Reflections of an Old Programmer with Ben Northrop

Ben Northrop was sitting at a tech conference, listening to a presentation about a new piece of technology, when he was struck by the sense that history was repeating itself. For the twenty years that Ben has worked as a software engineer, he has been hearing about new technologies that claim they will be able to disrupt everything, and he has relentlessly been keeping up as best he can with the latest trends.

Of course, Ben is all of us. Nobody can keep up. As a daily software podcaster, I think I am as well positioned as anyone to be tuned into the breadth of the software engineering ecosystem–but I am constantly behind as well.

In his blog post “Reflections of an Old Programmer”, Ben theorized about the causes of this feeling of fatigue, and the constant struggle to keep up with the world of software engineering. His post contains enduring lessons that will be of value to new programmers and will feel familiar to programmers who have been around for a while.