This week was full of social activities, both professionally and personally, which I'm very grateful for as the summer comes to a close. I've met people from multiple companies that interest me, did an interview for a new grad program, chatted about AI use with a university friend, shared my educational tutorial content on this blog, and thought about how humans fit into optimization (see related blog post).

Sharing my knowledge to help others

Starting with the educational content, this is something I'm passionate about even though I don't know how many people it will actually reach. It all started from wanting to have notes for myself on useful things that I may forget such as terminal commands that were helpful. It then evolved as I learned about the value of virtual environments in Python and wanted to write a mini tutorial to help others learn to use them. Then, at Scotiabank, I learned about bash aliases and decided to make my first "blog style" educational tutorial to really try and get people into this efficiency hack.

Given that I consider my passion in sharing this knowledge as a key component of who I am, I wanted to bring these tutorials into my website blogs. Given that it's a public repo, it was very easy to add the tutorials to my existing markdown --> blog post setup. Now, I'm very happy with the results, especially seeing my custom formatting on my posts! (check them all out here)

Thinking about humans in optimization

Onto my dentist story, I was sitting there getting my teeth poked as per usual. As the dentist moves around to record information as they work, I have a flash of inspiration: what if we optimized their process. This resulted in a long deliberation (internally of course) about why I actually believe the existing process is best, and why we need to think about what the people actually go through in these processes. If that sounds interesting, read my full thoughts here.

Learning about cool companies

I learned about two companies this week, the first when visiting a university friend. Their partner works at a company I've been interested in ever since I heard about it, but Scotiabank's hiring rounds were far earlier so I got the Scotia offer before I even had the chance to apply there. It was nice to hear that they have a great culture, push for AI use, and have lots of teams you'd never think of at first (I at least knew there would be full-stack roles for the admin and user-facing websites, but was shocked at how many other products they maintained). Though this person did express hesitance at how strong the AI push was, due to them burning through tokens with no regard, I'm sure they'll soon reach what I consider the "AI maturity" stage of realizing that efficient and intentional use is the most important.

For the second company, my main takeaway was that any company investing well in technology has a lot of initiatives going on and there is always far more that the business is pushing for than you'll ever see on a job board. They also really value people able to understand the business needs, even above technology skills, which says something about the shift in valued skills as AI gets better at technical work.

The drag of AI

In meeting a friend from university, he was quite interested to hear about my thoughts on AI given how much I'm using it for personal projects this summer. The conversation really stemmed from our thoughts on our summers in general, but as he asked about my work, I wanted to share my feelings as I used AI and get his thoughts on it. Turns out, it's something we both find very interesting.

The main idea is that I've found some of the joys in software development disappearing, since some of the joy that comes from solving problems is no longer in the code but in solving the problem itself. Previously, if I made some great code to solve a problem, I had to really think about how to design the code and write everything well, eventually getting a nice reward with working code by the end of it. Now, most of that is handled by a good prompt with all of the information the model needs and fine-tuning once it's done.

Satisfaction is key

While talking, I quickly realized that it isn't a "problem solving" issue but related to the idea of satisfaction. I likened satisfaction to being a combination of the effort I've put in and the gains my efforts have rewarded me with. As a large simplification, I think this helps explain why AI-generated projects are less satisfying in some ways. Though the benefits I receive are equal, the effort and time put in has drastically decreased. Doing little automations for myself was once hours of painstaking work for a small feature, after which I was so satisfied with my efforts, and now it has been reduced to 10 minutes of the AI "churning".

That said, I also made it clear that in no way do I dislike software development now. If anything, I see these feelings as directly related to the fact that I'm building personal helpers. The only one who benefits is me, so my satisfaction is limited to value I believe I get out of it. But I'm someone who likes to feel like I'm making a difference, so my work on the engineering society is still extremely satisfying because I know I'm improving the lives of engineering students. It's the same at work, where building products that help people and the business are inherently satisfying thanks to the scale of their benefits.

Practice makes perfect

As a small note on something I'm proud of this week, I had an interview for a new graduate program. In it, I received feedback at the end that I did very well in explaining concepts for a technical and non-technical person. The program manager mentioned that as someone on the hiring side, they look for people who recognize that they don't have the same technical background as the tech managers in the call, so people who can tailor their answers for that stand out. Namely those who make the business impact clear and have enough details for someone technical to be impressed while not losing the program manager.

This was the best compliment I've received this week. After responding, I often thought that I could have explained it better, but we really are our hardest critics. It goes to show that my practice did pay off, and for that I am very grateful.

Finishing up

This ended up being quite the long post, which makes sense considering how much I did this week haha. As a final note, I also got to watch the new Spiderman movie in theatres (unofficial tip: get CineClub because you save so much on tickets) and loved seeing the POV shots of him swinging through the city and improvement in his moves to take advantage of his dexterity and webs.

Anyways, a good week to be sure, and I'm excited to finish this summer with even more fun and growth.