Welcome to the twelfth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of Being a Senior Developer. In this edition Daniel Steinberg explains how forty years of experience in the field is just the beginning, Graham argues that "agile" methodologies have reached senior status at the age of twenty, and in this issue's subscriber-only article, Adrian talks about not being a senior developer anymore.
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At Least
About ten years ago there seemed to be a slew of thirty year olds explaining what it was to be old. “Now that I am thirty,” they would say, “I understand …” I am not sure what it was they understood. I had stopped listening and faded off into my own head thinking, “uh oh, what if they find out I am fifty. They will never hire me.”
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Enough Agile
Agile won. The practices encouraged by Agile transformation coaches the world over are practiced the world over. I do not remember a software team in the last decade who did not gather around for their regular standup meeting. A team who did not drag Jira stories across a board, in standard "as a user" format. Who did not have Jenkins builds kicked off by every commit. Who did not ignore, if not actively block, attempts to explain how their software worked with long sentences and UML diagrams. Or maybe Agile lost.
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Not Being A Developer After 46
Three years ago I gave a talk named "Being a Developer After 40." Maybe you have heard about it. It was – and still is – my absolute bestseller article of all time. It struck such a strong chord among software developers, that many offered to translate it to the most incredible languages (among which Russian, Czech, Vietnamese and Persian) and got a lot of attention and reprints all over the place. I gave that talk subsequently in other conferences twice. I now wish I had never written it.
