🧩 I fell into a trap. One I’m often warning others not to fall into. Two of them, actually. 💻 The solution I’m building for one client isn’t necessarily a hard problem. There are existing solutions, but we want a simple MVP at lowest cost, so most paid services are off the table. With our custom integration needs, we decided to roll most of it ourselves. No, this wasn’t the trap. ...
The Promise vs. Reality of AI in Tech I’m genuinely excited about recent AI advancements. The tools continue improving, and we’re discovering more ways to optimize and enhance our work. I’ve personally found a good rhythm using AI to multiply my skills rather than replace or hinder them. However, I’m concerned about the industry’s direction with these improvements. Instead of creating better developers, we’re often replacing them. Rather than building amazing accessibility tools, we’re creating deep fakes and virtual companions. ...
🎯 This morning’s YouTube recommendation: someone coding purely by voice using Cursor agents and Windows dictation tools. My first thought? Not “wow, how cool!” but “seriously, is typing that hard now!?” 🙄 My second thought: “Good luck remote debugging a Linux server at 1am to fix what your AI buddy broke…” First we outsource thinking to AI, now the typing… it’s like nobody wants to actually do this job anymore! 🤦 But here’s the thing - after my initial skepticism, I realized this IS actually pretty cool. Just not for the reasons filling up your social media feed. ...
🤖 I love how every new LLM release triggers a wave of “AI is coming for your job!” posts, only for people to realize a few weeks later “oh, nope, sorry, not this yet” 😏 💡 While AI tools are certainly force multipliers for productivity, even with agents, they’re not replacing humans yet. Even the best apps I’ve generated with Bolt or Replit eventually need human intervention and fixing. 🎯 Hot take incoming: I find it amusing when people consider these simplistic example AI-generated “apps” as “real development”. Most modern webapps are already essentially just careful combinations of frameworks and styling, using existing tools that solve problems in generic ways. That’s not novel software development. ...
Over a year ago a wrote a post about how I felt that, even though ChatGPT was making me more productive, I also felt it was making me lazier and dumber. Since then, I’ve been a lot more intentional about how I use AI tools, in particular generative AI tools and coding assistants. It should be a multiplier, not a replacement or crutch, which is something I see juniors and non-developers struggle with the most, but clearly we can all fall prey too. ...
Trigger warning: this is a bit of a rant. Also, it contains opinions. Specifically mine. If you are allergic to other peoples opinions, or likely to experience anger or hatefulness when hearing others opinions, this post is probably not for you. Also, if you actually are an Engineer, have a cookie. Intro I spend a large amount of time on interviews. Or I did, up until mid 2020, but whatever. Sure, it’s not as much as large corporations fielding thousands of applicants, but I’d wager more than the average startup. I’ve conducted a couple hundred interviews myself, and I’ve been interviewed a couple ten times. ...
Intro I don’t know why this has been on my mind the last few weeks, but guess that means I need to write something down… I love Bruce Lee. I don’t generally think of myself of someone who has “heroes”, but if there is one person outside my father who has greatly inspired me and changed how I think about life, it would be Bruce Lee. At first, as a little kid with silly hopes and crazy dreams, it was just all the cool fighting scenes in his movies that made want to be like him. ...
TL;DR That’s pretty much it. Entire post summed up right there 👆 Introduction Early in 2023 I took on a challenge. I’d been going on about making my own game for ages, and my wife finally called me out on it; stop talking, start doing. A buddy of mine had been doing the same thing about an app idea he had, and so our wives decided to lock us in a room for a day and force us to work on these ideas. ...
LOLWUT. Random. Yes. Kinda. So here’s the thing; I recently watched a reaction video by ThePrimeTime for a clip about the “Best Programming Setup” from the Lex Fridman interview with John Carmack, and for some reason it sparked an urge to write about something. The specific bit was here (from around 19:45 to 21:12), where John talked about making the move from 2 to 3 monitors, and Prime commented on being a 1 monitor person. ...
Clarity for the purpose of this post 😏 code monkey, n. a computer programmer who is not involved in any aspect of conceptual or design work, but simply writes code to specifications given programmer, n. an organism that can turn caffeine into code. Introduction Once upon a time, (many, many moons ago) at the very start of my career, I was just a “code monkey”; an individual contributor to the grand scheme of the digital jungle being fed instructions from primates higher on the food chain and was expected to simply do what I’m told. ...