I feel like I got stuck in a rut a few years ago, was working in an obscure language, job was well paid but pretty dull, then I got made redundant and to carry on working in the same field would likely mean a move to another country, and I really didn't want to.
So, I had a Mac and iPhone, some hobby projects I'd dabbled in, and just went all out to learn Macos and iOS development, starting with Objective-c and later swift. I know many here will balk at MacOs, and it is a bit niche, but iOS was really interesting and led to a new job. I think iOS can still offer some challenges that older programmers might enjoy, there's still room for optimising and tweaking perfomance, memory and file size, and it's fun to find out how powerful modern mobiles really are. It's really easy to get started, and you can quickly get to building something really powerful, play around with the AR tools, look at the machine learning. There's good frameworks to get started and powerful stuff like using Metal once you feel like really tweaking things.
So, I had a Mac and iPhone, some hobby projects I'd dabbled in, and just went all out to learn Macos and iOS development, starting with Objective-c and later swift. I know many here will balk at MacOs, and it is a bit niche, but iOS was really interesting and led to a new job. I think iOS can still offer some challenges that older programmers might enjoy, there's still room for optimising and tweaking perfomance, memory and file size, and it's fun to find out how powerful modern mobiles really are. It's really easy to get started, and you can quickly get to building something really powerful, play around with the AR tools, look at the machine learning. There's good frameworks to get started and powerful stuff like using Metal once you feel like really tweaking things.