Riding the Wave Again - AI FTW

As I write this, there’s less an hour left of 2023. I’m in the living room with the wife who is starting her studies in becoming a certified Doula. I’m grinding as usual and this is just another night. I want to be able to sit at this dining table again in one year and be amazed at myself for all I’ve done in 2024.

Cheers to that and to you and your own goals.

Before I mention this notion of my most recent ‘wave’, I’d like to share how things started out for me.

I Missed a Pretty Big Wave

In 2014 I had made the decision to drop out of college and undergo a tech internship to get hired and professionally break into the field…

I didn’t get hired.

Not only did I not get hired, but I couldn’t ride that wave of what was big back then. Frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Flask was hot and everyone was javascripting all the things.

I couldn’t really get into javascript or Rails at the time, or even Python, so finding a job at that time was pretty frustrating.

Go was released merely two years before I heard about it, yet it was making its rounds in tech as being ‘blazingly fast’. Cue everyone rushing to rewrite their apps in Go. The architect at the time suggested I looked at it, and I freaking loved it.

It was so similar to C (the language I was most familiar with).

A lot of the main people who were responsible for C or were close to its beginnings like Rob Pike and Ken Thompson (Rest in Peace Dennis Ritchie) were leading Go’s growth.

Without knowing too much else about it, I went all in after going back to finish my degree, and boy did I go all in.

Finally Catching My First Wave

Busting my ass in a programming language nobody really even knew turned into me being hired as a contractor for a job that brought me to California.

It got me that job full time, and it got me my next job. It’s now 2018 - Go is EVERYWHERE. More insanely, it was being used to write a lot of the groundbreaking tools that facilitate cloud infrastructure today.

Terraform, Kubernetes, the list goes on.

Being well versed in a programming language that was used for low level systems and performance meant I had to work with Senior Engineers with decades of experience. The only reason why I could hang with them was mainly because I knew Go.

Tackling problems with Go as a developer forced me to learn about Kubernetes and devops. In 2018 made the decision to become a fully fledged devops engineer at a startup that was related to the hotness at that time: drones.

Catching Yet Another Wave

Like all waves, it reached the shore. I still wanted to surf though, so I hopped onto the next big thing in 2020 as many of us did: crypto and NFTs…

We all know how that went. My ass got laid off from a crypto hedge fund in eleven months, lol.

I learned a lot though and fought towards my path of learning and getting things done like crazy.

The Latest Wave is Artifical (Intelligence)

It’s now 2023. While others would have ridden one wave of employment or some trend for a few years, I’ve hopped onto about seven different waves since I rode the Go one eight years ago.

I lurk a bunch of the AI related subreddits for interesting threads and to keep up on the happenings. I’ve kind of had this idea to try and jump into it. I mean, I’ve played with ChatGPT and midjourney and stuff, but as an infrastructure engineer, there’s an aspect of me that always wants to build things rather than just build a wrapper around someone else’s API.

So, a few days ago I decided to have a little solo hackathon.

I brought out my desktop, installed linux onto it, and with input from a great friend of mine who has been into deep learning and AI for years, 2 hours of sleep, and undiluted concentrated coffee, I was able to pull up a browser on my machine and generate images from text.

My gosh, it was amazing. I was sitting there with my wife just typing out random things that resulted in one of the longest ‘shock and awe’ moments that I’ve ever had. Sure, I’ve played with AI image generation online before, but to have something that I put together myself, along with the power to twist and turn all these different knobs to generate varied or highly detailed pictures really takes the experience to a new level.

I spent the day just tinkering. I was downloading different models and applying different filters to create new images.

This hackathon I had was worth it and it really opened my eyes to the possibilities of what could be done on consumer grade desktop computers today (my desktop is running a 3060Ti).

My Advice on Surfing

Some people would look upon my history as someone who isn’t loyal.

One of the most consistent truths out there is that the best way to maximize your salary is by switching jobs. I would add that also applies to maximizing the type of experiences.

I would also argue that my luck in getting into Go was an investment that paid off.

The kind of waves that you can ride based on risk and can be dangerous but also pretty rewarding, and a few of the jobs that ended wasn’t my choice. I was laid off or wronged and didn’t care to stay and correct anything.

I don’t regret anything and I attribute my Go and Kubernetes as the sole reason why I remained employed this year.

It’s okay to go against the grain.

Where to Go From Here

People say that to get into devops, you gotta learn all this underlying stuff. Well, I jumped from software engineering to devops and I’m working my way down to learning Linux and networking fundamentals.

Like AI, I used my skills to setup a Stable Diffusion image generator on my desktop, but now I’ve gotta dive deeper.

I want to be able to wrap this up so that it can run in a more efficient and automated fashion. Once that’s set, hooking it up to a web application to generate images would be pretty neat. Slapping stripe payments on it and opening it to the public would be even more neat! But I digress.

I’m just gonna keep surfing for now and seeing where things go.

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