Disclaimer: this post talks about aging, but I'm only 34 at time of writing. Take this with a grain of salt.
I've been working in tech for money since 2006. Twenty years of my life - the majority of it - has been spent trading my computing aptitude for money, building systems, teaching people, and sharing as I go. For almost as long as I've been working in the industry, I've been attending conferences.
But now, two decades into my career, I've found myself (and my friends) expressing a very worrying sentiment at these conferences:
I'm not sure these events are for me anymore.
Early in my career, I had the pleasure of attending the first-ever PyCon Canada in 2012. The event was foundational for me, but looking back, I was young, eager, accomplished, and very naïve. I vividly recall discussing a tricky problem that I was trying to solve, around reloading the state of my Python web app in real-time, when another attendee turned around and taught me the benefits and drawbacks of "hot reloads" - a concept I had never heard of. That app went on to be The Wub Machine, a music remixing app that launched my career; and those attendees went on to become close friends and colleagues - some of whom even attended my wedding.
Over the following 8 years, I attended conference after conference, meeting brilliant technologists who just wanted to share their ideas and learn from others. Speakers like Brandon Rhodes, Camille Fournier, Zach Holman, Alice Goldfuss, Gary Bernhardt, Lynn Root, Bret Victor, Charity Majors, and many more inspired me to become a better engineer - no matter which technology I used - and inspired me to share my learnings and knowledge with the wider community.
And then, after being immersed in this environment for almost a decade: COVID hit, and the spectacular run of conferences, community, and connection ground to a halt. From 2020 to 2023, the community very slowly started to recover, but so many familiar faces didn't come back. People's lives changed. Priorities changed. Hell, people just aged out of their early adulthood and couldn't really justify conference travel anymore. Twitter, once the town square for this community, died, fragmenting people across X, Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, and... wait, not Threads. But the wider programming community could no longer agree on a single platform, and moved to a collection of mostly-disconnected echo chambers.
Many other things happened around this time. ZIRP ended, making money no longer free. Companies no longer valued open source and community-building in the way they once did. Round after round after round of tech layoffs began to scare people into focusing on their employers, not their communities.
And, quite frankly, the explosion of AI changed the mood. The topics that mattered to the programming community abruptly changed, and those without a background in machine learning or AI - or even those with a background in these topics - suddenly had very little to say about them in public. Most people were new to AI and were on an even playing field, and those who were doing the cutting-edge work weren't talking about it at tech conferences; they were at NeurIPS or ICML presenting these things called "papers" instead of giving conference talks, sharing their discoveries rather than teaching each other. And, frankly, the credentials that such conferences demanded, coupled with the stark lack of focus given to presentation quality in academia, made these spaces foreign and inhospitable to those whose careers thrived in the tech conferences of the 2010s.
Today, in 2026, the newer generation is AI-native. They've never heard of a package registry - and have no idea what PyPI or NPM or RubyGems might be, who builds those packages, what open-source is, and so on - but they've downloaded a multi-billion-parameter local model to play with or built an app without touching a single line of code. They don't need to go on the same journey that we did. The kind of talk that I would have loved to listen to in 2014, about software architecture, or the intricacies of C++ virtual dispatch, or Gary Bernhardt's seminal The Birth and Death of Javascript, have all lost their utility in an age when understanding these concepts no longer makes you more employable than someone off the street with a Claude Code subscription.
As I wrote this, and as I talked with friends about this concept, I heard three major points come up:
If any of these concepts resonate with you, I have bad news for you: you're dangerously at risk of becoming irrelevant.
Because the truth is: of course there's still something for you to learn. Kids these days don't care about what you cared about because we have advanced as a society since then. And this space was fun a decade ago because you were young, excited, and carefree; not because the spaces have gotten objectively worse.
Just like I remember being naïve and excited my first-ever conference, and having those more experienced than me turn around to teach me a new concept; it's time for you, the aging millenial or Gen X programmer, to be that wise mentoring voice. Conferences used to be useful for you because you could grow; but now that you've gotten through the easy part of growth, it's time for you to continue growing by giving back and meeting the community where they are, just like they did to you when you were starting out.
A great example of this archetype is the great Simon Willison, who has transitioned from a conference attendee and community member to... a conference attendee and community member, even though the entire world has changed around him over the past 25 years. Simon could have chosen to become jaded, fall back on his laurels, and lament the younger generation for being disinterested in "the basics" - but instead he found something to be interested in (LLMs and
AI engineering) and stayed excited and sharp. He's still learning, finding things to learn, and teaching those around him. As we all should.
The world has changed a lot over the past twenty years. The skills you built up over those decades are still useful. But the one skill that will take you through the next twenty years is more rare, and easier to neglect: the skill of adapting to a changing world and changing your priorities to match.
The community you grew up with no longer exists. As the proverb goes, you can't step into the same river twice. The community has changed, and you have a choice: either meet the new community where they are from your position of wisdom and knowledge, or pine for the days when you were less wise and your path was much clearer.
If you got here, you're smart enough to be able to take on this challenge too. But what got you here won't get you there. At least not without some changes.
Special thanks to Zameer Manji for reviewing early drafts of this post.