A first post.

July 3rd, 2024

Welcome to my blog, this will be a place where I will mainly post write-ups on small things I'm working on, interesting technical discoveries I make, and perhaps down the line more career-oriented discussions as I become more suited to talk on that sort of stuff.

If I (hopefully) keep up with this and don't let it immediately die out, it should be fun to revisit in a few decades and see what I've gotten up to over the years. Yes, I realize how optimistic that sounds.

Given that this post is mainly only meant as a testing ground for my actual website design, I'll talk about a few small unrelated topics that capture the zeitgeist of my Summer, 2024.

How, and why, does this site exist?

My current tech stack for webdev consists of Next.js, React.js, TypeScript, TailwindCSS, and a few other things depending on what I'm doing, though not for this site.

Admittedly, I have not ventured beyond the world of React, due to a few simple reasons.  1. I am not a web developer, so I don't feel it is worth my time.  2. I find React generally quite nice to build sites with.  3. The community is massive and it is easy to find examples.

Next.js follows naturally, and I tend to avoid JavaScript anytime I can unless it is non-optional. Explicit types, interfaces, and classes make writing JS so painless in comparison. I think it is a necessity in proper development, and it is no surprise that the industry is eating it up.

I wanted to make a blog, honestly, to hold myself accountable in regards to building cool stuff and documenting it thoroughly. I have gained so much from random articles I have found on Medium, freeCodeCamp, and other developers personal sites - I hope I can contribute to the community, some way, some how.

My plan to streamline future posts.

Currently, I am typing this inside a .tsx file inside a <p>, and it sucks quite a bit. Originally, I wanted to try and use MDX, which I very well may do, but I thought it could be more fun to try and build a custom markdown parser myself. Hopefully, if all goes to plan, all existing posts after this one will be written in some markdown. I will probably try and mimic a popular markdown syntax, and then make a Python parser that generates the .tsx to represent it.

Thoughts on artificial intelligence.

AI has become a major talking point in every sector of technology for at least the past 24 months. Do I think this is a good thing? I'm not so sure, but it certainly isn't surprising. I will echo what I have heard from many other avid users of AI, in that I find it quite nice. Building this site felt significantly easier, as I was able to find answers that could have taken me hours by digging through documentation, in minutes.

However, I think AI has a chokehold on investors and C-suite management to a comedic extent. Every company seems to think they are now an AI company, despite them having little to no use case. For a company like NVIDIA, this is great. Providing shovels never really backfires, so long as you don't preemptively manufacture too many shovels before a major drought in demand.

Recently, I saw a LinkedIn post that showcased their 'AI goalie' they had set up at some soccer game, where people could try and score and a robotically controlled poster board goalie would move side to side blocking it. Calling this AI, to me, captures the industry wide watering down of the term artificial intelligence. Anything that rubs shoulders with data science is now, apparently, artificial intelligence.

For now, it is a fun tool that has certainly improved my programming productivity by a solid 20% - 30% or so. Has it changed the world? I don't think so.

The job market, as a soon-to-be new grad.

Anyone in my position, as a computer science graduate of 2025, is surely aware of the current market conditions. They are not exactly ideal.

I greatly enjoy programming, and unless this field takes a massive nosedive, I don't think I see myself exiting. That being said, it is stressful times.

I find this stuff sort of fun, so I don't mind having to devote a little extra time here and there to stay afloat. That said, you won't find me doing LeetCode in the retirement home. Hopefully by then, either Mark has perfected his Metaverse and we all live happily ever after inside our headsets, or Elon has finished his autonomous robots, and we all sit on the beach being served martinis by our silicon underlings. Or maybe they can help do some sentiment analysis on all my blog posts in the future and analyze how less shit they become over time.