It seems like I have a huge gap in the last time I posted here yet again, but I swear I've been very busy and still studying in the tech world, just haven't had a chance to sit down and write about it in a while. And also just wondering whether I should write at all, as I mostly just do it as an accountability piece and not really any other purpose. I do, however, enjoy reading what I wrote from before as well to know where I was at, so this is also going to be a purpose for which whatever I write has meaning. But writing does take quite a lot of time which feels more and more often like a rare commodity, yet is so easily taken by other forces.
It feels like I've put my head down for a while (mainly just wrapped up in the responsibilities and learning the technicalities in my current role) and once I lifted it up, and the entire world is different now in the tech scene. I think I may have been one of the last cohorts of doing a web development bootcamp that still had a significant amount of students get a tech role afterwards, since it truly seems like the game is all changed now. The software development world now feels oversaturated with those who claim to have talent (as we all did when we first started out), while simultaneously, a dwindling supply of roles for even those who have held development positions for the past decade.
Definitely this has to do with AI. A few months ago, my coworker and I built out this entire platform and tool using AI that was basically a product feature request that our product team wasn't prioritising. But with the public API, we were able to build the whole customer request out iteratively - building a prototype, testing it, then continue describing to the AI the further details of what we wanted it to do based on the customer requests we'd heard over the years. And it built this full blown app in React.js, much better probably and absolutely within the fraction of the time it would have taken either of us to build - all we had to do was deploy it if we wanted to actually use it and host it. Each of those iterations, going into every file and adding the components and coding the logic to route things and state with React and what not would have taken a few hours, even as a good coder (maybe 45 minutes if you're a really good React developer) - and this AI did each iteration in less than 45 seconds.
I circled back to a lot of my coding work materials a few months back to consider what to do next, since I've gotten a decent handle on most of the regular things I run into at work (which took a while! And of course I still see things that are new, but it's gotten easier to know what to look for and where to look). In the process, I realised that AI has literally changed the game entirely - not just from what I was describing with that React app my coworker and I built, but even learning to code was a different ball game. Do we really even need bootcamps and the teachers assistants we relied entirely on while we were studying, when we can now ask AI all the same questions and get maybe even more detailed answers? Our teachers may have been coding for a while, but AI has the entire MDN docs ingested, and they can also understand the questions we're asking (if not the first time, the second or third time).
I do think you probably need some sort of bootcamp or class, just to get going and to get started, because when you first start out, you literally don't know what is going on at all until you get a good handle on things, which takes a bit of time. I always tell people that it actually took me a while to realise that bootcamp was teaching us web application development (and mostly front-end at that). I had thought I would be learning basically all the things I've been learning now with computers and networking and security - yeah none of that happened - I mean sure there's localhost and deployment and remember to add your .env file to the .gitignore - that's about it. So yeah, I think being able to get a context of what's going on is important, as otherwise, you would not even know what to ask an AI. I don't think you can get past your own limitations around that; even if you ask the AI to help you get there, it's not useful to the degree that it's usable in the labour market.
But given the background from bootcamp, the contexts from working at startups and for open source software where there's a lot of visibility into different teams and source code, I can pretty much create many mini courses and bootcamps of what I'd like to learn at this point. And when I get stuck, I'm able to ask AI to explain things to me while I study and go along.
That has been a big gamechanger in how I learn and study, which gets me into what I've been up to now - super long filler introduction, but here I am now.
It took me a while and I did go down a few different pursuits, but I've been pretty set on my studies in Linux, Docker, and Kubernetes at the moment, and have been studying those in the recent months. Hopefully I'll have more to share around this when I gain some stronger footing in it, but with all that's going on in AI, I do think that these fundamentals will be really important going forward, and because I use these technologies at work, it will be cool to just continue improving my mastery on these specific subjects.
I think that's mostly it for this round, hopefully it won't be another 2+ years before I post again, or whatever works and makes most sense in life I suppose - life!
Catt xx