Tech

🎯 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. ...

Right, so it’s been a minute since I last posted something. Like many other companies this last year, we weren’t spared layoffs. While I still have my job, my team has been greatly reduced, both from people leaving when they saw the signs and from people being let go. So while fighting survivors guilt and an increased workload, posting hasn’t been my first priority. But while doing my day to day and trying to keep my head down and deliver as much as possible as quickly as possible, I noticed something. And I’m not sure how I feel about it, other than we need to talk about it. ...

Introduction So very many years back when I was but a fledgling coder, armed with BASIC skills and deep into a Turbo Pascal with Objects book, I remember a conversation with my dad. Frustrated by the level of specificity needed to communicate with a machine, I asked, “Why has no-one made a programming language where I can just tell it ‘build this game for me’?” My dad, in his infinite wisdom, mused that cracking that puzzle – creating a natural language programming language – was a feat yet to be achieved. “Whoever manages to do that,” he predicted, “will make a fortune.” ...