Some form of 2024 retrospective - Coding Ramblings

I’ve never really done any of these yearly retrospectives before about my own work and career progress, mostly because I’ve never had anything that noteworthy to write about. Following your normal career path is not really anything to write home about, but, I guess it’s more about what you do and how you do it that will matter most for your own career growth. In that sense, I would easily elect 2024 as my “first real career year” in programming. The year when I had to go above and beyond because the circumstances sort of demanded it. With the whole GenAI boom, my job was no different from the rest of the industry and, in fact, we had had a sort of “proof-of-concept” with integrating LLMs into our core products in 2023, and, the results were actually decent, so I internally pushed forward to get a sort of permanent team assigned to “working on AI initiatives”. Alas, my prayers were heard, and, in March 2024, we got an official team set up with the narrow scope of “extending our core platform by enhancing it with AI-powered features”. Since I had been a vocal pusher for this, it was nice to have the opportunity to really see how far this could be pushed from a POC to something running in production. This was exciting because there was nothing at all. No repo, no team name, no concrete deliverables, no business objectives. Zero, zits, nada. It started with choosing a team name and having a handful of very high level ambitious goals to reach “as time passed” so to say. This ended up teaching me a lot about a lot of stuff.

There’s a huge difference between working with something and creating something. Sure, it’s easy to work on small features on a big existing project, because things are just there. Pipelines are there, code is there, examples are there, tests are there. A lot of the work is just pattern matching and extending an existing structure to support “new feature X” or “extend capability Y”, which is interesting and nice, but, you leave a lot of learning on the table if that’s all you do. When you start with a blank sheet, no repository at all, you surface all the complex details of your infrastructure that you didn’t know you needed in the first place. It becomes a completely different beast and you are forced to level up. By teaming with my platform colleagues I ended up learning a lot about Gitlab pipelines, Kubernetes, Docker and multi-project pipeline dependencies that I doubt I’d ever even see or need had I stayed doing the same thing over and over. It was effectively a huge learning opportunity to build something from thin air and I’m super glad I took it. You can then take time and pride in your work and push boundaries on whichever direction you choose.

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