Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
On a video call, silence feels awkward. It turns a conversation into a performance where every moment, even a pause to think, gets judged. Neil Postman talks about this in Amusing Ourselves to Death, but let me try to explain it with an example.
No one was expecting me. We were a dozen or so new employees. After orientation, I was dropped off at my department. The manager and the lead dev were having a squabble, walking back and forth, cursing and yelling. In a row of cubicles, each dev buried his face between double screens and headphones, pretending to be deaf to the noise. And conveniently ignoring me. I stood awkwardly, the tension thicker than a keyword-stuffed article. Until the manager walked towards me and found me in his path.
I’ve worked at the forefront of an AI-first company. Our entire product revolved around using AI to improve customer service, and the company’s success was directly tied to how well the AI performed. You’d think that in a setup like this, AI would dominate the workload, but in reality, the AI portion of the job rarely made up more than 10% of the effort.
I was inspired by Obama’s Hour of Code initiative a few years ago. I've encouraged friends and family to learn to code. If you were caught by the bug back then, chances are you’ve already seen the benefits of diving into the tech world. Whether you learned JavaScript, frameworks, or experimented with jQuery, you saw the advantage. Understanding how code works gave you that huge advantage. Coding bootcamps were popping up everywhere, drawing in crowds eager to enter the tech industry. While they were complete beginners at the time, many of those folks now have years of experience under their belts.
The past few years have been a whirlwind. Work, personal life, and family life have all shifted, and this blog has understandably taken a backseat while I dealt with challenges that required most of my time. As I look back on my contributions here in 2024, I realize I only managed to write three blog posts all year. That is something I need to change. In 2025, things will be different for one simple reason: I have a plan.
When a customer finishes pitching the website or service they want you to build, the inevitable question follows: How long do you think it will take?
When I joined a tiny startup with big ambitions, I had no idea we’d be building an eCommerce chatbot from scratch. It was my first real-world dive into AI, and I was starting with zero experience beyond a few online courses. As the first engineer on the team and the third employee overall, I had a simple goal: figure it out and make it work.
Code reads different than human languages. When we don't understand what the code is doing, we write comments in our code in the form of human languages. But the language we speak and write every day can be bloated or ambiguous. The human brain is just really good at extracting context. When you are trying to understand what a snippet of code does, a story is rarely the best method. However, if the confusing code is wrapped in properly named functions, half of our questions are already answered.
As soon as I deployed my code, the lead dev launched webpagetest.com and entered our domain name. The code was working perfectly, but he needed to make sure that the website was still fast. A perfect score of A or we would have to get back to work. Granted the company was in the process of being sold for 1.1 billion dollars.
I stumbled upon this dating app with a fresh twist – no profile pictures. I can appreciate the effort to shift the focus away from superficial looks and promote meaningful connections through words. But I couldn't help but feel that it misses the mark when it comes to addressing the real issues in the world of dating apps.
