I saw a message on a Catholic Facebook group the other day about a thing called “100 Days of Dante”. The idea is to read a little bit of Dante’s Divine Comedy each day for 100 days. This is one thing that I have always wanted to read the entire poem, but have never gotten around to it.

A few years ago when Father Mike Schmitz was doing the Bible in a Year podcast for the first time, I heard about it on X (Twitter at that time.) All the Catholic people on there seemed to say he was solid, and at that point I was unfamiliar with Father Mike. I started listening to it on day 6 and was immediately hooked. I ended up making it the whole way through reading along most of the time while I listened to the podcast. That approach worked so well I went on to do the Catechism in a year when he did that as well and made it through the entire catechism of the Catholic Church for the first time in my life.

Intro

Lately the topic of the day is AI agents and vibe coding. I have been playing around with some of the ai tools and figured I would jot down my thoughts. This is also a chance to dive into a bigger test of the tools and see where they help and where the limitations are.

The History

Initially it started out with the copilot style of AI which really was just a much better line completion than say intellisense from an IDE. At first, I have to say I was pretty impressed when I could just drop a comment in my code which was basically a TODO for me as I went and the AI would fill in the code for me. I guess this must have been around 2023 when I started experimenting with this.

I haven’t been active on here lately just due to how busy we have been in getting our product on the market. That being said I did end up writing a post for our company blog about the engineering process we have built up over the last couple of years. I figured I would share it on here as well. Check it out here: https://wndyr.com/is-what-were-doing-driving-value-as-engineers/

I am a strong proponent of Agile development and I like the mind shift around thinking about value creation and who is the ultimate customer for what I am building. I hope that it is useful for you as well.

The 2000s

With the turn of the new year it got me thinking a bit about the change in the decade. Hard to believe it has been over 20 years since I was celebrating the change of the century with my friends in Minneapolis. Things have changed drastically since then. At that time I was 6 months into my career. I had joined a telecom startup and moved to Texas after graduating from the University of Minnesota. The 2000s were a decade of change and growth for me. It had me working really hard to get established in my career. Going through a couple of acquisitions and finally moving into my second startup. I met my wife then and got married, and we transitioned from apartment life to having a house. We traveled as much as we could. Mexico was much safer back then and we explored a lot of central Mexico as well as trips to Europe every year.

My site was down for much of today as I finally took the plunge and rebuilt my image from ground up. This was something I had considered doing for some time now. The old site had been through a couple of ubuntu upgrades and was chugging along, but I always thought it would be good to do a fresh install. However I never really wanted to dump the time into it. Then I saw this article: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14284/amazon-offers-another-amd-epyc-powered-instance-t3a

I am late to the party. Normally I tried to take off until Epiphany before I return to work, but I needed to start working on the 2nd so I wasn’t able to get to this post until now. As is my tradition I set my themes for the year that I want to focus on. I find doing so helps me stay on track and make sure that I am growing and improving myself.

I just signed up to take the Stanford Machine Learning Course for free on Coursera. Anyone who wants to take the course with me is welcome to join me over here: https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning. They are only accepting enrollments until January 12th I think it said so not much time left to sign up.

Recap for 2018

As is my tradition it is time to review 2018 and see how my year unfolded. The first thing that I always do is review my themes for the year and see how many of them I hit.

In general 2018 was an interesting year. The year started out with me on vacation. When I was on vacation I realized that I would have to change jobs in 2018 and luckily it all worked out for the better. I can say making that move was one of the best decisions I have made in my career. The difference between the first half of 2018 and the last half was a study in extreme opposites on the career front. Probably the biggest takeaway from that whole situation is that company culture may be the most important thing when it comes to choosing a position.

I decided to upgrade my site to the new version of Ubuntu as I haven’t done that for a couple of years. It is always a nice thing to work on when I am on vacation as it is the sort of thing that I don’t really get around to normally when I am busy. What a pain that ended up being.

The Upgrade for the OS itself went very smoothly as it seems to normally do so for Ubuntu. But the upgrade to the newer version of PHP broke everything with my site. As I think back actually I think this happened last time when I went from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 as well and it jumped from php5 to php7. I ended up with about a 3 hour outage trying to sort everything out.

It has been a crazy few months in startup land. The interesting thing for me about startups is no matter how crazy it is compared to corporate work, I find myself really content amidst the chaos. The big change here is we have decided to build our backend architecture in Go instead of Java. Having done Java for 19 years this is a big change, but for business decisions we decided that the trade offs with Go were better for our long term business needs than the trade offs with Java. Now that I have been using it for a few months I figured I would discuss some of the differences between the languages and what I like and dislike about each.