Speaking to students

Given there is a chance, I'm eager to give a tech talk to any kind of audience which is willing to have a listen. Part of the fun of giving a speech is of course also learning something about the subject and also, improving myself as a speaker.

Two of the most recent talks I've held this year have been to the local university IT students. Having been one of them in the past, I knew that giving them something uninspiring to do would be something they are used to. The challenge would be to figure out something actually fun which can be accomplished in a matter of a couple of hours.

There are countless blog posts and tutorials about how to talk to students, but I decided to ignore them and wing it.

I gave two assignments to choose from. First one was to make a DVD screen saver with JS. There was a short-lived internet meme about it earlier this year, and I thought that hey this could be fun. It turned out to be quite amusing to watch at least especially when mixed with the second assignment which was to program a simple music loop with SonicPI.

I am not a fluent and a confident speaker, and because of that, I usually avoid trying to be funny. That does not mean that the subject of my talk or in this case the technical assignments should be boring. Personally, I dislike the usual pure algorithmic challenges merely because they are everywhere: in interviews, homework, language examples, etc.

Last week, I demoed my working style in an adult education course where the students with previous IT background catch up with modern web and mobile technologies. Together with my colleague, we created a simple voting system for the parliamentary elections this spring. Contrary to the earlier presentation, here the subject was rather dull, but that redirected the focus to my daily routines. The discussion and questions were directed towards my tech choices (in this case, Nuxtjs) and not to the domain which was beside the point.

Comments

I'm not a passionate developer

A family friend of mine is an airlane pilot. A dream job for most, right? As a child, I certainly thought so. Now that I can have grown-up talks with him, I have discovered a more accurate description of his profession. He says that the truth about the job is that it is boring. To me, that is not that surprising. Airplanes are cool and all, but when you are in the middle of the Atlantic sitting next to the colleague you have been talking to past five years, how stimulating can that be? When he says the job is boring, it is not a bad kind of boring. It is a very specific boring. The "boring" you would want as a passenger. Uneventful. Yet, he loves his job. According to him, an experienced pilot is most pleased when each and every tiny thing in the flight plan - goes according to plan. Passengers in the cabin of an expert pilot sit in the comfort of not even noticing who is flying. As someone employed in a field where being boring is not exactly in high demand, this sounds pro...

PydanticAI + evals + LiteLLM pipeline

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"You are a friendly breadwinner"

A recent blog post by Pete Koomen about how we still lack truly "AI-native" software got me thinking about the kinds of applications I’d like to see. As the blog post says, AI should handle the boring stuff and leave the interesting parts for me. I listed down a few tasks I've dealt with recently and wrote some system prompts for potential agentic AIs: Check that the GDPR subprocessor list is up to date. Also, ensure we have a signed data processing agreement in place with the necessary vendors. Write a summary of what you did and highlight any oddities or potentially outdated vendors. Review our product’s public-facing API. Ensure the domain objects are named consistently. Here's a link to our documentation describing the domain. Conduct a SOC 2 audit of our system and write a report with your findings. Send the report to Slack. Once you get approval, start implementing the necessary changes. These could include HR-related updates, changes to cloud infras...

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