I’m not going to lie, procrastination is part of my work journey. I’m not proud of it, of course, but I have to admit it if I want to improve.

I’ve deleted some of my social media accounts in the last years, including Facebook and Instagram, but YouTube and Twitter are still very important (and very addictive) to me.

I work from home, so you can imagine that it’s so easy for me to take my phone or open a tab on my browser and just do anything except work. And that’s true so many times a day, and the consequence is I have to stay in front of the screen, working after my work hours, because I have to finish the work, of course.

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.