As we age, we usually end up with more and more life responsibilities, beyond just the work we are doing. All of that is input to the brain and requires energy in response. The brain is not infinite.

I often feel as you do, but then I have periods where I am as light and agile in my productivity as 20 years ago, maybe even more so, and usually it is my life circumstances that are the culprit.

I remember once about 13 years ago I was working on a mobile game and had a similar problem as you describe; there was one day where the technical work seemed to overwhelm me and I felt inadequate. But I was just a young chap, and it was a passing moment -- I had indeed just taken on some enormous new life responsibilities at that time, which were the likely explanation.

Burnout is real, too, and giving yourself space (if you can) to relax and not think about work for a break can be quite useful to recharge.

Not that I'm good about those things - I do OK but not great. Sometimes (rarely, thankfully) my energy is so low I can't really code at all, sometimes I'm flying. I'd say by far the biggest factor is my overall state of positivity and optimism. And yeah, life definitely gets more complicated as you get older.

This is an amazing insight. I’m almost 46 and feel like I’m at the top of my game, programming-wise, but also, I’m probably at my healthiest. And that’s worked-for health, not the kind that comes for free in your 20s (generally). And I think about and pay attention to energy levels during the day, and just know when I’m toast for the day and time is better spent elsewhere. I take a brief afternoon nap before coffee most days. I pay attention to when my mind is receptive to new information. I let some things bubble away in my subconscious and sometimes make new insights on walks, in the shower, or while making coffee.

Western diets (e.g. the standard american diet... what we actually eat) is fairly bad for our health which impacts our abilities.

I would recommend folks look into the Blue Zones. Where people live the longest and thrive for the longest. Look at their eating and lifestyles. One of those zones is in the US where people have work/life balances similar to folks here.

In my case, changing my diet and activity level caused my energy to go up and mental clarity to improve.

After a year of this I've dropped 20kg, and my mental clarity is back where it was when I was early 20's.

I think it was mostly the no sugar that did it.

Exercise too - I walk 2-5 km a day

Oh and cutting down what I eat too -- I only have 1 meal a day, and a smoothie in the afternoon

My major diet change was to eat like the healthiest of the Blue Zone folks. I wanted great energy now and longevity of it and my life. A diet that gives me energy now but leads to heart disease wouldn't cut it.

For that, I went plant based whole grain.

How much you eat matters, too.

A good technical book on diet is The Proof is in the Plants [1]. It covers what we need in our diets and why. For example, how much selenium do we need and what are sources of it. Despite the book title talking about plants it also covers meat and dairy. Everything covered in the book is based on the latest scientific research. It's written by a dietitian who can reference the studies.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Proof-Plants-science-plant-based-plan...

After a month though my taste buds changed, and I really enjoy the taste of meat and vegetables now.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to eat some vegan ice cream, and I thought I would treat myself to a couple of scoops in a cup thing, and after just 2 bites it was sickly sweet, the amount of sugar made me feel really ill, and it felt like I was eating poison, so I threw it away.

Quite interesting. I do miss some foods (pizza :( ) but the mental clarity alone is worth it.

Plant based whole grain is usually a diet of the real foods themselves. Take a bean burrito that someone makes fresh. Or a stir fry using fresh veggies. So different from processed foods.

I still eat pizza. Love them carbs :)

Where can I obtain this for free energy?

I think it fries your dopamine and other neurological circuits. I don't know the science in depth but I have seen enough anecdotal evidence on myself and others to be persuaded that the relationship is huge.

Do a screen fast for a couple of weeks and check out what happens.

I recently did a big change in myself - adjusted sleep, took specific supplements which I was suspect was deficient in and have found my energy to be much fuller. Do not ignore what your body is telling you.

I went for many years without an exercise habit. About 5 months ago I started lifting weights. The transformation has defied all my expectations and the biggest unexpected benefit is that my mind has become sharper, faster and more focused. I essentially feel like I've reversed a decade's worth of brain and body aging by going into the gym and lugging some iron around a couple times a week.

Around the same time I started cutting back on alcohol intake and cleaned up my diet a bit. So it could be any of these factors but I think it's a combination of all of them, as you get older, you need to maintain your body or it'll deteriorate and take your mind with it.

In this recent survey of nootropics [1], weightlifting was better than dozens of chemicals. In fact, it was third only to Dexedrine and Adderall. It scored better than Ritalin! And its variance is tighter than most substances, meaning it's one of the most likely means to improve results for anyone who takes it on.

Personally, I agree. After covid sapped some of my energy, it took about 2-3 months to get back to my average gym sessions and now I feel so much better. Happier, tougher, etc. When I am in shape, the geometry of the world around me changes. A distance or effort I might consider looks, feels, and is more in reach after a few weeks of rows, lunges, pushups, hanging, swinging, light cardio, biking, etc.

[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/link-troof-on-nootropi...

My theory is that when you're young, your body has a much wider margin for error. A few drinks or sloppy exercise routines never seemed to impact my work. As I've aged, the margin has shrunk, and now there's a measurable effect that I can no longer ignore. Aging is in itself a handicap, but now after too many drinks, the next day both my cognitive sharpness and motivation to even care about shoveling bits around a network have declined.

Now I need to actively stack the deck in my favor, rather that engaging in behaviors that further handicap myself. So that means exercise, a sleep routine, zero alcohol most days of the week, reducing stress, all that goddamn stuff I never had to worry about ;)

Another way to think of it is this: at 40 or 50, can you afford to be lugging around a 20% RHR penalty all day? That will surely come home to roost, probably in the form of atherosclerosis. Remember the most common clinical presentation for a heart attack sufferer is not chest pain, but being dead on arrival.

I bring this up because it's worth nothing that our bodies and minds are remarkably good at covering up problems until far too late. When you get those early warning signals (high RHR, feeling of cognitive decline, etc) trust your body, be proactive, and employ countermeasures.

Last year for unrelated reasons I wound up not drinking at all for a few weeks. All of my heart & sleep metrics were improved by large amounts. When I zoom out for the full year view it's obvious immediately when that was in the aggregate data.

In terms of how this knowledge affects my behavior? I'll still tie one on at about the same frequency. But the casual "sure why not, I'll have a beer" is gone. Whenever I'm about to consume alcohol I think about if the amount of enjoyment I'll be receiving is worth the downside & act accordingly.

The other wearable that has had an extreme impact on my lifestyle has been a Dexcom CGM through Levels. I could write pages about this, but in some ways it has been more impactful than anything else. Knowing how your body reacts to particular foods, and seeing the immediate feedback is super eye opening.

And it extends into sleep as well, looking at what your blood glucose does overnight based on stress, exercise, what you ate, when you ate it, it's quite amazing to see how this subsystem in your body is reacting.

I'll never forget the first time I ate sushi (which mentally I thought of as a "light" food, even a snack) only to see my blood glucose rocket past 200 mg/dLf.

You can also see the effect of alcohol here. Not just with carbohydrate heavy beers, but with the fact alcohol itself suppresses your blood glucose levels, since it causes your pancreas to spike insulin, which disposes of glucose. So it's yet another way alcohol causes a disturbance in your body's attempts at homeostasis.

Alas, a CGM through levels is quite pricey because of US healthcare bullshit about giving CGMs to people without a diabetes diagnosis, but doing a month or two of CGM once per year I think it's a great investment (approx $200 for three sensors which last a total of 30 days)

The battery life is very good, I typically get several days to a single charge, which is far better than the Apple Watch. But most importantly it's comfortable to wear during sleep - indeed it takes the majority of its measurements only while you're sleeping. YMMV but there's no way I can wear an Apple Watch to sleep, while the Oura ring works perfectly. I've worn the last two generations of Oura ring and would definitely recommend.

Gen3 app without premium subsciption is very limitied https://youtu.be/c4AVLGwkJHo?t=193

But when I had kids it forced me to move and do things. Now I feel better in my '40s than I did in my '30s.

* I hired a personal trainer. Actually, two of them, scheduled on different days, to reduce the chance that I would saddle myself with a bad one and not know it. After 2 months I let go of the least effective trainer. The trainer(s) were huge at first because having an appointment with someone helped me actually get off my ass and show up, my own willpower alone was always insufficient in the past. They also exposed me to a variety of exercises which is how I learned that I really enjoyed weight lifting (and some other exercises, not so much). Nowadays I just have the one guy once a week doing form checks.

* I joined a very nice gym near my office, again as a motivator. It's easier to attach one habit to another habit, and the habit of going to work is pretty ingrained, so "walk across the street for one more appointment" turned getting into the gym from something hard to something that was basically automatic. My workout is my favorite part of the week now because my gym also has a great jacuzzi and afterwards I get to plop into the jacuzzi, veg out and catch up on podcasts.

* In terms of the "technology" around weight lifting specifically. I'll triple emphasize just hiring a good trainer and just following their instructions at first. But once I started engaging my own brain, I found A) Correct protein/macro intake was bigger than everything else in terms of getting results. Get your daily protein to where it needs to be (which is freakishly high) and same goes for calories (depends on your current body type and intake). B) You don't have to push hard on increasing weight at the beginning at all, nor worry much about how many reps you do, just do what is fun and safe and do it regularly. C) For further education the book Starting Strength and the Fitness Wiki maintained by Reddit's r/fitness are really good. They recommend similar beginner workouts and as an out of shape guy, you can basically start on these immediately as long as you're getting regular form checks and sticking to low weights. (I actually was so weak I had to start with just the bar or even dumbbell variants... once I started pigging out on chicken and whey, that changed very fast, increasing how much I was lifting got easier, and within a couple months I had muscles everywhere.)

Make sure you ramp load gradually if you have lifted in the past, your muscle memory can return faster than your connective tissue strength leading to injury risk if you stack the weight aggressively.

This! Dealing with this right now :(

The way I am managing to build my habit: Only do group sessions. If you want to go fast you go alone, but if you want to go far you go together. I know that group sessions are the only thing that give me enough structure to continue.

So maybe it will help you get started as it did for me? Personally I went to a fairly expensive gym so the groups are small. This to minimise risk of injury. Try it if you can afford it.

Start with push-ups. They're fast and require nothing but a flat surface. You can always transition to lifting weights later.

Start today, ideally right now. Seriously. It's your only chance. Tomorrow there'll be an even better reason not to.

Don't worry about initial quantity. You can start with two push-ups, that's fine. It'll take ten seconds if as much.

Repeat every day.

When you feel it got too easy, increment by one starting the following day, not at the moment.

I tried 3 times a week or whatever, and every day you'll find some excuse to push exercising to the morrow.

But doing exactly the same routine every day was key. Then the routine evolves with time, but it's almost always the same routine. I started with a few pushups, then added burpees, then I bought some weights and added a few movements, then I started running 300m a day the first week, and augmented gradually until I ran 42 km every single week.

Years ago, I used a trainer in a gym to kickstart a plan, and I found it very useful.

It’s probably not possible from a physics standpoint to replace motion induced pumping/diffusion with pure chemistry.

Its possibly people may isolate the two effects separately

It’s worth it for the global effect on my energy levels and health. But it remains true that for some of us, exercise is never a source of enjoyment, and I understand why many people can’t get through that to do it anyway.

I feel the same way with exercise. People tell me that you feel good after and I never do. People tell me that you feel a "good" soreness in your body and I never do. I just feel sore.

I wonder what's different about people like you and me where we don't enjoy this process the way some other people do? Do you think it's been studied?

This is kind of where I always have been, I find exercise to be a loathsome and boring chore, a necessary evil that gets in the way of things I would rather be doing.

I wish I felt like this. Exercise is tolerable when I'm doing something at the same time (walking, chatting, listening to music) but that's enjoyment despite the exercise, not because of it.

The feeling after's nice, though. Would take that in a pill form, for sure.

Reducing, stopping, counteracting mental decline is a holy grail in medicine. I think there has been some progress here.

And on the general mental acuity note there are things like modafinil.

The best things known work are do what you need to do to get good sleep, and find some way to exercise routinely.

Call me a wimp but I find DOMS can be a little distracting haha.

When I do expect DOMS to kick in, I drop weights to 50% my max sets (usually dropping weight vs reps). This makes me "somewhat sore" the following day but no more than that. I also put an emphasis on sleep, "clean" nutrition and supplement with electrolytes. Works really well for me.

As for low intensity cardio, I feel it's good for me, but I have to say it can be a struggle to keep it low. The feeling of "I want to push harder" can sometimes be overwhelming.

This is so true. I'm 37 now, and I'm struggling with that - I'll come up with a project idea, only to second-guess myself whether it's ambitious or innovative enough, and really worth spending the limited time I have available. I end up questioning whether it would really count, or just serve as frivolous self-entertainment.

When I was younger, it was good enough that ideas were interesting or would help me achieve mastery. Once you have a bunch of well-worn skills under your belt and have plenty of options and the ability to make commitments, everything becomes just a function of effort/time and choosing what to do next becomes the biggest challenge.

I'm trying to cut myself some slack and allow myself some amount of time to pursue frivolous ideas. At least you can intentionally combine them with e.g. new implementation technologies (e.g. a new tech stack or new tools) to get important first-hand experience and maintain relevant skills (and therefore decision freedom).

I'm also hoping that some day, having kids might help me with some of these anxieties :-). If I revisit/retread older ground then perhaps to make it accessible to them at home or teach them by doing little projects together and give them a boost and allow the next generation to take it further. I.e., even doing non-innovative stuff could count, as a fundamentals teaching moment for someone else. Hope they take an interest!

http://notinventedhe.re/on/2011-11-9

Since I retired, I have suffered a cognitive decline; everything takes longer. But, you know, I'm retired, and work expands to fill the time available.

and it just makes me tired. While I'd like to retire and think I'll financially get there sooner or later, I'm afraid that there's an underlying structure to work that I'll miss.

This trend seems genuinely goofy to me. If you have daily reports, standups, or whatever, you're going to be spending a lot of your time prepping for those. That's time that you're not spending writing actual code (or whatever you're nominally supposed to be doing).

It may well be that the OP has other load that has crept up on him; until you take a step back it's often difficult to see what's happened over a period of years.

But burnout is a thing, and sometimes you need to take stock, take a break, and maybe even make some big changes. You're only here once, so it's a good idea to give it your best shot, IMO.

As far as anyone can tell.

Responsibilities seem to multiply. And as you age you sometimes find you're not only caring for kids potentially but aging parents. It's a lot.

1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4015335/#:~:tex....

Even without burnout, sometimes a problem doesn’t motivate you and therefore you don’t really feel like solving it when there are other things that seem more interesting or more practical.

Either case, once the down period starts it’s a good signal to take some time off and get your head out of it.

But... when I get on some personal project, I'm on fire. I can learn new languages and concepts and systems and build pretty complex things that people are amazed at.

I think it's more job burn out after years of writing code for other people. You write the code and you work towards the deadline like the world is going to end if you don't make it. Then that code is in production for a year or two. Maybe more if you're lucky, and then it's gone, replaced by some new thing. You stop caring quite as much. But you see these new young kids on fire and working all night and you get imposter syndrome and you try to care and you beat yourself up and think you're losing your touch. tmi?

On the other hand: When structuring my day with Pomodoros (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique - especially doing the rest properly, meaning just lying down doing some relaxation technique) and resisting all other harmful stuff like (to much) news or (any) social media, I feel like I'm even sharper than in my younger years. Even remembering stuff better.

So, I think those problems are to be spotted in our changing environment and internal setup more than in an aging process. At least not at 40, 50 or 60.

in short, that assignment sounds de-motivating, so you're predisposed to notice momentum is hard to establish.

and getting coherent blocks of time, to get in a flow as they say, is the challenge that hits me all the time, and which i didn't have when going to an office 20-35 years earlier (including in college i mean).

You don't have to take Responsibility A if you don't want to, but you have to live with the consequences of your decision (good or bad). It's a trade off. I want a house. I make that decision for that responsibility. I now own that responsibility knowing the duties that come with home ownership will take a portion of my time and therefore will reduce the availability of time once given to a different responsibility.

Of course, mistakes will be made, but the best part is you can most often correct mistakes in healthy and meaningful ways.

People plan towards retirement which is usually just looking forwards to not having to work anymore.

People look forward to having children and grand children.

I don't know anyone who looks forward to getting older except for the young.

But that's a very sad kind of survivor bias. You were born with your quickness, but you have to earn the experience. Not everyone ends up middle-aged with useful experience. You hear only from the ones who do. And nobody has a time machine.

So look forward to reaping the benefit of experience, but let that be a warning that experience doesn't happen for free. Use your youth to acquire as many lifelong skills as possible. Use those skills in challenging ways to develop judgment. Use your skills and judgment to develop meaningful relationships with people who have chosen similar strategies.

Being able to offer solid skills, judgment, and relationships, rather than the ability to work consecutive 18-hour days, is what you'll have to look forward to.

Such as: owning property, owning car(s), having children, getting married, getting a mortgage, etc.

You can chose to not do any of those things and basically live like you're 20 when you're 80 (in terms of responsibilities).

It's just the mind's way of coming up with problems when there aren't any.

You're damned if you do (give up control) damned if you don't (walk through life unmarried with no kids in an apartment wondering what could've been)

Either way, at the time it was quite worrying - even disturbing - especially when there was work to be done, so think I can relate

Generally I was able to reverse it by working on something which really stimulated me - even hacking away on some goofy personal project after hours - and that kind of bootstrapped me back into a place where I could easily attain flow for "harder" tasks. Can't recommend that highly enough, that and realising that I had different stimulus needs to previously - changing up my coding music, or even foregoing it and switching to mynoise.net yielded some excellent results, or reducing distractions (try periodically disabling system notifications)

That said, if you're really concerned probably see a doc just to rule out any funny business

Ps. Best of luck with it, crossing fingers for you

The longer you're in front of a screen, the more you lose awareness of yourself and what you enjoy. Taking frequent breaks away from screens is important to stay motivated and restore that drive towards meaningful things.

It's sounds wishy-washy how I explained it here, but the video has a more scientific explanation of this phenomenon.

https://youtu.be/zBgCRJluWTc

My smartphone stays at home, on permanent charge (the battery life is severely depleted). I use it only to collect SMS 2FA codes from those organizations that assume that everyone has a smartphone. We call them "mobile phones", but that doesn't mean you have to move if you're using one.

That zombie effect applies equally if you're behind the wheel of a vehicle. Please don't ever do that. Of all tasks, driving is the task that requires the greatest situational awareness.

So when I get stuck now, I just start writing code like I would have when I was early 20s.

I account for this in planning. POC -> POC validation -> Finalv2ForReal -> Finalv2ForReal validation

It gives two shakes at a decent solution with some built-in learning. If this looks like too much for business then well I tried I guess I'll do less work for the same amount of money (inevitably the stupid shit that got prioritized goes away). And I documented what I would have done and can point at it when POC as a service is ermmmm ... less than performant.

"even more advice": Issue is likely mental focus (since you have a finite daily mental, emotional stress budget)

https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/breaking-the-chains-finding...

- (let go of) mental re(re)view. "This too shall pass".

+ (embrace) "just do it" && "Don't worry, be happy".

! (remember) chemical dependencies, if any, must be brought under control.

That one exact thought is compounding your problem. It's pure anxiety and it makes problem worse, I know from experience. When you think that, try to calm yourself with "yeah, it's just anxiety speaking, it will be fine". Maybe also try magnesium supplements, magnesium citrate helps me (but it typically takes up to a week of supplementation, minimum 2 days).

.. which honestly sounds an awful lot like the stress of the situation (or concern about cognitive decline) - which isn't going to do your focus any favours!

Any kind of reset can help with that: go for a short walk, chuck some binaural beats on headphones and close your eyes for 5 mins, drink a warm (non-caffeinated) beverage and think about something else.

Above all else: probably good to just remember everyone has off days, other engineers aren't going to judge you for a day of lower productivity

Aside from reducing your internal stress, One key ingredient of finding "flow" is a sense of immediate feedback, perhaps allocate 20 mins to some short tasks which give rapid reward; write a couple tests, draw a diagram, etc..

Binaural beats (use "relaxed"): https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/binauralBrainwaveGenerator...

Going for a walk is kind of a lightweight "shower effect", random article link: https://buffer.com/resources/shower-thoughts-science-of-crea...

(Sorry, time zone mismatch slowed my response)

Link dump (for reading some other time)

- stress and brain function: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6504531/ - flow state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

I’ve experienced this a bunch of times too. I’m sorry to say this, but burnout for me never goes away on a convenient schedule. The more I make myself wrong for feeling overwhelmed, distracted and unmotivated, the worse it gets. Or in other terms, problems are rarely solved with the same thinking that created them.

For me, I have to really give myself permission to step back, take stock of myself, get some sleep and good food and often take a break from “work” programming tasks for a few weeks. (And I know exactly how inconvenient that last part is).

The more I push myself to feel better already, the longer it takes.

Some days you just feel down and are barely able to function, others you have seemingly unlimited energy, and this can come from a whole host of factors : how did you sleep, what did you eat, what is the weather, how is your personal life going...

And of course things get worse as you age (with quite a lot of variation and personal responsibility in staying healthy).

Write down what are the big challenges/problems, try to break them down and write about it, keep dividing it until you start to see that you can tackle the indidual pieces.

I'm 42 and I've been in a mental place similar to yours, but a little more drastic due to a hard time in my life, and it took a while to get back into top shape, but the effort to break down my problems on paper helped me tackle some immediate tasks I had to accomplish.

Good habits and lifestyle changes take time.

The only other option that has worked for me would be drugs like Adderall.

I think what we have to deal with is not just cognitive decline, but more importantly cognitive overload. People in their 40s usually juggle lots of responsibilities, especially if they have a family. At this age you normally also have earned some money, and if you start buying things like a summer house or an apartment for renting out, those things come with maintenance tasks. This can accumulate quickly.

Whatever the reasons are, my approach was to get used to it and work differently. I am terrible at doing multiple things at a time and my short-term memory is bad, so I learned to concentrate on one task at a time and eliminate distractions. I buy large monitors, so that I can have multiple things on the screen at the same time and avoid having to remember (I can easily forget an IP address when switching windows!). I spend money on Apple hardware, because of 5K displays: 5K makes a huge difference, because I can comfortably have THREE columns of code in my fullscreen Emacs instead of two. That means I often have 5 different pieces of code visible, which does wonders for things like APIs, which you mentioned — I can follow the entire path of a call and keep it all on screen.

I also noticed that there are positives that come with age and experience! I find that I'm much better at seeing the "big picture", analytical thinking, design, and predicting potential problems. Most importantly, I'm now much better at knowing what not to do. These skills are invaluable when running your own business.

This is a really good point. I feel like I'm dealing with way more responsibilities now that I have a house and a family, I'm no longer the center of my own universe.

This seems like a particularly helpful suggestion, both for the original context of the question, but also something I'm likely to use myself. Thanks.

I can still bang out code like nobody's business, even in my late 40's... when I can find 4 uninterrupted hours to get into it. Which is rarely.

It's more about depth of focus, which was so easily available for 10+ hours a day when I was younger.

With family+house responsibilities, I rarely (if ever) have that anymore.

This seems like something you can overcome. Have you tried writing these function calls out as a flow on a piece of paper, or in a flow chart, document, something like that? A reference which you draw to be able to tell where you are the stack and where you came from.

It sounds like a very crusty task and I doubt I could maintain that many levels of calls in many different contexts. The important thing is finding a mechanism which works for you.

edit: I'd note that it's possible your development environment is older than your colleagues, too. Many modern ones (VS Code, etc) can jump around a codebase automatically - find callers to a function, jump to where the next function is defined, etc. Maybe check their setup and see if it's worth adopting.

"It’s probably just that aging changes your mode of thinking. Right now, I have to really concentrate and I might even get a headache just trying to imagine something clearly and distinctly with twenty or thirty components. When I was young, I could imagine a castle with twenty rooms with each room having ten different objects in it. I would have no problem. I can’t do that anymore. Now I think more in terms of earlier experiences. I see a network of inchoate clouds, instead of the picture-postcard clearness. But I do write better programs."[0]

I can believe the part about better programs. Can you imagine working with somebody who can clearly visualize software with 200 sub-components in it? I once worked with software written by someone who had similar powers. He was a hardware designer. His software had very little organization; he wrote imperatively and remembered where everything was. Six months after he handed a program off to me, I spoke with him and told him I was currently trying to figure out where a particular component was initialized, and he told me exactly where, in what part of what file. IIRC, some hardware registers were being initialized in a procedure that was allocating working space for a numerical part of the program, because that's here he happened to open the log file for the first time, and he wanted the logging from the hardware registers to be the first thing in the log file, before he logged the fact that the memory had been allocated successfully. He remembered this with no hesitation, more than six months after he last touched the code, possibly two years after he made the decision to initialize the hardware in that spot.

Someone with less mental horsepower, like me, has to organize their code into modules with clear names and responsibilities.

[0] https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/programmers-at-work-...

I am insanely jealous of people who can keep everything in their head. Maybe there's a silver lining in that my methods are more resistant to brain-busting situations, depression, cognitive decline, etc., but I'm not sure that I'm convinced.

I try to lean into just such a silver lining. I like to write my code for worst-case future-me: what would it take for my sleep-deprived, Monday morning, uncaffeinated brain to make sense of? It definitely helps, especially even considering that approach, I often find I overestimate my future ability to understand past code.

To be fair (haha) I went from writing super organized code with loads of concise, well-documented files to writing code just as you describe when I started designing hardware and writing more complicated embedded firmwares. For whatever reason, hardware initialization boilerplate doesn't like to be spread out or organized. As soon as you try your code ends up breaking outright or becoming a vastly more complicated, gigantic mess.

It's because the hardware is soooo specific and we as software developers want to make interfaces that are as generic, high-level, and re-usable as possible. Example: You can't just write a function that takes two pin numbers and initializes I2C on them so you can talk with some module. You usually have to know--ahead of time--which two pins you're going to be passing to that function (so the types match; because each pin has its own special type haha) so the function can initialize the correct I2C bus on the chip (in the right way)... Which immediately makes such a function non-generic and kinda pointless since you'll never be able to re-use it in anything else for any other purpose. You quickly get into the habit of saying to yourself, "Why am I making this a separate function again?"

Also, the order of operations matters so much more in embedded stuff than it does in regular software. I could totally see the situation where you want to initialize logging immediately after initializing some hardware because you want the logs to reflect values that you only happen to have available during initialization... You don't need them after initialization so why waste precious memory keeping variables around just so you can log them later? Just setup the logger in the same code, write your variables, and be done with it!

Makes sense, right? Hah! Only in the world of embedded firmware!

Whiteboard markers are too wide and I am left handed so I erase as a write.

And using paper makes it feel like I am wasting paper.

For example, write a quick script to add a panic (nonexistantFunction()) as the first line of each function. Then, call each function in turn. Save the panic's function stack trace, then process them as a combined graphviz file.

This simple and efficient hack will get you all the most important edges in most cases for most languages. It won't get you the internal links, for those you need a more effective parser or more exotic means of obtaining branched call stacks.

[0] http://graphviz.org/

When tracing deep call stacks I can find it helpful to write out the question I am looking for the answer to in a comment. Then I can retrace my thoughts back up the callstack using the very handy shortcut to go back to the previous curson position.

What I do is log virtually everything I'm doing in an editor window that I keep open all the time (one file per project/task). If I get disturbed by a call or a colleague, I can do a quick recap and get back to where I was. Likewise if I lose the plot several levels down my stack. It also helps if I need to switch projects for a while, or overnight.

It's like a running log of my thought processes:

- Need to add feature x to module y

- What docs have I got?

  - How to file in d:\projects\docs...

  - Log file from 13/03/2021

- a,b,c...

- Looking at A

   - I'm thinking of adding a new parameter

     - Who else calls this?

       - Routine F

         - The mod would be straight forward there.

       - Routine H

         - This is called by S

           - This needs more thought, it might be chewy

     - What SPs are involved?

       - UpdateCustomerTable(CustName, Address1...)

   - I've backed up the database to ADB_20230110_1501.BAK so I can test.

I keep the log files, which go back over 20 years and can be invaluable next time I have to look at the same project months later. Reading the code AND my notes helps me re-build my mental stack much quicker. It also helps with any bugs that I introduce.

Good luck. It is possible to be productive at an advanced age, and still enjoy it too.

So I bought an A4 hardback notebook, and started logging everything I did. I wish I had been doing that since I started in this business; it's a really good work habit.

I keep a lot of journals. Bullet journals for my daily tasks/planning. Long form journals for deep subject matter: maths, graphics, algorithms, etc. Combined with my writing it's definitely been a useful way to see how I've evolved my thinking over time, etc.

Keep at it!

Moving to flat ascii files meant it's searchable and has longevity as it doesn't need any specific tool or app. I can also carry the lot around with me - very useful on site.

Cheers.

Of course, I have a digital file of timestamped and commented code snippets and pieces of config. But that's just about the activity of coding; I now think a handwritten log is a good idea for anyone, whatever their trade.

The reason I recommend a hardback notebook, is because it offers the best CYA protection (I was caned as a child). It's sorta symbolic - hard evidence, if you like.

[Edit] You can also scribble in your notebook in meetings, while glancing furtively over your spectacle rims, to intimidate the speaker. Hard copy is power.

\work\customername\StockSystem

MyCust001 - Interface not updating PickStatus.txt

MyCust002 - Add Stock Check Flag to ScanPullStock.txt

MyCust003 - Look at enhancing Batch Split screen.txt

I use the numbers as a quick reference within all my documents.

\personal\Diving

Diving book recommendations.txt

Diving gas tables.txt

\personal\DIY

Standard screw sizes.txt

Choosing new security lights.txt

Getting new consumer unit fitted.txt

I add the date and time to a line whenever I start, or after a break. (Pressing F7 on UltraEdit does this automatically). I can use this retrospectively to see how long things took.

What I suggest for your current situation is to diagram everything. Just buy some big sheets of butcher paper, and draw out the entire nested API structure. Rely on your visual sense so that you don't have to do as many mental gymnastics. Your visual processing center is the GPU of your brain, it has vastly more parallel processing power than the language processing centers of your brain.

Also remember that everyone has different aptitudes. You might not be decreasing cognitively at all, it might just be that this problem doesn't click with you like it does with the other developers.

"Normal" programming involves writing code that will run on one specific thing with (usually) one specific use case using tools (and often whole languages) made for that purpose. Web programming involves writing code that will run on any number of servers/devices/containers in any number of locations/networks using any number of architectures with arbitrary resources of wildly varying quantities and qualities that serves other servers, desktops, mobile devices, embedded things, and who-knows-what else; also of wildly varying quality/resources and quantities with wildly varying and unpredictable workloads/traffic intensity.

In other words, web development is about 100 orders of magnitude greater complexity than "normal" software development. It has become so bad that "premature optimization" is the norm; because the cost of re-doing things later to support a new feature/device/endpoint or fix an issue (e.g. lacking screen reader support) can be so great that adding a dozen layers of complexity to writing and deploying your code at the start can feel like a bargain in comparison.

Video games? Mission-critical real-time embedded code? Operating system development?

I don't want to knock anyone down, but web programming is not the most complex or challenging thing going, it's just software development.

True, it's made more difficult and annoying than it should be, because you need to deal with a jenga-like stack of badly-designed and poorly-documented APIs, forced to use languages and systems with inherent flaws, and have your targets constantly shifting due to the latest fad. But then, that's not unique to web dev, it's just worse.

The web is not just for websites anymore, it's a universal platform for app distribution. This means web apps can instantly be made available to billions of users. You noticed that yourself. This brings all kinds of complexity that these layers solve. They absorb complexity, not add it. So I don't understand why you would say things have gotten "bad". Things were way worse, but individial contributors never noticed.

True, until there's a bug in abstraction level 6 caused by an upstream change in proprietary abstraction level 3 that's been patched in abstraction level 8, but not for your specific case. Then it becomes complex.

I can't think of many 'modern' projects in the web world that do not rely heavily on an often very large number of external dependencies.

I am interested in your experience and why you think this? It's not true at all from my experience. In the past, making a basic message board would have been pretty difficult. Now it can be done in days. Same with Twitter clones etc.

What type of basic website takes months to develop?

Your number #1 priority with any port or major refactor is getting the current implementation defined and under test, so any replacement can be tested against the same tests.

Once you've done that you should have a solid foundation and understanding of what the API actually does.

In getting it under test, you'll also build up better mental models of which parts are actually separate and easily testable and which parts aren't.

Then you can get to work replacing and testing each unit, then build them back up on the other side.

My old company lived and died by its instrumentation of DAU (daily active users). We would try to refactor the code to an IoC pattern with DI but invariably we'd get blamed for a downturn in the numbers - but never lauded if the reverse was true. It was a losing game - we finally had to get management to commit to the modernization (never, ever say "rewrite") and power through the days of low DAU.

> By the time I'm down in the weeds I've forgotten what I'm doing, what the purpose of the actual API call is.

If I can craft tests up front in terms of the higher level goals then when I finish a subcomponent or get distracted by something else the higher level test is there for me to fall back on to figure out what to do next.

The difference is that our younger selves were maybe more optimistic and naive and probably would have just produced a new mess for the next one to scratch his/her head about.

Abstraction is hard and we usually have to much of it in our code bases. You have to break it down and isolate smaller tasks to get started with. Start with some endpoint of the API and try to understand what it exactly does. Usually there also should be an API spec where the ins and outs are defined. Maybe it is easier for you to write this code by adhering to the spec and/or fulfilling existing tests than reading the old convoluted code?!

Probably you know all this and maybe you just hate your task. If this is the case.. sometimes a change is what you need.

This needs to be highlighted!

The point is, even if you live a perfectly healthy life with the perfect diet, exercise, and rest, it’s possible that something else is out of kilter and may need serious intervention.

Maybe try a max exertion test for post exertional malaise.

I do think they should be OTC. When I faced the roadblock of not being able to get the medicine I wanted I did go to black market and would do it again in a heartbeat.

   1. Illegal drugs

   2. Being a head trapped in a jar, hated by all

   3. A bullet

Why is nobody talking about this outrageous conduct?

If you mention these concerns, they will suddenly discharge you, and/or treat you like garbage.

All we're doing is creating pipelines to prison. The industry has no problem sending ill people to prison forever. Not only that but droves of people are dying because of these policies.

I'm shopping for a new one, but their initial intake forms are immediately confrontational, and this is someone that seems to have good reviews... I went through several that seemed to have good reputations, and none were taking patients.

I just looked it up, Modafinil and Amitriptyline are both Schedule IV drugs for what is OTC in many places, that is pretty extreme.

Marijuana is Schedule I though and plenty of people smoke pot. While it isn't legal the odds are probably in your favor.

I'm telling you this because I don't think it's you necessarily, but that more and more there are codebases that are dense with this kind of thick obfuscating abstraction.

I dropped out of IT when I was 52. I'm 55 now and don't think I could keep up with the constant myriad changes in literally all aspects of tech. Change for change sake is a scourge that lots of companies fall prey to in the name of keeping up which feels to older developers like chasing the rainbow that is just over the next hill...

Reminds me of "The grug brained developer" :)

https://grugbrain.dev

1. Covid. My number came up in September 2022. The mental fog is real and is not what generally people think it is. For me it surfaced as diminished short term memory (example, write down a phone number you see one a website. Before covid, it’d take one or two looks. After covid 3-4 looks back and forth. Hand in hand with this - affected executive functioning. In other words, you just feel dumber lol

2. Burn out. It starts with lack of energy, low executive functioning and progresses into depression and/or anxiety. If this applies to you - get help. Make changes. This one you can fix.

Somewhat related, 41 was the age I realized I don’t want to drink again. Some people have this moment earlier, some never. 1.5years later, the feeling is freeing and awesome. I was not a heavy drinker before but lately I was less and less enjoyable with more hangover (and irritability) the next day.

Decades ago the whole MSDOS machine was mine and my tools were an editor, C compiler and linker. Now you need to know a much larger number tools, frameworks and environments before you write a single line of code.

My brother, who's 18 months my junior and a developer like me, shares the same sentiment: "It's like I used to have 20 registers, and now I'm down to 12".

It's comforting to believe that age hasn't diminished us, but working directly with my juniors has disabused me of that notion.

I feel that Tennyson put it best when he said, "Though we are not now the strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are."

Couple of solutions:

- Wider screen (I use 50' oled), and the VS Code pin feature, you basically order the tabs to follow the code.

- Note taking support by using nested bullet points, a.k.a outliners, it could be a simple markdown file, Notion, Roam Research, Obsidian ... Then you write what calls what for what reason, and make it kind of nested story.

- Favourite panel in VS Code, rather than seeing the whole tree of files, you can favourite the same files you are pinning, to come back later on, you can have favourite groups by feature if IRC, this might be an extension and not built in.

On the health side, disclaimer: I'm not a Physician!:

- Do you have old injuries that hurt? I'm using my injuries to know when my diet is causing inflammation, I try eating in different ways until the pain goes away, I bet it affects cognitive performance too.

- Mentally having "too many windows open" like the computer decreases our performance, this is worries, fears, stress. Try to unburden those by talking to someone, or find what other healthy needs your are ignoring, like walking, moving, exercise, contact with nature, playing music, doing something creative, laughing ... sometimes we become one dimensional and that's not good for us.

A way to test if you have lost ability or is just crappy code that does not motivate you to follow, is to talk to someone that speaks a lot with side stories, and then see if you can follow all the branches of the conversation and help them coming back to the original branch, if you are able to do so, might give you more confidence. This of course requires to be present, really listening, which is a skill in itself.

And the last advice, would be to implement some kind of meditative practice, and walk long distances while you listen to Andrew Huberman podcast.

Look at your IDE, desktop, editor, OS, monitor, chair, etc. and see how you could improve it with new options. Tech or otherwise...

Is your desk a space of zen? Got a plant on your desk?

To me, it sounds like you are placing too high an expectation on your own cognitive ability, and not spending enough time sleeping. Any project that requires someone to do 4D chess in their heads to complete it is too complicated and no one will be able to maintain it. Start writing stuff down and making diagrams until the design is easier to understand. You are trying to build a city in your head without creating a plan.

Even a back of the napkin drawing can be enough really. Sometimes flaws become obvious when we do this. The value of older developers is they have the patience to do stuff like this, while all the young'uns go winging off on wild projects that they have to re-write in a month.

Listen, there are 60 year olds that look like our long held image of a 60 year that can barely walk or do anything.

And then there are 60 year olds that go to the gym everyday.

How do you want to play this? I don’t accept your premise that 40 has anything to do with it.

Being a miserable fuck is age-agnostic. Trust me, I’m a professional malcontent.

But I like your take. Do everything reasonable to continue forward and maintain your body and mind.

Just don't completly ignore your genetics and biology and be open that they might speak-up and have a say too.

All adaptation is contextual. This picture is probably familiar to a lot of people, and is a perfect illustration of what I’m talking about: https://www.boredpanda.com/athlete-body-types-comparison-how...

There is no universal “better”. At any age, in any environment, in any physical condition, there are contextually appropriate optimums, and always two categories of direction: 1) using whatever tools are at your disposal to adapt as much as you can while accepting (and testing) limitations 2) ignoring what tools you do and don’t have and either giving up or trying to get the world to adapt to you.

The first direction is always better.

But cognition constantly being under ageist assault has little to no basis when you consider so many knowledge driven professions employ people well past middle age (academia, doctor, lawyers, scientists, writers, artists). They also do their best work much later in life.

They may have a say, but ultimately you can only try to deal with the cards you’ve been dealt. At least I wouldn’t just accept that I’m genetically predisposed to misery with no way out.

There’s an incredibly sad but inspiring documentary called “The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off” about a man named John Kennedy that died of a genetic skin condition called EB at 36. He did everything within his power to make the most of his life, and was brilliantly dedicated to squeezing as much meaning and good as possible out of his horrible situation.

Failure to attempt moving away from and transcending sickness is itself possibly the worst form of sickness, and something that can be easily cured by just having someone genuinely loyal and rooting for you, even if only your inner self. What sick people need most, more than simple compassion and accommodations for their problems, are people genuinely rooting for health/trying to find solutions or grieving the difficulty in finding any.

Maybe you can pair with one of the other developers? If they are junior, they could benefit from your experience and insight and you could benefit from their focus and ability to navigate the massive codebase.

Other things you can try (work for me): getting comfy in a small and cozy room, turning the lights off or putting in noise cancelling headphones. Move the phone away and turn off any notifications. Better yet, have a dedicated machine for coding with no logged in accounts.

Ome last thing, you may have undiagnosed ADHD. Mine became progressively worse in early 30s. Self medicating through caffeine no longer worked for me. The doses that were effective were making me severely anxious and sometimes nauseous. ADHD meds have removed the negative side effects of caffeine and helped me feel a little more normal.

Sorry about the long comment: there’s a lot I can share from my perspective, but I don’t know if any of it helps. Feel free to comment back if you’re interested in touching base.

Get a blank sheet of paper and a writing utensil. Not a text editor.

Start at the top of your call stack and start making a diagram that resembles a directory tree:

    application_code_function(string arg)
      library_function()
        std_lib_func()

I don't do this often, but it helps especially when I'm not familiar with the patterns used in the project, or I'm having a groggy day and having trouble thinking "deep". It seems to help to me to try and reason about it away from the distractions of the IDE and the OS.

[0] "Memory Diagrams: A Consistent Approach Across Concepts and Languages", Toby Dragon and Paul E. Dickson

I found that I was much more interested in how the work impacted customers, how we could work more effectively as a team, building relationships across the company I am at, etc.

At 48 I switched from programming to managing. It was a good move for me. I don’t love managing the way I once loved programming, but I periodically reassess and realize that although it’s fun to take a day and write some code here and there, I would be pretty miserable if I were to go back to it full time. I would constantly have to find ways to motivate myself to get anything done.

I do still take those days sometimes and write code for our product, but keep myself off the critical path at all times.

Management may or may not be for you, but it’s something you may want to consider. I wish I had moved over sooner.

As an aside, I had read in my twenties about a theory that claimed something happens physically in our brains as we age that explains this phenomenon of greater interest in the big picture and less interest in detail-oriented work but I have never gone back and tried to confirm or learn more about that theory.

That said, I still managed to pull out a few nights of programming (the Synacor Challenge) and debugging, occasionally till 2AM while I barely get much sleep because we are trying to ditch the pacifier.

I have a feeling that humans can still burn extra mental energy when really driven, to certain limit. But in 40s we are driven by far fewer things than in 20s, and we need more rest for these burns. The up side is I know ourselves better now than in our 20s so I can at least achieve something. Back when I was in my 20s I spent most of the time playing games and failed to learn anything properly.

D-Vitamin supplements, ZMA (Zinc, Magnesium), Enough sleep, No coffeein after 3-4, lifting weights and endurance training (crossfit), eat whole food which you prepare yourself with focus on proteins and fats from animals.

But I think the biggest difference comes when I care about something or not. The other day I was reading through the material for the Full ham radio license in the UK because it's about bloody time I got the Full one rather than the lower level. And because I was interested I easily recalled the next day that the impedance of coax used by hams is typically 50 ohm, television feeds typically uses 75 ohm and ladder line is 450 ohm.

If you're doing something that doesn't interest you don't be surprised that your brain isn't interested either! Also, if you have a life then tiredness, worries, stress, etc. all kill your coding vibe.

Like you, I'm faced with a couple of APIs that I have to understand. In my case, they are third-party SAAS APIs that I need to evaluate as integration targets for a product I work on.

The odds are very low that I'm going to learn anything of lasting technical value from these APIs. Two years from now, I will probably have to wrack my brain to remember if I ever worked with them directly or just heard about them second-hand.

The same is true of most of the programming I do, especially if I do it well. The alternative is to become one of those toxic senior developers who feel entitled to novelty at work and find ways to make simple problems technically stimulating for themselves, and simultaneously unapproachable for many of their teammates.

How do you stay engaged? You have to remember that you can always solve these problems better than you ever have before. Your solution can be more transparent, cheaper to operate, approachable for new devs, easier to hack on without breaking it, better-documented. You can challenge yourself to finish it quickly or to involve junior devs in its development in a way that is constructive to their growth.

If you don't care about making your solution better in those ways, if you only care about solving little puzzles in code, then you will get bored, because you will look at new projects and know that you can solve all the little puzzles in them, and you won't learn anything fundamentally new in the process.

The other thought is that maybe it was poorly written, having multiple layers of abstraction, etc. that are unnecessary? Most API's are CRUD operations on data or calling deeper internal things, like payment processing, in which case you are calling other API's essentially.

I would suggest writing external tests that hit the existing API and in small chunks port features over and incrementally get those tests to pass calling NewAPI. Internal/unit test coverage can help to ensure each module or logical grouping is working the same as the prior work too.

Younger me didn't find coding boring - I was still learning things.

Older me, has done a lot of things multiple times. I'm often not learning anything (or, I don't believe I'm going to learn anything).

To be honest, things like Copilot have really helped with this - auto generating boiler plate code removes a lot of the tedium.

I've found I need to stop comparing myself to my late twenties self and understand that my burdens are different and I need to set different expectations of myself. As my responsibilities and noise/interference have grown, my ability to do complex design/development has been inversely effected and waned significantly and _that's ok_. I need better tools and to be better at managing my time and energies to be more targeted/specific and I am much more effective than I was all those years ago. I just have to be more intentional and forgiving of myself.

Also you get those nagging feelings of futility about doing a mechanical task (translating an API) when you know you (or anything else) will 1) make mistakes and 2) have to do it again in five years anyway.

There are two times you buy a motorcycle - First when you know you can't die and Second when you don't care if you do. Sucks to be in the middle (aged).

2. Some people decline mentally faster then others, sometimes in their 40-50. Don't freak out, but do pay attention, ask others you know to pay attention to you.

3. Take it one layer at a time, and again, write everything down, best on paper.

And keep smiling when it is hard.

For me it works wonders. Wish I started it when I was 17.

No, but we mortals age our brain ability does tend to decline.

You're going to have stretches where you look back and feel like you're doing the best work of your career, and stretches where you worry that you're done for. It's all normal.

If this project isn't clicking with you, but you have to do it anyways, use this as an opportunity to build some "compensatory" habits. A similar situation (I'm older than you, but this happened in my late 30s) got me big-time into note taking, which has been a long-term win.

- If you drink, curtail it. - Diet is everything. - Get more sleep. - Get quality exercise. - Find another hobby that is interesting but relaxing, but don't try to turn it into a side hustle. (I restore old guitars)

My recommendation? Focus on tooling. See if you can create a better test infrastructure, a better developer experience for the others. Do you see another way the code can be organized to make it easier to reason about? Is documentation/code-comments lacking? Perhaps your time can be leveraged to help the others. Maybe that perspective shift can unlock your super-powers.

There could be so many possibilities I'd explore before cognitive decline (at 40??)

1. You are not communicating well enough with team lead / members to get ahead on the task. Maybe they have good advice/feedback that you're not getting because communication is off.

2. You are a bit burned out

3. You ran into some difficulty with this hard task and drove yourself into a state of panic. This panic can feed onto itself and prohibit you from making any progress in a reinforcing loop. Now you're in such anxiety you can barely focus on anything.

4. You're not attacking the problem right. Maybe you can use debug messages, or a debugger, or write diagrams, or a small POC, whatever it is you're doing now maybe you can make some adjustment on how you're trying to solve it.

5. You're not taking care of the basics - sleep, nutrition, exercise. This will basically harm you in countless ways, don't do this.

For example, one of the best developers on my team (a little bit older than me) is "on the spectrum". We've worked together for nearly 20 years, starting at about the same time. Early in our career, we would dig into the details of APIs and patterns and be able to rattle off the details of the changes when a new dot release of an library came out.

As the years have gone on, I've "lost interest" in the details knowing that I can look them up when I need to and have naturally defaulted to generalizing ideas. That is, rather than knowing that we need to change the third parameter in the function call in FOOBAR 3.2 when we upgrade from FOOBAR 2.9 because the details of the memory management changed, I just know that we use the FOOBAR function because it does a specific task that we need.

The reason I bring up my friend/coworker is that he never generalizes, he gets stuck in the details. He can't design his way out of a paper bag, but he can write thousands of lines of code over the weekend with full unit tests and there's never any bugs. So we make a great team, he's one that has focused and has every detail at the tip of his tongue. But he never sees the big picture.

So I view getting older in software as (over) training AI. My brain works in the generalization route and the more I see, the more connections I make, but I need to "make room" in my brain by not encoding the details. My friend's brain works differently. He encodes details and can keep a deep call stack but at the expense of ever being able to see the big picture.

I guess that's a long way of saying that maybe you shouldn't be so quick to think it's cognitive decline. It could be just that your brain is encoding things differently after seeing so many examples in your career.

I know I'd fail miserably at porting an API now (I've done that when I was younger very efficiently). But I also know that I can bring a much higher level of design and ideas to the team than I could have 20 years ago.

Code is the author's though processes made concrete (in a sense), and some people just think differently, some people are just incompatible. Over the years I've seen some codebases considered good that are easy to follow and I like them, and other codebases considered good that just seem to grind my mental gears even though I can't put my finger on any specific problems with the code.

Good luck and get the sleep you need.

I have an advice: walk daily as much as you can, but no more than two hours, ruminating what is bothering and/or factinates you in your work. Thinking around the exercise time can be very helpful. And walking allows you to think while doing some exercise, which is even more benefitial.

More than two hours of walking may result in more than 12 km of walk, which can be taxing. 5-6 km of walk is OK.

Personally, I also do resistance training and intermittent fasting, but my primary tool is walking and was for a long time.

Right now I am closing the bug that was introduced more than 10 years ago into the system I work with. I have more than four thousands of lines in changeset in more than four hundreds of files, in two unrelated repositories. So I think I am not all that bad at figuring things out.

PS And sleep well! ;)

Have you looked into what you're eating and doing for exercise? You definitely cant power through brainfog with caffeine anymore.

try the following to get yourself back on track 1. first meal of the day should be a filet of fatty fish like salmon with skin. if you can't afford this, use a high quality fish oil pill like nordic naturals. keep it refrigerated. omega3 fatty acids are prone to oxidation at roon temperature and there are no official stadards for it in america)

2. limit carbs to whole foods like sweet potatoes, yucca, potatos

3. cut out all sugar outside of whole unprocessed fruit. (juice doesn't count)

4. have a side of greens with each meal

5. start lifting weights, (triggers release of HGH)

6. choose one day per week to do a 24 hour fast.

after 2 weeks, you'll start to feel your brain come back

Kippers!

I don't know if they ever had them in the USA. They seem to be seriously out of fashion in the UK; in the seventies, supermarkets used to sell them in plastic sachets, but nowadays it seems the only way to get them is online (or maybe you live in a town with a real fishmongers).

I don't generally like fish, but I'd eat kippers if I could get them.

Juice might as well be soda when it comes to sugar.

in retrospect i realize that paren could be read two ways. to be clear, I want to iterate that juice doesn't count as an unprocessed fruit.

Avoid juice like the plague!

No matter how good you are, nobody is good enough to port an API like you are saying it, by memorising or thinking 9 levels deep. Humans aren't designed for this kind of tasks.

Instead, you should take steps to understand the parts that compromise the abstractions that make up that API and implement it.

Also have good test coverage from both sides, so you make sure you are implemented something that resembles more like a spec.

What OP is trying to do is quite literally impossible. Not even the best chess players in the world can hold such a big (decision) tree in their heads _at once_. And they might be the most extreme data point we have on this matter.

The way we humans compute needs to be supported by breaking stuff apart and focus on few things at a time on one side, and by abstraction on the other side. Iterating on smaller problems and generalizing the big picture along the way.

Think forest & trees metaphor, or the 7 +/- 2 problem.

Of course as we get older our ability to completely emerge into one task and put all our energy into it generally weakens for a variety of reasons. But there's enough evidence to support the idea that regularly challenging our cognitive ability keeps us sharp and maintains or improves our ability to learn and tackle new things.

What we can't do however is fight our natural limitations and OP seems to try just that.

Additionally, and this might be just as important, this seems to be a very tedious and boring task. The worst tasks are the ones that require a lot of mental effort while also being incredibly boring. It's hard to find a high state of motivation and focus, which contributes to the issue.

My suggestion would be to try to tackle the low hanging fruits first: find the parts of the lowest complexity, try to understand these and get the simplest things done first. This will also restore your confidence.

1. Enough quality sleep. 2. Exercises that involves your legs. Somehow leg muscles help the heart to pump the blood back up, keep enough pressure and circulation in your brain.

I'm 35 and I've already experienced the benefit of those 2 and the negative impact of lack of those 2.

Maybe you could be just rusty about that kind of code?

My area is blessed with parks and cool places to go for a walk, I hope you and OP have something similar.