I'm old and dumb comparing how things are today with where I started from. Time to start over again.

Hooold up, how old sre we talking about and what were your previous stacks.

@AleCx04 I'm in my mid-40s. My exposure to programming has been ad hoc. And the lessons I've taken in various trainings for work never got put into practice, so I forgot them. Also, when I was in college I bailed out of CS and went into Business Computing which wasn't as heavy on understanding algorithms and moving fluidly between multiple languages (of which there weren't nearly as many then as there are now).

To put it into context, when I started as a web developer, I literally bought one book on HTML 1.0 and taught myself everything I needed to know in a week. I was doing freelance client work within a month. I only needed a text editor and a browser. Fast forward to now where it takes about an hour to set up the core build tools, frameworks, and task runners to get to where I can produce a modern, responsive, fast website. And that takes a lot of time in and of itself when you get to tooling up for code and visual regression testing, managing Git, devops, and more.

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@stackodev i feel for you old-timer. ++
You don't need to work as hard as you used to do in the past in terms of writing everything from scratch.
Today is a lot more code reuse and copy and paste with some modifications as long as you know what you are doing.

For small and static projects:
Just do a tutorial/bootstrap/boilerplate or even download and modify any free responsive template you like on the internet.

For big projects:

Just make sure you plan:
1. your backend and frontend technologies and architecture.
2. External services and APIs.
3. Ui/ux flow - how you would like it to look and behave as the final product.
4. Testing and maintenance.

Once you got the plan all figured out you'd be good to choose your development methodology (tdd/ddd/etc..)

Happy development!

@bioDan Thanks. Oh, I know a lot of that. I've been doing many of those things. I just feel like I need to "get my head right" again as to erasing some of my bad habits and old knowledge and replacing them with good/new ones. I need to get back to the basics and work my way back up the knowledge ladder to rediscover things that I'd forgotten or discarded or assumed but that are going to be helpful in my general problem solving. My biggest weakness is OOP as I "came of age" in procedural languages (BASIC, Pascal, PROLOG, ColdFusion, etc.) and could never wrap my head around all the objects and "stuff" that OOP throws together.

My goal is to get to where I am more comfortable just sitting down and designing programs and writing OOP code without panicking and hiring someone else to do it for me.

@stackodev the easiest way to get a fast, responsive website is to drop all bloated shit and start your favourite text editor.

@stackodev it is never too late to get up to speed my man.

Is there any particular backend or frontend stack that you are interested in?

@AleCx04 I figured I'd start with the typical LAMP stack + HTML5/CSS/JS/JQuery for frontend that I'm already familiar with, but need to fill in gaps with. Then I'll look into React, Angular, and all the other "cool kid" stuff going on out there. For now I just need to get a more solid foundation in what I already do in "fake it til you make it" mode. Once I'm confident I've got that nailed, I will feel comfortable moving on to other stack elements.

What I'd really like to be able to do more of is writing plugins for WordPress and Drupal, which is where I see the majority of demand with my clients, and for which I have to hire out the work and take a profit margin hit.

@stackodev im so glad you're able to have that positive outlook on it all though! Hope it works out!

You never stop learning, that's the glory of programming, power through man!

It's fun learning the basics all over :-3

I have big respect for you because you still wanna learn...

A lot of 40-60 y.o people just stagnate and most of the time, dont understand that the world already have changed... (usualy they bechave like a total debiles (morons) as well)