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Ten years ago (and/or possibly if you were ten years younger) I'd have said yes. Now, I'd be less inclined to do so - certainly without knowing how good you are / how hard you want to work / how quick a learner you are / how much money you need to make.
Getting any work in your late 50s can be difficult - more so in the tech industries, and more so when you've no commercial experience in the field.
The difficulty these days (as compared to 30 years ago) is that there are now so many frameworks, IDEs, toolkits, languages, methodologies etc that the chances of even ticking all the boxes on a recruiter's wishlist are minimal, much more so when going "full stack". True, in practice if you have similar experience a quick learner can migrate their skills quickly - but recruiters don't think like that, especially when there's a 20- or 30-something already with the experience.
If I were in your situation (I'm only a few years older than you) I'd be concentrating on back-end - that's where the architectural design decisions are made, and you can still do the back-end coding. In many organisations you'd have the opportunity, once established, to dabble in front-end stuff too later on, if you wished.
Alternatively, if you're doing this to "keep you occupied" and already have pension / income sorted out, consider going freelance and working with small companies. You become their "one-stop-shop" and get the opportunity to directly benefit their businesses by bringing the right solutions to their problems. Choice of tech is then more determined by what you know / have access to / enjoy, you can get really hands-on at every stage. On the downside there's no-one (CodeProject excepted!) to bounce your ideas off and turn to when you're stuck.
Whatever you decide, good luck (you will need it...) and have a blast!
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DerekT-P wrote: The difficulty these days (as compared to 30 years ago) is that there are now so many frameworks
I think the biggest hurdle is getting paid for your level of experience. Today, there are a lot of much younger people that are much more willing to relocate, work longer hours, *and for less money*, and that don't enough time in the industry to argue against pointless tech stack choices that management almost always gets wrong.
I'm in my mid 60's, and I honestly feel like I'm probably in the last job I'll ever have in the industry. I have over 40 years of experience, and demand a salary commensurate with that level of experience, and realized a long time ago that there's no point in even feigning anything resembling loyalty to a corporate overlord that would fire me in a hot minute if they saw it as politically or financially beneficial to them.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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This is very true. You either become a manager and never code again. Or you open your own consulting business and eventually spend more time looking for work than coding and when you do get a gig you outsource it to someone else while you go search for the next gig.
I still get to code sometimes. But not as much as I want. But I do get paid fairly well and I really like my new job. sooooo,
To err is human to really elephant it up you need a computer
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Triton318 wrote: As a full stack developer for a company, what are the chances that I will be involved with the actual design of the product, as well as the implementation of it? Because, as much as I enjoy the coding, I want to also be involved in the design and functionality of the site, program, or app.
I can't speak for the industry or every job out there, but as a 50 year old "full stack" developer working in an agile environment I definitely have input into the design as that's part of agile.
Generally if the role is full stack, I imagine you would have input into the design simply because in a full stack environment I imagine it's unlikely that you would get a very specific specification for anything up to and including the UI.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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I'd try "Big Data" analysis (analyst) based on your instructional background. Or AI / Machine Learning.
Takes a while to be a "good" programmer. Knowledge AND practice.
It was only in wine that he laid down no limit for himself, but he did not allow himself to be confused by it.
― Confucian Analects: Rules of Confucius about his food
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Unfortunately as app users today, ads are everywhere (and they are about as annoying as trying to understand the person on the other end of a support call). Some are full screen, some are banners. Some can be dismissed, while others can't. Why are the same ads not littering our desktops? Is there a rule against it, or have the developers just not gotten around to it yet?
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles
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David Crow wrote: Why are the same ads not littering our desktops?
There are a number of reasons:
- Respect for users of desktops as computers
- Ad-blockers available - I guess I don't know what I'm missing !
- App's are for losers - you were just asking for it
- (fill in as many more as you wish - there may be an app for that)
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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How evil! I did not think you had it in you!
W∴ Balboos, GHB wrote: App's are for losers - you were just asking for it
You mean losers who can only communicate in grunts and one syllable words? The only time you ever will hear 'app' from me is when you punch me in the right spot. And survive the response. 
I think the whole thing is not much of a problem. You don't get to see much of the ads because of the fossilized smear on the phone's screen. No ad blocking until you have smeared your phone enough. And Jurassic Park has another source of DNA in the future. By digging up someone's phone.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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I guess because most (decent) desktop apps are "pay up front" instead of "add supported" - and generally they are significantly more expensive than mobile apps.
If you are writing a mobile app for money, you probably won't sell many copies at a premium price, (or indeed at any price) so "in app purchases" (i.e. the "pay to win" / loot boxes models) or "ad supported" is the way to go.
From a personal POV, I have a few mobile apps (and VR apps) I use regularly, and I paid for the "no ads" version after using each of them for a while. I've also uninstalled quite a few apps because the ads were far too intrusive - some developers are just plain greedy! (When you install a game, and you get 5 seconds of game play followed by 30 seconds of ad the developer can go ![Elephant | [mastadon]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/elephant.gif) himself - I'm uninstalling).
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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David Crow wrote: Why are the same ads not littering our desktops?
There is a huge push to get DNS moved into HTTPS and that's when you can expect to see unblockable advertisements. App developers will be able to simply drop the Chromium Embedded Framework DLL into their project and circumvent DNS filtering.
Guess what happens when you allow advertisement and content delivery corporations to design the internet protocols?
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My comment to The Insider News[^]
goes more or less in the same wave as yours...
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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It's a clever strategy...
- Move DNS into HTTPS
- Move HTTPS into stateless QUIC[^]
Smart TV and other 'smart' devices will simply move all their DNS into DOH[^] and users will be unable to filter out advertisements. At that point the only way to filter out advertisements would be setup NULL routes[^] for advertisement networks.
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So, then, is the blame on the app developers for adding ad-related code to their product, or the end user for clicking on the ads? I'm probably wrong, but I've always thought that ads don't generate any revenue unless they are clicked on. If enough of them were flat out ignored, would they then just go away?
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles
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Well,
David Crow wrote: blame on the app developers for adding ad-related code to their product
Not at all, they are just trying to make an honest living. But let's not pretend that advertisements are the only possible source of revenue for app developers. I would gladly pay $20 for an ad-free experience.
I am not an anti-capitalist... but there are several smart TVs out there right now that pop-up adverts in the middle of watching TV... and the consumer is already paying the cable company. History has repeatedly shown that if you build a framework without any barriers at all... combined with an economic incentive... the developers will take advantage of the situation.
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David Crow wrote: Why are the same ads not littering our desktops?
Where are you getting your Windows 10 ISOs from? Even the "clean" ones from MSDN fill your start menu with items like Candy Crush, Minecraft, some crapware from Adobe if I'm not mistaken (I've never clicked on it, except for right-clicking to remove the tile), Office, Skype, OneDrive, etc. Out of the box. Clean OS. Not even connected to the internet.
Then the OEM OS images are even worse with third-party anti-virus and trialware.
Maybe not the "same" ads, but those certainly count, in my book, as "unwanted crap that only exists to get money from you"...which is pretty much my definition of an ad.
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When I got my laptop, I didn't even turn it on before inserting an Ubuntu boot DVD. I assume Windows 10 came pre-installed, but I'll never know. I run linux on all 14 of my laptops/desktops, and for dev I run a Win7 vm.
Only three years to retirement, and then I can delete the VMs.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
-----
You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
-----
When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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Android being created by Google probably has something to do with it
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I'm writing a little bit of code to represent modest in memory JSON trees on 32-bit Arduino compliant platforms using the Arduino SDK.
My first plan was to at least prototype that using something like std::unordered_map but lo and behold, you can't use unordered_map with incomplete types. With GCC's std::map you can, for some dumb reason. It's totally possible to implement unordered_map to work with incomplete types, and boost even does it, but I can't use the boost framework with this thing.
Consider what a structure representing JSON "object" actually is:
It's an unordered hashtable with string keys, that point to a union of possible types, one of which is an unordered hashtable with string keys that point to a union of possible types, one of which is an unordered... you get the idea.
Basically the map needs to have itself as right hand side members. This is pretty standard for representing JSON in any language.
This is also fairly commonplace for representing tree structures.
So it just floors me that neither Microsoft nor the GCC team have implemented unordered_map in a way that's (at least I consider to be) proper. This use case is so common!
I can kluge around it supposedly with std::unique_ptr but I'm running into more problems there.
At this point I'm about ready to write my own.
Normally I *love* the Standard Template Library. It's the perfect addition to bring C++ from a mid level language to a (slightly) higher level language, and it's nice that so much of the guts are able to be reconfigured and overridden but when it fails, it fails *spectacularly* and then you are as much on your own as when you try to do something in classic VB outside of its ecosystem. It's a really frustrating thing about an otherwise lovely framework.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Well,
You could take whatever issue you are having to Stephan since he is the guy maintaining Microsoft’s STL implementation.
Btw, in the old days with Visual Studio .NET 2002[^]... Microsoft had it's own standard template library implementation that did all sorts of custom things... one of which was allowing to check iterators against NULL. I can't remember all of the customizations off the top of my head... but there were many... and they were not well received by the community.
Shortly after that the Visual Studio team licensed the STL library from P.J. Plauger[^] and used that for over a decade.
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It's not just a microsoft issue. It seems there's nothing in the standard to prevent the maps from being implemented this way. GCC does it too.
Real programmers use butterflies
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honey the codewitch wrote: there's nothing in the standard to prevent the maps from being implemented this way
Ok, then write up your proposal and submit your paper to the ISO C++ committee.
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I just want to make a JSON lib tho. 
Real programmers use butterflies
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"A lovely framework". That's like saying, I have a comfortable straight jacket.
It was only in wine that he laid down no limit for himself, but he did not allow himself to be confused by it.
― Confucian Analects: Rules of Confucius about his food
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Normally I'd agree. Privately I see the STL as part of the language. They've just separated that part into something you can modify. So I give it some leeway. All languages come with some sort of framework implicit in their design.
Real programmers use butterflies
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