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Showing posts from July, 2020

ChatGPT - How Long Till They Realize I’m a Robot?

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I tried it first on December 2nd... ...and slowly the meaning of it started to sink in. It's January 1st and as the new year begins, my future has never felt so hazy. It helps me write code. At my new company I'm writing golang, which is new for me, and one day on a whim I think "hmmm maybe ChatGPT will give me some ideas about the library I need to use." Lo-and-behold it knew the library. It wrote example code. It explained each section in just enough detail. I'm excited....It assists my users. I got a question about Dockerfiles in my teams oncall channel. "Hmmm I don't know the answer to this either"....ChatGPT did. It knew the commands to run. It knew details of how it worked. It explained it better and faster than I could have. Now I'm nervous....It writes my code for me. Now I'm hearing how great Github Copilot is - and it's built by OpenAI too...ok I guess I should give it a shot. I install it, and within minutes it'

Grow Your Career, Be A Senior Engineer

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My personal experience with navigating a career in software engineering has been dotted by fits and starts.  9 years into my professional life I can look back and see what worked, what didn't, and why.  I want to share that knowledge so other young engineers can do more with their first 9 years than I did.  Plus it's just fun to reminisce and will help me visualize the next steps in my career. To be clear, the north star goal in my career is and has always been to learn and grow towards more positive impact on those I serve.  If you have the same or a similar goal, this article will be useful. I wrote up a simple formula which I think can help any aspiring engineers out there.  It can be used as a template for a career plan.  When you're thinking about how to get to the next level, make sure you're putting equal emphasis on all these categories.   1.) ACTION from you, despite imperfect information 2.) COWORKERS whom you respect 3.) MENTOR(s) invested in your growth and