I'm 46, and while I do think my cognitive speed has declined a tiny bit, my abstract thinking has improved throughout life. The one change I have noticed though is that programming has become insanely complex during the 37 years I have been programming, but more especially during the last 10-15 years. It's at the point now where you can't even create a basic website, to modern standards, without spending months of work to develop it, or without spending 95% of your time on StackOverflow wrestling with bugs and complexities of 7 different pieces of framework that you're trying to get working together. It's utter insanity.
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.
Don't compare web development with "normal" software development. Writing code for the web is 10,000 layers of added complexity far above and beyond literally any other kind of programming.
"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.
> Writing code for the web is 10,000 layers of added complexity far above and beyond literally any other kind of programming.
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.
I agree that web development is complex. I disagree that abstraction layers add complexity. Abstraction layers solve problems. If you don't have the problems that these abstraction layers solve, then you might perceive that as complex, but most people actually do experience these problems.
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.
> I agree that web development is complex. I disagree that abstraction layers add complexity. Abstraction layers solve problems.
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.
Yes, but in my experience this doesn't actually happen that often as long as you don't rely on external dependencies too much. This happens in any ecosystem btw.
> It's at the point now where you can't even create a basic website, to modern standards, without spending months of work to develop it, or without spending 95% of your time on StackOverflow wrestling with bugs and complexities of 7 different pieces of framework that you're trying to get working together. It's utter insanity.
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?
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.