So for the majority of my career, I have been a full-stack web developer. I have been self taught so if someone was to ask me about software factories , you would get back a blank stare in return. Rightly or wrongly, my philosophy for development has always KISS. I find that the more complex a system is, the more holes there are for exploitation.
I taught myself a scripting language called ColdFusion for my first corporate job. I then moved on to HTML. However, the majority of my career has been spent in the .Net Framework: both Visual Basic.net and C#. I learned how to build backend databases and moved to a process which probably has a fancy name but for me meant designing the system from the database tables forward: learn what each object in the system looked like, acted like and if it was acted upon by another object.
I learned enough CSS to be dangerous. After a while, if I found a style that I liked, then I would stick with it until something better came along. In my current job, I don’t do a lot of hands on coding and I miss it. The last opportunity to build an application came a couple of years ago. We had a need to create a program that would allow us to group accounts by customers. There was a similar system already built. It had two major flaws: 1) It was mainly thousands of lines of if statements. 2) it was written in a language without an HTML interface and I had never seen this language before. Enter my new coding partner, ChatGPT. I pair programmed an interface by asking it a series of prompts that would build the html forms, the update statements and debug any errors that pop up. In a month of off and on work, I had a proof of concept that I could take to the business. That got me hooked, I wanted to learn more and more about what AI could do.
I am now working to learn all aspects of AI from AGI to ML and building agents. I hope to document that journey here.