What has changed?
I am no longer leading DevRel at Starburst. Quality people & quality technology there, but we all know our cheese is constantly moving. I guess that was a soft plug for the Who Moved My Cheese? book.
One of the biggest bummers for me personally is that this means my iceberg book is going to eventually get published without me. I’m imagining the work I put into it so far will likely still be leveraged, but there will clearly be additional content I didn’t create as I wasn’t completely done when I left.
Sure, I’ve very bummed out about this, but why is it OK? Well… the book is sponsored by Starburst and I did factor my writing into my daily workload and tasks so I guess it is fine they’ll just move on without me. Regardless, I’m eagerly awaiting the next early release and the final version. Wishing great luck & success to all still working on the book.
What am I doing now?
I’m embracing AI tools to help my output scale up. Some simple examples of the kind of things that can be built fast & with quality are available in my Carl & Claude, Postcard Swap, and Risk clone repositories. I’ve been knocking items off my “to explore/build” list that have been sitting there for years.
I still struggle with the good/bad of AI as you can see from some of my other posts on this topic, but it is a productivity booster no-doubt. I’m not yet giving over my entire life or relying on it for all work products. For example, I don’t want to give up my “authentic voice” when writing posts such as this as it is just part of what I want to do and I enjoy it too much. Hopefully folks enjoy reading them, too.
I’m happy to know that macOS 27 has a hidden LLM inside and I’m using Mac’s fm as a nice little LOCAL sidecar for basic information requests such as: how do i start postgresql that was installed via homebrew, show me examples of connecting to postgresql with the psql cli tool, and what datatypes are available in postgresql.
I fully understand and sympathize with professional stories such as Fifty Years of Semicolons as (at least at this point in time) many incredibly talented folks would be happy for all of this to not be happening AND I’m still worried about the climate & economic impacts of the AI boom, not to mention…
… but CLEARLY, to stay relevant in the software field I need to continue to learn and find my best set of tools & processes in this brave new world.
What’s next for me?
The future is surely unwritten, but I’m currently enjoying being the “freelance trainer” I’ve always wanted to be. I’m wrapping up a multi-month training/onboarding program with 20 recent computer science grads at a major fintech firm. They’ve kept me on my toes and we are absolutely leveraging AI. I’m getting to see how our profession looks from the perspective of probably the last group of folks who have one foot in traditional software development and the other in an AI-assisted world.
GenAI is also impacting the technical education space and I’ll likely write up my thoughts on this subject in a future post. I’m having fun with the semi-retired model I’ve always envisioned, but I’m also looking at some more classical (and full-time) tech roles thanks to my strong professional network I’ve been able to build up over the last 35 years in tech.
As my buddy Will always says; you either wear out or rust out — and I know which one of those is for me. Stay frosty out there!