harder to make a living).
I guess I was responding to the part about "closing the laptop forever", which I took to mean closing it off to all the other amazing things you can do with a computer today. But in context, they probably mean just stopping programming.
But it still drives me crazy that god forbid a programmer would actually do something as low as open an Adobe product and actually make something that someone that's not another programmer could actually enjoy. Appreciate the creative good our industry has accomplished for godsake.
:-)
Side gig? Still do consulting for various entertainment companies on a particular subject.