Technology, Insights, Travel and Philosophy
Lets start somewhere. 11,000 years ago. The Ice Age has long gone, humans have started hunting and gathering in groups. We have not yet invented agriculture. To the West, the first stone walls of Jericho are being stacked, and in Turkey, the hunters of Göbekli Tepe are carving massive predatory totems (Schmidt, 2000).
We are currently in a massive boom and crack cycle. Companies are scaling LLM usage at an unsustainable rate, only to realise that every token has a literal cost that product margins were never designed to absorb.
There has never – literally never been a better time to build software as an individual developer.
Not during the open-source boom.
Not during the mobile app gold rush.
Not even during the early cloud era.
I sat through a design review for one of my apps recently. The app itself is simple: a FastApi endpoint that searches a FAISS index of Jira and Zendesk tickets, and another endpoint that summarizes results using a locally hosted Ollama model. That’s it. It solves a clear, narrow problem for our L3 support engineers.
I remember seeing an Atari 2600 clone, an NES clone and a PlayStation in the late 90s and was mind blown by those consoles. I mostly saw them at my friend’s place, and although I got to play very little of it, I became a gamer in my mind just watching others play. Pac-Man, Super Mario and a whole collection of games.
Like many of us, I had lived a life of belligerence – opinionated, intoxicated, hustled and travelled. I never sat home for a minute. The only time I would find myself at home is to sleep at night. Just couple of weeks before covid hit the world, I was doing a road trip across the winter of Iceland braving snow storms and staying in beautiful scenic Airbnb’s in temperatures way below zero throughout my two week trip.
Recently I gave a presentation on learning multiple programming languages quickly. The idea of the presentation was to quickly start coding in multiple languages and learn the toughest or the unique parts as we go along practising.
The technique is just common sense though, and has mostly worked for me in my career where I have used it to learn multiple programming languages – Java, JavaScript, Python, Go and Rust to name a few. I intend this article for anybody with interest to learn new languages.
If you ever wondered about the gift you would give a young nurturing mind, look no further than the Raspberry Pi.
The Pi as it is commonly called what is a Single Board Computer. They are fully functional computers having the processor, I/O, memory in the same board. For all that, they have a very small form factor. They are powerful enough to automate stuff, create robots, build internet of things or like me build retro consoles or simply be used as desktops.