I've been working on a side project that I started in 2020. If I wanted to implement a new feature it was:
- Wait for regular work hours to wrap up around 5 or 6 PM
- Get dinner and rest / relax until around 8 or 9 PM
- Open up the editor, think about the problem, Google things, read stack overflow which gets it 95% of the way there, Google more, dig deeper into the docs finally find what I needed
- Write a function, make some progress, run into another roadblock, repeat previous point
- Look up and it's now 1AM. I should write tests for this, but I'll add that to the backlog
- Backlog only ever grows
Now with AI I describe what I want, it does the grunt work likely cleaner than I ever could, adds tests and warns me about potential edge cases.
I don't know about 10x, but I'm releasing new features that my client cares about faster and I have more time to myself.
All of the negativity around AI writing code sounds like people who would say "You can't trust the compiler, you need to write the machine code yourself"
Will AI fuck up? Yes
But I'm the human in the chair guiding it, and learning myself how better to prompt it to keep it from those fuck ups with every iteration.
I just sent my single client a monthly subscription link via stripe.
$875 a month for service and support on a custom built loyalty platform.
Make about $25K up front to build it, then followed up with maybe another $20K worth of various features over the last ~5 years
Starting this month $875 a month to keep supporting them and helping grow his vision (credit management for events...ie: get a nfc wrist band at a party as part of an all inclusive package, has $xxx.xx worth of credit, tap your wrist band to pay)
i'm also starting to try to bridge this out as a more generic platform and look for new clients.
$875 a month in the USA is a nice bit of extra cash. Server costs are coming in around $300 because I haven't optimized aws and there are some legacy systems I'm supporting(VPC costs are killing me) but it'll be nice to have some extra cash to pay off some debt and maybe buy some things to fuel new hobbies.
Built a bespoke loyalty points system for a chain of gas stations back in 2020. Thought at first it would be a one time deliverable and then I could move on with my life. Cut to today and I'm trying to launch it into it's own platform.
Nothing much to show other than one client, but I'm on the cusp of charging them monthly vs getting paid by the hour.
I'm accustomed to seeing large plumes of chemicals coming out the other end in my minds eye when I think about rocket launches. This looks "clean" coming out the exhaust.
Why is that? Is it due to the nature of chemicals it uses?
I'm reading through the book the blog mentions right now and building a small LLM. I'm only on chapter 2, but so far it's helped clarify a lot of things about LLMs and break it down into small steps. Highly recommend Building a large language model from scratch
Born Guyanese, but only lived there until I was 3, then we moved to St. Lucia. Have lots of memories from visiting over summers and Christmas multiple times when I was a kid.
Mostly consider myself Lucian and I feel like I've assimilated into the American tech population. My history now is just a interesting fun fact. Don't meet too many people from the Caribbean in general in tech circles, so it's always fun to get a reminder that they're out there.
AI is definitely a big part of it. When I would search Google with a technical question and land on StackOverflow I was looking for an answer. Sometimes you get a post which is similar, but not quite right, or the answers are only 95% of answering your actual questions.
AI of course just answers it. I can ask it follow ups, I can give it loose code and it just gets it. My grammar can be riddled with spelling errors and it still gets it. I can go back and forth with it and get a fine tuned answer.
When I used SO I had always just wanted an answer, but had to accept answers that were close, but not quite what I needed.
God forbid if I needed to post a question. I'd immediately get hit with over moderation, or someone closing the question for whatever reason.
I used to be an avid SO contributor up until around ~2015. I saw the mod community turn snarky. AI is just a better way to get stuff done.
I went to school with the son of the owner. For about 3 years off and on he'd been asking me about building apps, where he could find good devs, what price to pay.
I'd sent him some info, but never got too involved. Then the pandemic hit, and I found myself with a bit more time to kill, so I listened more to what they needed.
They basically wanted to get a loyalty program going at their gas stations and partner gas stations, but wanted custom rules which their current provider couldn't do with their off the shelf solution.
They also wanted to use one of those old school CC machines that were everywhere before the likes of square showed up. But getting your hands on those units is expensieve.
So I started planning it out. They needed to store customer data, and needed a point of sale device to swipe customer loyalty cards on, which needed to read in customer info, do a deduction, or a store credit top up and print a receipt.
I found a android terminal machine off alibaba, opened up android studio and started hacking away. I hadn't done more than a basic android hello world at this point.
For the backend I used django to get started quickly, and they were very happy to use the django built in admin panel to do stuff as needed, and view transactions.
After I got the devices talking to django, I had to integrate a loyalty vendor they already sourced, and just went along with it, but that was a mistake. The vendor points API doesn't really add much value on what django can already do for me, and my new goal is to become that vendor since I think I can do their product better.
But basically I iterated on it for about a year, launched a little over a year ago, still working out some edge cases and kinks, but they do roughly 25K transactions a month on devices spread out at over 20 stores.
They want to bring it to new islands, so I'm trying to remove some of my duct tape fixes with more stable fixes so that can be smooth sailing come next year.
EDIT: Might get back to writing and update with a much longer post. Draft:
So back in 2021 I built a loyalty platform for a chain of gas stations in the Caribbean. Thought it would be a quick deliverable, then hands off.
It's turning into a full time side gig that's paid off in handful of batches (~$25K and running)
I'm trying to become a loyalty vendor API.
Would really like to work on my own interconnected systems of blogging tools and social media. Kinda a blend between having your own site and myspace? Not really targeting a market or anything like that, just think it would be cool to do for personal use and sharing with family and friends
I don't recall ever seeing it in the wild, but I remember it as a JS script you could add to your site from a page that I think was http://www.dynamicdrive.com/
I may have played around with it on a couple of HTML pages written in Notepad way back.
Lots of comments in here disregarding the author's take, but there is a pervasive alcohol culture in most US workplaces.
One place I worked at did champagne for birthdays and major celebrations. All outings after work were at a bar.
Another place I was at was basically a frat house. Lots of young folks fresh out of college and drinking was practically expected. Interviews took place at bars in the early days. Owner used to come by my desk on a Friday afternoon with a bottle of wine, pour me a glass and tell me to stop working and have a drink.
Staff parties were drinking fueled raves. Socializing and other official events were centered around drinking. It was even a selling point of working for the place that the fridge was always stocked with alcohol. Some people kept a special bottle of whisky in their desk.
I'm no prude...I enjoy the occasional drink of all varieties. One glass (max two) of <insert alcoholic beverage here> and I'm good.
But the drinking culture screams at you that you should drink all the time, drink more and be happy to have a chance to drink. It screams that you should care about brewing processes and types of alcohol.
It's not a problem just in tech, but tech workforces revel in it. I can't say that if I didn't drink it wouldn't stop my advancing through career ladders, being a "good drinking buddy" did play a non zero role into the speed of advancement and size of bonuses in some form when I directly compared my trajectory to others who didn't take part in the drinking sessions.
It's also not just a work problem...humanity as a whole defaults to drinking. I was part of it through my college years and the first few years of working in tech. I started backing away from drinking as much and going to fewer bar outings for my own personal fitness reasons, and I felt the pressure "what you're leaving already? You're not going to have another? Drink faster".
For all of you who say you've never pressured anyone about it, haven't seen it, or don't feel it, there are 10 more people who do the exact opposite. No one held me down and forced me to drink, and no one applied more pressure that I couldn't gracefully handle as someone secure in themselves and their choices can do, but there is a non zero amount of work to be done that becomes mildly annoying for me. For others who cave easily to pressure but want to break out they feel it more I'm sure.
For anyone struggling to break out of the drinking cycle here are some things I've found after years of trying to drop it:
* Set yourself a limit and stick to it. Make it known. Mine is a two drink max. Even one will do. If you so choose zero is fine too.
* The pressure can feel immense, but hold your ground.
* Having no drink in front of you or an empty glass is a trigger for someone to ask you about it and try to pressure you into another one. Keep a glass a little full to help avoid that.
* Keep a separate tab from everyone else. I've found that having one shared tab is like throwing fuel on the fire for everyone to drink more. Especially in a company outing there is a chance that the company will pay for it making everyone go crazy with consumption.
* If someone buys you a drink that you didn't ask for feel free to not drink it and pass it onto someone else who is enthusiastic about drinking it. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do.
EDIT: One last thing -- I don't think we should remove people from being able to drink at work events, or remove it as part of the culture. Instead just raising the idea and making it more normalized that there are people who want to spend time with you, but don't want to drink just to spend time with you.
Never forget: The original version of Javascript was written in 10 days.
Javascript is a mess, especially at smaller shops which may face pressures to ship projects to a client that work, regardless of the state of the code.
Breathe. You're overwhelmed and that's ok. Just take it day at a time, line at a time and don't be afraid to have to google the same thing over and over again. It eventually sticks.
Don't be afraid to ask for help after you've exhausted yourself trying to solve something. Lots of other great advice in this post too. You'll get there.
I moved away from for profit orgs to work for a social movement org a few years back.
Your best bet is to find orgs that you like, and reach out to them. Some may have a careers page, others won't. Mostly you can expect to get contracting gigs if you form a relationship with them. These places rarely have a tech team and usually outsource anything technical.
If you're accustomed to working in tech circles with well defined roles and working with people who know what it takes to build software, be warned that you won't find that at most other places outside of tech, especially if you're thinking about orgs that deal with addiction or mental health. Be prepared to explain concepts you took for granted (like sprints) to a lot of people.
Of that about 70% of my photos are backed up to Glacier, but the remaining 20% needs to be culled (lots of repeated shots from camera high speed burst mode, bad shots etc) before I put them up on the cloud and incur the cost for them.
What I really need to do is automate my system i.e.:
- Plug in XQD card
- Automatically generate a "contact sheet" of jpegs at a 1920 x 1080 resolution. These photos I allow me to keep every shot at a low cost. These come in at about 6-10MB vs the 70MB+ raw file
- Auto backup to glacier whenever I rate a photo 3 stars or higher in Lightroom
I've been working on a side project that I started in 2020. If I wanted to implement a new feature it was: - Wait for regular work hours to wrap up around 5 or 6 PM - Get dinner and rest / relax until around 8 or 9 PM - Open up the editor, think about the problem, Google things, read stack overflow which gets it 95% of the way there, Google more, dig deeper into the docs finally find what I needed - Write a function, make some progress, run into another roadblock, repeat previous point - Look up and it's now 1AM. I should write tests for this, but I'll add that to the backlog - Backlog only ever grows
Now with AI I describe what I want, it does the grunt work likely cleaner than I ever could, adds tests and warns me about potential edge cases.
I don't know about 10x, but I'm releasing new features that my client cares about faster and I have more time to myself.
All of the negativity around AI writing code sounds like people who would say "You can't trust the compiler, you need to write the machine code yourself"
Will AI fuck up? Yes But I'm the human in the chair guiding it, and learning myself how better to prompt it to keep it from those fuck ups with every iteration.