Technical Know-How - Continual Forgetting

Yesterday, I met with a friend of mine from a previous company where i worked for 3 years as an Angular developer.  He at a new company now but still working with Angular as the primary tech stack.  I found myself trying to recall a bit of what I knew about Angular... and totally drawing a blank.

I was a full-time developer in this technology as recently as 2.5 years ago, and I found I couldn't even remember what the code looked like.  Would i even recognize my own code if i saw it?


Similarly, I talked with a friend of mine who is working to learn software engineering, and I told him that I very much enjoyed Vue and found it to be "the most fun" out of the frameworks in which I've written production code: KnockoutJS, AngularJS, Angular (2+), React, Vue, and Ember.  He asked me what makes it the most fun.  I could think of a few things that gave me that impression and gave a passable answer (dynamic attributes, terse syntax, v-if and v-else in the template, etc.), but again i was drawing a blank on many of the central tenets that makes Vue unique.

I don't know how much of this is because I am 40 years old and how much of it is because technical know-how is short-term memory.  But it's a little disheartening sometimes to feel like I would need to relearn so much about any of these languages if i went back to work on them.

It makes me wonder how many other developers feel this way about anything they used to know well.

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