He has heard the whispers, “he is getting older, who will replace him?” People asking him with a straight face, “when will you retire?” After close to 25 years at Amazon, where each year has been different and amazing, He feels as young as the day he decided to leave academia and join Amazon. The thing about getting older as a developer, is that you have seen a lot and encountered many of the problems younger developers are facing (even if they look a little different on first glance). If you’ve been around the block as many times as some of us have, you’ll have earned battle scars along the way. There are days in war rooms you will never forget. You have experimented a lot, and you have failed more times than you care to remember. You have half-a-head full of what is practical and works. And a quarter of that space has been trained to look for red flags, scanning for things that you know will go wrong.