It was yesterday when I finally decided to click the cancel button of my GitHub Copilot subscription. The reason? I feel I’m getting more and more stupid coding with AI.

whoami #

I truly believe the context matters on the decisions we take, and my context is I’m still a junior developer who feels growing the coding skills is harder in the AI age.

I started to work as a firmware engineer on 2023, already in the AI age. However, the AI models weren’t capable enough to generate good quality firmware code, so I had to figure out a lot of things by myself. I learnt a lot and I’m grateful for that.

Yesterday was my last day as a firmware engineer. I was at that job for a little more than two years or almost three years if I consider my internship time, but despite I enjoyed it, it’s time for me to say good bye.

I studied Electronics Engineering, so I would consider I was working on something related to it on this time, although I honestly prefer programming over circuits design or whatever an Electronics Engineer is supposed to do.

Oh well, I’m writing this after more than three weeks, but I certainly delivered the project I mentioned in the part 1 on time.

To be honest, I believed it would be something easy, but in the second week I realized I needed to spend more hours on it because I underestimate the complexity of the frontend. I don’t know how to explain it, the frontend is full of technologies that does the same, one tool has an alternative and the alternative has multiple alternatives, it was a problem for me who is not in the frontend world. I also surprised how difficult is to create a simple global variable in React, we have to use something called Redux or React Conext to deal with this problem, I read they have some differences and there are probably more alternative out there. Anyway, I was able to find a solution for every issue I had and the frontend looks good in my opinion.

I’ve been working as a firmware engineer for two years, but I don’t make enough money to get the life style I wish, so I’m here, in a big trouble where I have to learn web development for a project I have to deliver this month.

As I said I’m a firmware engineer, the main programming languages I use everyday are C/C++ and sometimes Python. I learned to code with Java tutorials on YouTube on 2018, it gived me the basic concepts of how to write code, but I haven’t used it since then. About the web side, well, I took some courses on YouTube and Udemy when I was in college because I thought it could be my entry point to the software industry, but I only learned some basic stuff again.

Hello, I’m Francisco Torres, a software developer from Mexico. I studied electronics engineering, it is not too related to software development, but I learned programming by myself. Yes, I saw some of C progamming in college, but it was not in a deep way and I didn’t have too many programming related subjects.

I was looking for an internship since 2022 winter. In that time I was almost in my last semester of the university, and I had the option to do an internship while I was studying the last semester. I sent my resume to some companies in Linkedin, but no one called me. It wasn’t something bad for me, because I was still studying and I had time to find a job.