Very satisfied with return to software industry work after 22 years for development of ReactJS frontend web app for an NGO educational portal

From Oct to Dec 2024, as part of a software industry company team, I worked as a developer on ReactJS frontend of a web app for an NGO educational portal. The web app manages creation of learning aids assets by volunteers from request to completion. The technologies I mainly worked on for this project were ReactJS and Bootstrap. I did this work as part-time, work-from-home, and as a free service volunteer. This project was my return to software industry work after a gap of 22 years (Sep. 2002 to Sep. 2024).

It was very satisfying to contribute as a software developer to providing a software solution for real world needs. For 22 years, I did not have this satisfaction! Note that I taught software development from 2003 to 2012 but that work did not involve developing software solutions for real world needs.

I was wondering whether I could effectively and happily contribute as a 62 year old software developer to a team which is much, much younger than me! I was also wondering whether I would run into some ego issues from my own side. But the team was very cooperative and so I had a good time contributing to the team and I did not run into any ego issues from my own side.

The previous small software apps that I did on my own in the past year to two which were either for my learning needs or sometimes functionality that I needed (like creating short blog books for recent posts as an easy backup mechanism for recent blog posts), had confirmed to me that I still liked reading and writing software/code. That liking to read and write code continued in my work in this software industry project.

I also wanted to ensure that I do not take on much stressful work as I have quite a few limitations now due to my personal issues. The project leader/manager knew about my limitations and so did not impose any deadline on me. That made this programming work quite pleasant and with minimal stress. Sometimes some bugs/issues did raise challenges and so there was related minimal stress but that was OK. I could be frank with the team about stuff that I did not know and either opted out of that work or took time to learn/pick up.

Now I plan to explore opportunities for paid software development work in industry in part-time, work-from-home mode. I will be putting up a post on that in the near future. [Update: Put up the post: Seeking full stack web development (MERN stack) part-time, work-from-home job/assignment with up to 2 weeks free trial period, https://raviswdev.blogspot.com/2024/12/seeking-full-stack-web-development-mern.html . Also on LinkedIn]