This morning, I met Bodie and Georgia at around 08:30 to head to Bratislava. There were a few others who where planning on coming as well, but they slept in too long.
We walked to the Vienna Main Station and took the REX 8 to Bratislava. An hour later, we arrived in Bratislava and started walking towards the old town. The old town seems like it used to be a walled city, and it is now a really nice pedestrian area.
This morning, I woke up in time for the walking tour. There were about ten of us from the hostel in the group. Our guide was a woman named Katerina (not sure about the spelling). She took us from the hostel, through the Naschmarkt (an extensive outdoor market area), and towards the city centre. Along the way, she pointed out a variety of the shops along the market including various restaurants, wineries, and beer houses.
My plane from Dulles arrived close to on time, but the immigration queue was very long. The new ETIAS requirements seem to be making the border check process somewhat longer than before. In addition to telling the border agent my business and when I was leaving, I had to provide a fingerprint scan. I really do not know what the purpose is, but hopefully it helps them track and prevent illegal immigration (although being Europe, I’m doubtful).
I’m once again heading across the pond to attend FOSDEM as I have the last three years. I’m flying to Brussels via Dulles and then I’m going to fly on to Vienna for a lightning tour of Vienna and Prague, with possible day-trips to Bratislava and Brno. I’m writing this about two hours out from Brussels, and already the trip has been quite eventful, but you’re going to have to read the whole post to learn what happened :)
Over the last month or so, I’ve been using Claude Code for assisting with development tasks1. One of the things that has confused me the most about the LLM-assisted programming ecosystem is the Model Context Protocol (MCP) landscape. In theory, MCP is a way to provide the LLM with data from an external system through a structured protocol. However, it sucks. It turns out that it is more efficient to have the AI just write code to analyse and manipulate the data from the external system directly. Rather than piping the data from the external system into the LLM’s context window and letting the LLM muddle through it, the LLM-written code can just do the necessary data processing. Computers have been good at running instructions on large datasets for a very long time and AI is not going to be a substitute for that.
A few weeks ago, Typst came back on my radar because Sylvan Franklin’s videos on the topic came into my YouTube feed. In particular, Rewriting my resume in Typst in which he rewrites his resume from \(\LaTeX\) to Typst piqued my interest. I have maintained my resume in \(\LaTeX\) since I started at Mines in 2016, and so I figured this would be an opportunity for me to learn something new.
Getting an entry-level software job is harder now than at any time in at least the last decade.
Building a career in software is (and always has been) hard, but highly rewarding if you succeed.
The key is to take ownership of both your work and your career trajectory.
In this article, I am going to discuss how to build a career in the software industry. We will explore career tracks, and discuss the attributes needed to become a senior software engineer. Then I will provide my view of how LLMs will affect the software engineering industry and job market.
I recently read I Know When You’re Vibe Coding by Alex Kondov in which he described certain characteristic “smells” of vibe-coded software. For example, he points to LLMs proclivity to pave their own path and go against established patterns within a project.
The article resonated with me, but I realized that it resonated with me at a deeper level than just explaining my interactions with LLM-written software. I realized that I’ve seen these “smells” before in pre-LLM software (especially that written by students).
This post is personal. If you normally read my blog for my travel updates or my software engineering takes, this is a very different kind of post.
If you don’t want to read about my personal life, this is a good post to skip.
It’s always awkward to come out, but the lead-up is always the worst part. Once it’s done, it’s done and I move on with my life. I have been out to my family and most of my friends for a few years now, but as one of my friends described it, I’m about as out as the sun on a cloudy day. Well, I guess it’s time for the sun to shine a bit more.
A few months ago, I was asked to give the keynote address at the BlasterHacks hackathon hosted at Mines by their ACM chapter. I wasn’t quite sure what would be interesting to talk about for the keynote, so I asked some friends. Byron suggested that I either talk about hackathon advice or career advice. Since I was giving a hackathon keynote, I decided to focus my presentation on hackathon advice. I went to six hackathons while I was a student at Mines, and won prizes at all but one of them so I felt I had something interesting to say about the topic.
