Programming: Three Lessons Learned in 2024

Three lessons I’ve learned this year:

1. AI: Use it or see ya later

It’s no surprise that AI is everywhere, but this year I really felt the difference. While AI can mean a lot of things, here’s how it showed up for me this year:

a) Paying for Copilot

At first, I was hesitant, but I’ve grown to appreciate the feedback it provides, especially when writing code. It’s been a game changer for unit testing and autocomplete.

b) Trying out Cursor

Cursor, a fork of Visual Studio Code with AI baked in, became one of my go-to tools. I like how it understands your codebase and lets you ask questions. Here’s what I’ve used it for:

• Generating TypeScript types from this JSON response
• Creating snippets, like a scraper for this HTML
• Improve the logic on this function

I’m still evaluating Visual Studio Code + Copilot vs Cursor. So far, it feels like either one works well, but I want to spend more time with both before committing to just one.

c) GPT over Google

With Copilot and Cursor offering chat features, I don’t use ChatGPT as much for coding. But when it comes to general searches, ChatGPT is still my go-to. Even when I do search on Google, I often wait for their Generative AI response.

2. Working with humans is challenging 😅 (but mostly joyful)

I’m someone who enjoys writing code and talking about software. Up until 2024, most of my roles were as an individual contributor, spending the majority of my time coding. But this year, I had the opportunity to spend a full year as a Staff Engineer, splitting my time between writing a few lines of code and ensuring others write amazing ones.

Working with machines is straightforward—no emotions involved (at least for now). But getting people to work together? That’s a whole different challenge. We all have our own perspectives, and most problems can have multiple solutions. At the end of the day, though, we’re all just trying to do our part. For the end user, it doesn’t really matter if the app uses TypeScript or not, if it’s built with React, or if it’s hosted on AWS. What matters is delivering a good product that works as it should.

So, next time there’s a decision to make, get everyone involved and let the best idea win. Don’t spend too much time overthinking, it’s better to fail fast and learn. Just like applications evolve, so do we.

3. Blogging is hard.

I started blogging this year, and so far, I’ve managed to publish a post every Monday since August.

Sometimes, I wonder if it’s worth it. I mean, I already mentioned AI, and let’s face it, whatever I’m writing about, someone else has probably written too, so AI likely knows it all.

But I’ve decided to stick with this experiment for at least a year. Most of my posts are about things I’ve faced at work, and that I think are worth sharing.

At its core, this blog is my journal as a software engineer. I hope you enjoy it, and I’m always open to feedback.

That’s it, enjoy the holidays, and keep up the good code!