I’ve been working in IT for nine years doing help desk, system administration, data reporting and app development…but I’ve never gotten any official credentials. The big benefit of working in tech (I was told) is that if you can demonstrate your skills for hiring managers, it’s possible to get hired into good jobs even if you don’t have a college degree or formal certifications. That’s how I got into the industry - starting as a call center help desk tech for iPhones, I moved up across different companies, transitioning to working on computers, to managing databases, to building dashboards and programming backend applications and scripts. I achieved that primarily through self-study. Surely, I thought, that with my ecletic and evolving skill set, I would never need to get any formal credentials to continue my career in tech!

As someone who develops applications for business and pleasure, I am now required to tell a robot to develop it for me. It isn’t a hard requirement by law or anything, but the general consensus now is that if you’re not using AI tools to build software, you’re Already Behind or whatever phrase social media harps on. I hope you enjoy spending $10-$20 a month, forever, to subscribe to the coding AI you need to do work at the new expected pace!

Recently I used Cursor.ai for the first time, and with it, I built a simple AI agent to automate a repeating text-editing task. Nothing complex. Still, it was fascinating to plan out the grammar rules and procedure to follow in Markdown files, and then watch it refer to - and execute on - those Markdown files to instantly build a Python script to do the job. Up until that point I had been merely reading about agentic AI development, but that firsthand experience helped me understand why this paradigm’s taken off.

Recently I completed the last set of changes I wanted to make to get this website back into basic shape. A vertical slice, if you will. When I started this project log I thought it was going to take much longer, and if I included other things as part of the vertical slice such as a super-impressive UI, it probably would have. But I ended up making two decisions that helped me complete this revamp much faster:

In working on my website redesign, I’ve come to realize that there’s an issue I keep encountering time and time again - I don’t really know good user interface and user experience (UI/UX) principles that well.

Anything I’ve made with a frontend typically has played it very safe. It’s not like I’m slapping neon text over animated backgrounds or anything. (I like to think classic GeoCities taught me that lesson, at least.) But at the same time, all of my applications have looked pretty…well, minimalistic. Lots of black text on slightly faded white backgrounds, simple buttons and layout, et cetera. Sometimes my UIs feel like pictures of bedrooms after someone’s done a “100 things” declutter challenge and moved most of the stuff out. I think the last time I brought in some color was adding the surprise color of blue to a PowerBI dashboard.

The problem:
I need to redo my website. It could use updating into a more modern-looking theme that’s easier to update when I post new book notes and articles and project updates. The site currently runs on Hugo, a static web app generator, and I use Cloudflare Pages to pull from the website’s Github repo and host it. We can stick with that basic hosting structure - I just want to update the site to look better and make it more fresh.

Early in my programming journey, I had a manager once who told me that the whole process was like drinking from a firehose. That’s stuck with me all of these years. It turns out that increasing your skill as a programmer means learning absolutely everything in the entire world (well, it feels like it sometimes). Just off the top of my head, you have to learn:

• the core features of your chosen language
• all the standard programming fundamentals (variables, loops, classes, control flow, input/output, etc.)
• Object-oriented design
• Writing tests, if not full-fledged test-driven development
• System design
• Building
• Continuous integration/deployment
• Version control
• Data structures
• Algorithms (sorts, searches, Big O notation, etc.)
• Libraries
• Frameworks
• So on, and so on, and so on.

Learn the above, all the time, forever. Not that I don’t love learning, but sometimes the sheer volume is overwhelming. Not to mention our total limited time on this God-green earth. You can only learn so much, do so much, be so much. You’re finite the moment you’re born. As you can imagine, for someone like me who wants to be and excel at so many things, this really blows.

Docker is pretty important these days, and it’s widely used across various organizations, but I currently don’t have any opportunities to deploy it at my working environment. Best thing to do in that case is start yet another side project where you get to brass tacks with the technology you want to learn and make something super simple to get up to speed. Consider this part 1 of X where I get more familiar with CI/CD pipelines and all the tools it requires. Docker’s the starting point.