Learned another couple languages in the last six months

A little C, some C++, lots of Java, lots of Ruby, lots of shell, some Scala then a bunch of DSLs and other sorta-languages. Last year, I learned Terraform, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and a bunch of AWS additions … but it was a slow year since I was also learning my company’s product. Last year, I started finally to do Python via PySpark and AWS Glue Jobs — it’s not nearly as bad as I thought. Now I am finally learning Go for real, and it’s pretty great for some things, especially the stuff I am working on. Oh, also Google Cloud Platform. And yes, ChatGPT.

The great thing about working for a software company is that you get to learn constantly.

Sound exhausting? Then maybe software engineering isn’t your cup of tea. I think there’s a kind of aura around engineers that know ungodly amounts of shit, and well there should be. Knowing ungodly amounts of shit involves learning ungodly amounts of shit, and doing it all the time. “Whatcha readin’ honey?”, your significant other might ask. “The Go Programming Language” you might respond (in your sexiest, most dulcet tones, of course). It is a rare significant other indeed who can respond without a certain shaking of the head and concern for your mental health.

More specifically, I don’t know anyone who seems incredible who doesn’t spend substantial time googling and reading source code, bug reports, stack overflow, shitty blogs like mine, and all the rest. We’re all doing the same thing: the best of us not great because of our facility with any given language or tool, but great because of our willingness to grind out a solution. And that takes time. It also takes a good memory, or note taking system, or (in the case of one especially godly coworker) a highly managed shell history.

But hard work or not, learning new things, and honing skills constantly is exhilarating. The cool, and I think inherently unique thing about software is that innovation seems to be accelerating, and has been for decades now. The advent of GPT is certainly going to make life different, but the ones of us who realize it will spend our time figuring out not how to use it, but to address its shortcomings.