This week, I attended the Rocky Mountain Ruby conference in Boulder. The last time I went was in 2012, and I have the faded, pilled t-shirt to prove it. A lot has changed since then. Back in 2012, I attended through an “opportunity scholarship”, and I was matched with a mentor (what the conference referred to as a “sherpa”). I was new to Colorado, and I didn’t own a house or a dog. I had years of freelance web development experience, but I didn’t have a full-time job in tech. I was in my 30s.

Now, I’m squarely in my 40s, even past the midpoint. I’ve owned a house and a dog for eleven years, and I’ve learned that Colorado summers are really hot. I’ve had and left a full-time job in tech, and I paid my own way to the conference this year. I’ve changed in twelve years, and so have Ruby and the conference. They were both bigger and more popular back then. Now, JavaScript and its framework du jour get all the attention. Ruby isn’t cool anymore, but neither am I.

The conference t-shirt design this year featured a dinosaur. Maybe this is fitting because I sometimes referred to myself as a dinosaur at my tech job. Compared to the people who came after me, I was tired and old in many ways, both mentally and physically, and no longer hungry. I decided to stop swimming against the current and instead swam out of it.

In a world of trendy JavaScript frameworks, I declared to myself and others that in my new, post-tech-job life, I would fully embrace Ruby, and I didn’t care what anyone else thought. The liberating part of my new life is that I no longer need to prove anything to anyone except myself. After all, now my primary goal with technology is to aid my creativity and help me build things that interest me without getting in the way.

There was something comforting about seeing people at the conference who were perhaps more similar to me than those I’ve interacted with at other recent tech gatherings or at my job. Not all of them were cool. Not all of them were young. But they were enthusiastic about a technology that allows them to build cool, useful things in a way that is familiar to them and enables them to live a good life. I can relate to that.