Mentoring


Cheaper to Write, More Expensive to Trust

compressed javascript code source
Photo by Fahrul Razi on Unsplash

A friend messaged me lately: Where do you see IT going? Any new patterns in the post-AI era?

My answer started with two recent jobs, both from my own desk. The first was one afternoon, when I asked an agent to build me a small UI that exports data from my workout tracker and from my Fitbit Air through the Google Health API, and merges it into a training agent I’d built. It works, and it will never need to survive me.

For the second, around the same time, I spent a week updating one outdated JavaScript library in an emergency medical dispatch system (the kind that follows an ambulance from the first call to the hospital doors, with the patient’s status reported along the way). It was already running. An agent helped me debug it and swap the library, and the rest of the week went on reading, tracing, testing, and asking what would break and who would notice first.

Same tools on both, but completely different jobs.

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Architects Aren’t Made in Classrooms: The Real Way to Learn the Craft

Architects Aren’t Made in Classrooms: The Real Way to Learn the Craft
MIT Building 35 Lecture Hall By Imai Keller Moore Architects

After a heavy lunch break with a team, Dorian, one (among others) young and competent developer, enthusiastically asked me: “How does someone become an Architect, and what’s the path to follow and what to learn to be one?”

I wasn’t asked this question for the first time, and to be honest, I was never able to answer it properly.

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