After having worked as a Software Engineer for ten years in various companies both as employee and consultant, I've handed over my work's Access Card and laptop to embark on a period of self-driven learning.
As a full time employee, I found that the 50 most mentally productive hours of my week were blocked by "producing something for my job" - it's true you can learn things on the job but it's a very interrupted learning and if your company's goals don't align with all that you want to learn, it gets harder and you need to sacrifice other time I would rather use to keep my body and mind healthy.
Artificial Intelligence has made the news front in the last two years, many technology companies are in recession, the climate/energy tech sector is figuring out how to layout their plans for the future, as well as struggling to get impactful investments and all of this together looks to me like an inflection point.
My current line of work is software development - a field that is still relatively new but after my ten years of experience I can see there's way too much wasted effort (i.e: dissonance between business and technical strategy, or within software developers themselves, too much reinventing the wheel).
There's a huge potential for using LLMs to replace many of the most repetitive and error-prone tasks we're doing over and over again. If we can create, train and use new tools to reduce this waste and do more meaningful work, I'm up for it.
At the same time; there're many engineering strategy tools being developed as I write this blog post such as Teamperature from Team Topologies, and there's a trend to move away from the awful mess we've started with the microservices-first architectures out there which made our software significantly more expensive to maintain and keep to a good quality.
My domain of work is the energy sector - up until now I've been focused on the software side mostly but I love energy, decarbonization, home automation...etc. In fact, my degree is a type of Electrical Engineering specialized in telecommunications, so there's a lot of electronics and electromagnetism still in my brain that are dying to get out and put into practice.
The courses, book reading and projects I'll be working on are around the following topics:
- Home Energy Management and Net-Zero Energy transition - Get well versed enough to be able to understand, translate and even make decisions for my team when I work on my next role.
- Artificial Intelligence - Understand as much as I can and learn about tools and applications I can use.
- Algorithms - Get stronger at them because I never put much directed effort into them other than the corresponding courses in Uni which I have mostly forgotten about.
- System Design - I'm using ByteByteGo most likely, they're amazing.
- Networking, reading, studying other companies stories and learn from all their collective information about Engineering Strategy, Engineering Leadership and current trends in the industry.
