Reflections

  • On Online Learning

    Experiences while learning coding online

    As someone currently unemployed, there is a variety of options for learning online. Some that I've known for a while, some that's just cropped up, and some I've only recently learned about. I'm coming from the background of being a bachelor's degree holder in computer science, so I have a pretty solid foundation in the field. In all honesty; I'm not sure if I'm learning as much as I should be or if I''m just catching up to what I should I been learning in the first place. In all honesty my degree has given me the foundational knowledge to be able to pick up new things relatively quickly, as well as making me realize that I should've paid more attention in some of my classes; but it was also strangely ahead as it was behind in places. For example, it was ahead in the sense that it was teaching us about software development and how to work together in a team, not being particularly attached to any one language or development framework; but it was behind in the sense that it was really empty on actual programming material. Using freeCodeCamp for the past few weeks has been great. The hands-on work and the way it structure the learning process is really nice. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good

  • On Agentic Programming

    Experiences while revamping this portfolio site

    Last week I finally got around to revamping this portfolio site. At first it was just to act as a way to get 'back into the game', to get back into the whole programming thing after a year of failed job applications, as it was a pretty easy project to get around to doing. As at first it mostly involved just changing around things to the newest version, i.e new icons, updating the tailwind formatting, adding some new functionality so some pages don't look squished if you're on mobile.

    Then I found Google Antigravity earlier this week and I tried experimenting with this new tool. (I realize this isn't the first fully agentic IDE but it is one I can try without having to bust out a credit card). At first it was just to play around with it, have it add this reflection tab as a basic code modification...

    Then I had it do a revamp of the website. It was like magic. I just gave it a list of what I wanted to change on this site and it did everything I wanted to do without having to do the hard work. It's honestly kind of scary how quick it can turn a 'hey can you revamp my site with these specifications' to boom, new site in like a couple of minutes.

    And while that kind of rapid prototyping probably isn't as big of a killer app since I'm sure it won't be as impressive when turned to legacy code bases, the fact that it can easily turn an issue into a fixed problem is also really impressive. Originally this reflection tab/component was inflexible and hard to add new content to. Now after a quick ask to the agent about fixing it- boom- it just works.

    I'm sure this is still something that's like a year or two plus a major LLM model version away from taking jobs but like the sparks of what's already here is impressive.

  • My First Reflection

    This will be a sort of pseudo-blog as I try and get my programming knowledge back in order

    Here I will write about my experiences, learnings, and anything else that comes to mind. I think that as tech advances the most important thing to keep in mind is to be flexible and ready to learn whatever comes your way with new tech.

    Recently I've gotten back into programming seriously, and the advent of LLMs have completely changed the game. Back during 2023-2024 pair programming was basically a gamble whether that line of thought will get you better results than looping back and forth from stackoverflow-- Now it can basically do most of the work so long as you're wise enough to spot problems and know where the project is supposed to go.

    Agentic programming is only going to magnify that even further. Straight up, I think the future is going to have way less pure code writers and more general problem solvers and planners. I worry for the software engineer proffesion as it is today, because I'm reasonably certain that what it will look like by the end of the decade will be completely different from what it is even today.