The new software engineer’s reality, being lead-developer to autonomous agents.
Like many, I have been riding the AI rollercoaster. My lows being filled with mourning for the fun of coding. My highs being full of interesting maths, and interesting concepts behind what makes a model. I’ve enjoyed those eureka moments when an agent churns out a huge block of well-written code.
There are some big questions to wrestle with. Questions which will likely need to be addressed by thousands of teams across the world over the next year or two.
I’m a serial project starter, a twisted project starter? … maybe. Ever since I was young I have loved the process of putting my hands to work and creating something. It’s brought me countless hours of joy and satisfaction, but honestly, it has also poured it’s fair share of grief over my head.
What should I do when energy + sweat > output + satisfaction ?
Much of this grief for me originates from reaching a point where I question whether there is any purpose or meaning in the venture I am undertaking. It’s truly very hard to read the signals sometimes.
I really struggle with this obsession within the digital and tech industry to lure everyone into a false expectation, that the more of their life they spend in a virtualised, surreal world the better things will become.
A Chance to be Satisfied
Some might see my approach to technology as an oxymoron, I recognise and promote the benefits, whilst at the same time I encourage us to design systems which do not engulf people in it. I have always been driven to keep people connected with the natural world. You remember? That world we can touch, see and feel. Hang on, we’ve digitised those senses as well! You might call these “tangible” things, although I recognise that the lines are becoming increasingly blurred these days.
I’m starting to add Invoicing capabilities to Soniq. While designing the schema for an invoice, I needed to consider how to model the billing details. After talking with Esther, Sam and Jamie it is clear that they all handle invoicing clients in very different ways. Sometimes and invoice can be sent directly to the student, and other times it should be sent to a parent or carer contact. After wrestling with how to allow for this flexibility, I realised two things.
One of the best decisions I made in 2020 was to open my calendar to everyone. People book appointments to chat about open-source projects, content creation, and business ideas.
This reminded me that I have wanted to do the same thing for a while. So I have opened up my calendar as well, and booked a chat on his.
I have played the guitar ever since I was little. I must have been six or seven when I was given a small guitar. Instrumental lessons were not affordable though so I never had any formal music training. I am so grateful to a number of people who gave me lessons here and there.
I’m thinking about this because Esther mentioned to me that a few students might need to stop because inflation is pushing up the cost of living. This would be such a shame, I can see how much students benefit from the time they spend learning from her.
I think instrumental teachers have it pretty hard sometimes. I’m sure I’ve written before about my interest in helping them. One of the big reasons for this is my wife, Esther, who is a Piano teacher. She runs her business as a sole trader company. The last couple of years have brought about a huge number of challenges which she has had to adapt to.
The pandemic has caused a lot of disruption to lesson schedules. Students often couldn’t attend face-to-face lessons, online video lessons, let’s be honest, are no where near as good as in-person. If this change hasn’t been enough the government in the UK will require even small sole traders to implement digital accounting software to submit returns by April 2022.
TypeScript has been around for several years now and over that time has gone from something people scoffed at to an integral part of many open source projects and frameworks. This has been great for me, I really like using TypeScript and it’s increasing popularity has made the day-to-day usage has become easier and even more fun!
I’ve been thinking. Why DO I like using TypeScript?? I mean there are times when I just rough it out in the ole JavaScript land but I always come back.
It can be hard making decisions, especially when they affect multiple teams and a large number of developers. What if you get it wrong, what if it’s not popular? A mistake could be costly, both financially and for morale. This is all true but what are the hidden costs of delaying a decision and is my expectation true that the cost of being indecisive over long periods of time is far greater.
This website has been my place for thoughts and experiments, ideas and memories for close to a decade. The first article on here was written in March 2010 when I was building jQuery plugins and working at Aqueduct in London. I’m still going to keep my blog going here but I want to collect up and pull together the more in-depth content on the Pogo Kid website in a more structured way.
Dave Taylor - Software Engineer
