Skip to main content

I'm often wrong

Developers should read Ralph Waldo Emerson. By read, I mean listen to a 30-minute podcast and claim expertise.

Emerson says being too opinionated is harmful. The cliche in tech is that the view from the window of kosher technologies shifts quickly. The result is that I've been mostly wrong about any given technical issue in my career. I'm not saying this to be unpretentious but rather a fact. 

Given I'm wrong and write poor code at a given moment is not to be interpreted that something is left permanently broken. The great thing about having loose opinions is that I'm always open to implementing a better solution. It may still ultimately be sub-par but better than the original.

Ralph Waldo Emerson says that we should not imitate others. That may not end up as a quote in a programming book, though. No one likes a genius, and a clever thinker can be an insult in a coding context. Seeing something you have seen thousands of times in your editor is usually desirable.

Widen the lens to look at your deployment setup. Which blog post was it that inspired building that? Would something not being a projection from someone else's organization chart be better? Maybe, maybe not.

Accepting that the half-life of a fact is short can lead to two paths. According to Emerson, having loose opinions can transform one's thinking toward true wisdom. If an individual is not willing to turn their coat and rather cling on to past decisions, they might become an undesirable colleague.

Source: https://www.philosophizethis.org/transcript/episode-164-transcript

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

PydanticAI + evals + LiteLLM pipeline

I gave a tech talk at a Python meetup titled "Overengineering an LLM pipeline". It's based on my experiences of building production-grade stuff with LLMs I'm not sure how overengineered it actually turned out. Experimental would be a better term as it is using PydanticAI graphs library, which is in its very early stages as of writing this, although arguably already better than some of the pipeline libraries. Anyway, here is a link to it. It is a CLI poker app where you play one hand against an LLM. The LLM (theoretically) gets better with a self-correcting mechanism based on the evaluation score from another LLM. It uses the annotated past games as an additional context to potentially improve its decision-making. https://github.com/juho-y/archipylago-poker
Post a Comment
Read more

"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...
Post a Comment
Read more