taught mental math (abacus) to 3-15yr olds for 10+ yrs. A great teacher notices the gaps in the fundamentals and fixes those along with variants before piling on.
as I got into SWE 4 yrs ago, this was a big part of my job as a SRE/SDET and my next job came b/c of that SRE exp which was never used, so just became an SDET.
5yrs ago, pre LLMs, I made a very simple version of this, create good playlists from a user query. Got me my first programming (& favourite) job at a music AI company to lead QA Automation, found a lot of bugs.
Only had basic python knowledge going in (new grad mech engineer on pumps/pipes). built on flask / python / heroic / GitHub.
Small team, some awesome people. Changed my life. for now, back to being laid off.
80%+ done MVP, for small business use & personal use. First go at full stack development with AI. useful features around voicemail, notifications, and spam prevention (whitelist, blocklist). Built to be robust, secure and available.
2. Intelligent understanding for videos, No MVP yet. Have an interface and use-case in mind that allows people to use understand videos with rich context quickly
currently on pause for leetcoding but I think there's potential here.
I'm an early-mid career SDET/SRE. Currently building a full web app with rest AP integrations, looks great and works great. Lots of functionality, useful and being hardened all b/c of AI. It's going to be live with customers soon I hope.
AI is not a feature of the product. GTM will be interesting, have some good ideas.
It's really up to you to be clever. I've never used Js/Ts/node/these apis etc. I started programming as a non-cs engineer to automate stuff and then got into SWE. This is truly an amazing time.
also starting in a blue-collar field soon as an operator-ish in a facility management company. I've already lined up an awesome new SaaS in the main industry. Pest control will be one of the verticals the company has customers fo so I will be keeping an eye for it, was thinking of just starting a pest control business it self.
Does your software do anything fancy or is mostly for organization, good workflow, and being the central source of truth?
Did it require a lot of development after getting a few customers on boarded?
Instead of maintaining a catalog of tools like read_file, grep, list_dir, they just expose one run(command: str) tool and let the LLM compose Unix pipelines. It has access to one tool for shell commands: run(...)
I think you could use mcp-shell , written in Go instead of python subprocesses
absolutely. as a early/mid level SDET/SRE, I can move so fast on prototyping full good apps now. That style of thinking is serving me well, knowing about queues, docker, basic infra knowledge, good coding practices, is plenty to produce decent code. Interesting time to be laid off.
AI makes a ton of bad decisions too and it's up to you to work with it. If I had the knowledge of the dangers hidden in things I'm developing, I'd move even faster
Was able to make a great full web app, which I think is hardened for prod but it had to be refactored to do so. Which it happily did.
It's really about asking the right questions, breaking down tasks, and planning now. I'm going to tackle a huge project, hoping to share it here.
The careers page would be more usable with option to load 100 postings a click vs a handful. The dropdowns also only support 1 option. AI should be able to resolve this asap
agreed. Of the two software teams I've been on everyone has been a "senior". Some were fresh seniors, and some more staff. I've always been the most junior on the team.
2 devs on teach team were truly 10x before AI; each has 15-25 yrs of exp on very small teams, great at so many things: code - infra - linux internals - networking - incredible debugging skills - keep up with good practices - great docs - and desire to do things the "right way" - IQ + horsepower.
The other good senior devs may do some of those things.
My title is Senior 2 b/c I negotiated a raise during interview, but am mid-level at best. Now laid off.
My initial idea was to go B2B, a simple camera device per court that flashes red on out of bounds shot. Let's businesses provide a quality of life upgrade.
looked more into swing vision and there's so much to it, looks like a great tool
ello looks great, great work