Hi There!

It's been very exciting as an engineer building at the fore front of using llms in order to solve general problems. On the one hand it's been crazy to witness the crazy developments in human / computer interaction that have occurred, both as a developer leveraging it for my work and in the world around me through ai being continually embedded into more and more products. This is both good and bad. But anyways.

But more importantly right now, its so both anxiety inducing and incredibly exciting to think about how ai has changed the character of building commercial software. It has blurred the long-defined lines of responsibility between product, engineering, design, and revenue. PMs are writing code, backend developers are writing UI, CMOs are coding. And we've got a new cohort of developers entering the tech industry who have only been builders with the help of AI assisted tools, either just starting their careers or otherwise transitioning to new areas of expertise within (or from without) of tech.

I thought it might be helpful for such a person, maybe looking to develop a portfolio or otherwise looking to develop their development skills building different types of applications, the following set of exercises. In each I will lay out what I believe is an opinionated framework to evaluate your own work and help develop your skills. Along the way we'll also go over (at times pedantic) best practices and conventions. In a word, I will try to impart to you how to gauge the 'Quality' of yours and others work, at least as how I can best define it. If that doesn't make a ton of sense, try reading this and get back to me.

The end goal, is not of course, to try and indoctrinate you to my way of thinking. Nothing presented here is gospel, and I find myself continually evaluating and reforming these opinions as I go through my career. The intent is to give you some open ended projects building different types of applications, which in turn will hopefully provide you a base to keep exploring new ideas, developing new bodies of work, and develop your own sense of 'Quality' with respect to software.

The Goal

all will be revealed in good time

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