I wrote this last year on Stackoverflow. Still holds true this year. Edited slightly to remove reference to another post there.

I'm 49 and I'm a programmer.

Well actually I'm a DBA, IT consultant and Business Analyst too. But in my heart I'm a coder - and I think I'm getting better with age. And I make a nice living at it, thank you - but I put a lot of effort into setting myself up that way.

There has always been ageism in IT. I entered commercial IT relatively late in my mid-20 after being a research scientist (biological - but writing scientific code for analysis). When I went to move jobs at 28 looking for an Analyst/Programmer job one recruitment company told me I was 'too old'.

Ha. Since then I've done a rollercoaster so far as coding is concerned - followed the big corporate trail up though systems analyst to project manager by my mid-30s before deciding I really missed coding. Went to a small organisation as senior developer then morphed into DBA for 7 years - but started writing code at home which grew contacts and income until I started running my own consultancy a little over 10 years ago. I purposely don't grow larger because I don't want to spend my time managing other people, but I do have a large network of other consultants in complementary fields (graphics, management consultancy etc) I can collaborate with.

My clients are nearly all in the SME sector, most I talk to the boss directly and they no or limited development support inhouse. Age in this case is an advantage as experience with systems in business means that people trust me as I can both deliver software, and deliver the right software for the business context. There is something awfully satisfying about being able to go to a client and say 'you need to spend $10k on this hardware and software development to support this' and the client does it because they trust your abilities and the experience you bring to recommend that decision. It helps I'm a complete neophile too and I replace my skillset every 5 or 6 years - I'm currently moving to Python and .Net (and raving about Ironpython for desktop apps)

So I spend about 50% of my time writing code, 25% doing 'business IT consultancy' and 25% general purpose IT to support that - for instance several of the systems I've developed for my clients are web based - and I run the web servers to host them.

And lastly it's a great job for fitting with family life and commitments. I have my office in the house (large room, lots of computers and screens) and I work probably 10 hours a day, but it fits with family. I've been at home when my kids were small and when they've come back from school as they've grown older. I don't even have to be in one place - last week I had to see a client on site at the same city when my son is a student, so I go in, see my client at lunchtime, sit in Starbucks all afternoon coding on my laptop, then take him out for dinner. Perfect mix :-)

So ageism - phah. Ageism is only a problem if you associate with people who are ageist - and as a society we're growing older and many of those older people who do have work going are not going to be comfortable with giving it to youngsters. There's plenty of opportunity for older developers, but you have to play to the strength of the experience you've accumulated and adapt. If you don't learn new technologies and stay excited by what's happening then that's your problem, not ageism.

Myself I see myself coding until I drop. I'm actually looking forward to being more flexible as I get older - when all the kids have left home we've plans to equip a camper-van with all the tech I need and wander around europe nomadically for a year or three working remotely as needed.

Coding is the best occupation ever invented. Who on earth would want to give it up?

The boxes are for particular recyclables - plastic bottles, tin cans, newspaper etc. We record weight against household so we can track who recycles and who doesn't (we give out prizes for participation), and look at it on an are level to see what differences there are and so how we could improve performance.

Not as fun as snapping garbage :-)

I am extremely skeptical of the current generation of RFID tags when used in practice out there in the wild.

About three years back I set up software to support a recycling scheme, whereby every household in a community (ca 10,000) were given a couple of plastic boxes in which to place recycled goods. The boxes where chipped *and* barcoded, and there were scales on the collection lorry to weigh the box and automatically scan the rfid chip at the same time, thus collecting usage data.

Three years on it turns out that the one thing we were not expecting - the rfid chips not to be reliable - has proven a major issue. The failure rate is not high, but we consistently have a score or more boxes needing replacing every month, which is a far higher rate than we were lead to expect. We did think it might be the manufacturer, but we've talked to several people doing similar things now and everyone has similar stories - the chips do fail.

Perversely - the barcodes, which we sealed in transparent plastic but didn't expect to last (hence going with rfid tags as major impact) have given us less than a dozen damaged to the point we can't scan them in the whole three years.

3 .. year .. 'veteran'?

Jeez, is that all it takes to be a veteran these days. What price those of us who remember the dawn of the endless September.

Yes, but the probability of planets with large moons is looking distinctly higher than it did a few years back - the mars-sized body that collided with the proto-earth probably formed at one of the trojan points and then destabilized to collide with the right velocity to produce the earth/moon pair. OK it's still an unlikely event, but most probably in the one in a few orders of magnitude than one in the tens of millions postulated by the rare earth people

Abso-bloody-lutly. It took me an age to figure that out and as a developer of 20 years in numerous environments this had to be one of the most non-intuitive changes ever.

4 works well actually. I have 3 in the classic 'one in the middle and one each side' layout, then a fourth further around on my right which has all those programs one wants open but doesn't really work on all the time - Skype, IM client (pidgin) iTunes and Spotify in my case.

The three centrals are 24" and the fourth 22" - I figure monitors are cheap and if you go for duel PCI Express slots on your motherboard you've got the plug for the fourth monitor so why no use it?

Is that the lynch mob went after someone killing a kitten. That's new certainly something new and implies that the west's cultural obsessions with animal welfare and cuteness are taking hold.

Nothing new in concept here, although the implementation is updated :-), The Chinese have been using similar systems of group responsibility as far back as the Qin dynasty (200BC or so). Bao Jia is a later (~1000AD) derivation that might be considered related to what's going on here too (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baojia_system)

We have a similar thing in the UK, but it was designed to tackle the well know scenario where a company would staff their programming pool with 'independent' contractors hired via an agency (thereby both the company and the contractor paying less tax). The contractors worked in the company's office full time, on the company's equipment, with their times and work allocation directly allocated by the company - to all intensive purposes they were employees, and to be honest I think the tightening of the law was perfectly reasonable.

To get around the problem is relatively straightforward if you're a genuine independent developer. Owning your own equipment and working from your own office usually suffices, with other good indicators being you have several contracts and managing your own time.

I've had the same main email address since the mid 90s, so as you might expect it's on every spam list going, and on average I'm seeing 100 emails a day hitting my Outlook spam folder. However it's never an issue for me as I pay for the rather wonderful Cloudmark spamfilter which is near as dam it 100% accurate for my use.

So all I have is spam hitting my spam fillter at about one every 15 minutes. Which has on several occasions been a useful 'heartbeat' to diagnose when my there's something wrong with my connectivity - either the internet connection itself or the servers being hit by spam.

It's so reliable a diagnostic that I've even wondered if there's a viable commercial product in there based on the idea :-)