Career

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Ah, another “trend” I’ve seen online in the last year. I wonder which AI recommendation tool suggested this one to the thousands of small YT channels and influencers who needed a topic… Okay, saltiness aside, I actually found this one quite interesting. And not because I agree with most of the approaches I’ve seen people recommend (it is shocking how many just want to punt their own products or their sponsors), but mainly it was interesting because I was thinking that… ...

Today again, I was triggered. So here is a hastily written post about my thoughts. sigh 😔 I feel like every week there is new thing which my inbox spams me with. If it’s not AI taking our jobs, it’s some [insert new and shiny framework] which will render [insert current “industry standard”] useless, or it’s about how everyone will get let go because of the market correction and recession, or whatever, so many stupid things. ...

I originally started writing this post at the end of 2022 but never finished it. Originally titled “Why LowCode/NoCode both excites and terrifies me!”, with the buzz around ChatGPT over the last months, I decided to 1) finish the post, and 2) update it to include AI tools like CoPilot and ChatGPT. So here, finally, is the update. Also a little different to my usual style. I didn’t like it. ...

A while back I posted my first blog post, and the key take-away it seems people had from that was that “intentional learning” is key growing in your career and profession. The discussions I had following this made me think of another conversation I had with a new developer I recently hired. He noticed on my LinkedIn that I have a LOT of completed courses, and asked how I go about learning this much and if what I learn sticks. I gave him a brief overview, but thinking about things over the last week, I figured I could probably share more. ...

Intro I see a lot of videos and blogs these days about “how I would learn to code if I started over”, and “do these X things to get hired by FAANGs”. I see free and paid courses and tutorials on various platforms ranging from horrendous to amazing. I see people with zero experience spewing opinions with no real basis as facts, and people knowing less than them eating it up (or worse, arguing with people who actually know). ...