I'm reading through the book the blog mentions right now and building a small LLM. I'm only on chapter 2, but so far it's helped clarify a lot of things about LLMs and break it down into small steps. Highly recommend Building a large language model from scratch
Born Guyanese, but only lived there until I was 3, then we moved to St. Lucia. Have lots of memories from visiting over summers and Christmas multiple times when I was a kid.
Mostly consider myself Lucian and I feel like I've assimilated into the American tech population. My history now is just a interesting fun fact. Don't meet too many people from the Caribbean in general in tech circles, so it's always fun to get a reminder that they're out there.
AI is definitely a big part of it. When I would search Google with a technical question and land on StackOverflow I was looking for an answer. Sometimes you get a post which is similar, but not quite right, or the answers are only 95% of answering your actual questions.
AI of course just answers it. I can ask it follow ups, I can give it loose code and it just gets it. My grammar can be riddled with spelling errors and it still gets it. I can go back and forth with it and get a fine tuned answer.
When I used SO I had always just wanted an answer, but had to accept answers that were close, but not quite what I needed.
God forbid if I needed to post a question. I'd immediately get hit with over moderation, or someone closing the question for whatever reason.
I used to be an avid SO contributor up until around ~2015. I saw the mod community turn snarky. AI is just a better way to get stuff done.
So back in 2021 I built a loyalty platform for a chain of gas stations in the Caribbean. Thought it would be a quick deliverable, then hands off.
It's turning into a full time side gig that's paid off in handful of batches (~$25K and running)
I'm trying to become a loyalty vendor API.
Would really like to work on my own interconnected systems of blogging tools and social media. Kinda a blend between having your own site and myspace? Not really targeting a market or anything like that, just think it would be cool to do for personal use and sharing with family and friends
I went to school with the son of the owner. For about 3 years off and on he'd been asking me about building apps, where he could find good devs, what price to pay.
I'd sent him some info, but never got too involved. Then the pandemic hit, and I found myself with a bit more time to kill, so I listened more to what they needed.
They basically wanted to get a loyalty program going at their gas stations and partner gas stations, but wanted custom rules which their current provider couldn't do with their off the shelf solution.
They also wanted to use one of those old school CC machines that were everywhere before the likes of square showed up. But getting your hands on those units is expensieve.
So I started planning it out. They needed to store customer data, and needed a point of sale device to swipe customer loyalty cards on, which needed to read in customer info, do a deduction, or a store credit top up and print a receipt.
I found a android terminal machine off alibaba, opened up android studio and started hacking away. I hadn't done more than a basic android hello world at this point.
For the backend I used django to get started quickly, and they were very happy to use the django built in admin panel to do stuff as needed, and view transactions.
After I got the devices talking to django, I had to integrate a loyalty vendor they already sourced, and just went along with it, but that was a mistake. The vendor points API doesn't really add much value on what django can already do for me, and my new goal is to become that vendor since I think I can do their product better.
But basically I iterated on it for about a year, launched a little over a year ago, still working out some edge cases and kinks, but they do roughly 25K transactions a month on devices spread out at over 20 stores.
They want to bring it to new islands, so I'm trying to remove some of my duct tape fixes with more stable fixes so that can be smooth sailing come next year.
EDIT: Might get back to writing and update with a much longer post. Draft:
Wow, thanks. This is fascinating and it's also a useful outline or storyline for how these sorts of B2B projects come about. Particularly the part about how their current provider couldn't or just didn't want to provide or develop new services or perhaps just didn't see the customer base developing. Driving a wedge between big enterprise solutions and "move fast and break things" guerilla solutions.
[EDIT: Just wanted to add that I'll definitely be circling back to read the rest as you finish it and the lessons learned.]
I don't recall ever seeing it in the wild, but I remember it as a JS script you could add to your site from a page that I think was http://www.dynamicdrive.com/
I may have played around with it on a couple of HTML pages written in Notepad way back.
Lots of comments in here disregarding the author's take, but there is a pervasive alcohol culture in most US workplaces.
One place I worked at did champagne for birthdays and major celebrations. All outings after work were at a bar.
Another place I was at was basically a frat house. Lots of young folks fresh out of college and drinking was practically expected. Interviews took place at bars in the early days. Owner used to come by my desk on a Friday afternoon with a bottle of wine, pour me a glass and tell me to stop working and have a drink.
Staff parties were drinking fueled raves. Socializing and other official events were centered around drinking. It was even a selling point of working for the place that the fridge was always stocked with alcohol. Some people kept a special bottle of whisky in their desk.
I'm no prude...I enjoy the occasional drink of all varieties. One glass (max two) of <insert alcoholic beverage here> and I'm good.
But the drinking culture screams at you that you should drink all the time, drink more and be happy to have a chance to drink. It screams that you should care about brewing processes and types of alcohol.
It's not a problem just in tech, but tech workforces revel in it. I can't say that if I didn't drink it wouldn't stop my advancing through career ladders, being a "good drinking buddy" did play a non zero role into the speed of advancement and size of bonuses in some form when I directly compared my trajectory to others who didn't take part in the drinking sessions.
It's also not just a work problem...humanity as a whole defaults to drinking. I was part of it through my college years and the first few years of working in tech. I started backing away from drinking as much and going to fewer bar outings for my own personal fitness reasons, and I felt the pressure "what you're leaving already? You're not going to have another? Drink faster".
For all of you who say you've never pressured anyone about it, haven't seen it, or don't feel it, there are 10 more people who do the exact opposite. No one held me down and forced me to drink, and no one applied more pressure that I couldn't gracefully handle as someone secure in themselves and their choices can do, but there is a non zero amount of work to be done that becomes mildly annoying for me. For others who cave easily to pressure but want to break out they feel it more I'm sure.
For anyone struggling to break out of the drinking cycle here are some things I've found after years of trying to drop it:
* Set yourself a limit and stick to it. Make it known. Mine is a two drink max. Even one will do. If you so choose zero is fine too.
* The pressure can feel immense, but hold your ground.
* Having no drink in front of you or an empty glass is a trigger for someone to ask you about it and try to pressure you into another one. Keep a glass a little full to help avoid that.
* Keep a separate tab from everyone else. I've found that having one shared tab is like throwing fuel on the fire for everyone to drink more. Especially in a company outing there is a chance that the company will pay for it making everyone go crazy with consumption.
* If someone buys you a drink that you didn't ask for feel free to not drink it and pass it onto someone else who is enthusiastic about drinking it. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do.
EDIT: One last thing -- I don't think we should remove people from being able to drink at work events, or remove it as part of the culture. Instead just raising the idea and making it more normalized that there are people who want to spend time with you, but don't want to drink just to spend time with you.
I've had friends who described the culture at their companies, and it sounded like everybody worked through an alcoholic haze. Somehow I've never end up at companies like that.
Although at one company there were occasional after-hours jaunts to a bar, they weren't attended by management, and nobody kept track of who attended and who abstained.
When I gave up drinking for a few years during my divorce, I was definitely in the minority of non-drinkers, but I never seemed to have any trouble. Then again, I didn't make a big deal of it by doing things like refusing a raffle prize. I wasn't trying to make a moral stand, I just didn't think it was a good idea for me to be drinking at the time.
Anyway, in my experience, OP is making a mountain out of a molehill, but I've heard from some friends whose work experience is different from mine that OP might just have had a run of bad luck.
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