Typical Hello, World

Starting the Substack journey with a focus on tech, AI, engineering leadership, and other ramblings.

The AI company space has multiple new products or models pretty much daily right now. But you can see a huge increase in companies (and individuals!) open-sourcing their work and having it available for anyone to experiment and, most importantly, build upon to make something new or better. It's such an exciting time to just dabble and see what you can do. Just perusing huggingface daily and seeing folks create not only these super complex systems but also just useful things to automate away some of the boring parts of life is super exciting.

The main reason I got into software engineering was because I just loved how it felt that every problem was a puzzle waiting to be solved -- a little scavenger hunt where you had to go find multiple clues just to get to your final answer. But the other reason was because I was lazy / unmotivated to do the mundane parts. A way for me to get rid of the mundane was to automate it away and just have the fun parts to deal with. Programming let's you do that and I don't think you need to go through years of university or months of bootcamps ¹. AI has brought "programming to the people" and I think thats super exciting for “what comes next?”.

AI won’t take your job as every over-sensationalized headline will make you feel — but it will make your job more interesting. A great article that goes into this is 𝘕𝘰𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘕𝘦𝘸𝘴: 𝘊𝘩𝘢𝘵𝘎𝘗𝘛 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘈𝘐 - 𝘗𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘰𝘯 𝘓𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘢𝘤𝘳𝘰𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘰𝘮𝘺 (the ATM example is one I regularly bring up). However, there will be some learning you will have to do (just like folks had to do when computers started gaining popularity).

I’ve found some extra time and extra motivation so I’m thinking about starting a Substack to help with how to breach AI and tech to everyone. I’m thinking the primary focus will be latest tech news and how it affects work and play, messing around with the daily “hotness” of AI tools and how they can be used practically, and some ramblings about my thoughts on running engineering teams and projects.

P.S. This post was NOT written with AI because of my thoughts on AI being "lossy expansion" -- this will probably be a future substack post.

1. This isn't to say these things are useless. I personally would go back to university many times over, and bootcamps are great for the mentorship and guidance you get.