Back at it

Trying to start again

I have not been doing well, I do not say this for sympathy and I'm not trying to make excuses, at least I hope not. After I got back from the conference I crashed. I came home all hyped up and then reality settled in and I feel like I basically spent a month procrastinating. It felt like I should be doing more after the conference, but instead I froze. I wanted to move past just taking more DeepLearning courses and start building. However, the building didn't really come. I was constantly plagued by feeling overwhelmed and not knowing where to start. Ironically, I froze. That feeling of I'm not doing enough got worse and worse every day and every day I sat down to build and came up with nothing and eventually just did something else. About a month ago I got hit with a case of vertigo. I came crashing down, yet again. For those who don't know I have a pretty rough issue with anxiety and my health. This sent me spiraling, I have basically felt a near constant "almost" dizziness. While I could technically work through this, mentally it crippled me. I was so stressed about it that I couldn't focus on anything. Every time I sat down to work on stuff I would almost notice this issue more which would cause me to stress out and even have panic attacks. I am doing physical therapy which is helping immensely and it has not gone away but it has felt more manageable. So, this is me saying that I am back, I will not let this continue to control my life and I will get back on this horse.

Finding a heading with a friend

It has not all been doom and gloom. Right before I was struck by the vertigo I did find a little heading with a friend. He talked to me last year about an app he was vibe coding and he wanted my opinion on it. I looked it over and I thought it was cool but in the back of my mind my first instinct was this is not what should be being worked on. I wasn't trying to harshly criticize his work, but my first thought was this will be unnecessary in the future because of AI. Anyway, I ran into him again at a party where he asked what I had been working on and more importantly what he had been working on. He scrapped the original app idea and was building something for his company to use every day. He realized how much monotonous "fill in this spreadsheet" work he had to do every day and wanted to automate it. We set up a meeting and he showed me the app he had built and how he was trying to change the company around it. I was really intrigued, but to be honest, I wasn't that interested in just helping build an app then trying to sell it. However, given that I've done this alone working with people felt like a good step forward. Then he really got my attention. He said this was just the first step, he wasn't trying to build this app to sell to other companies. He wanted to take this approach and build bespoke apps for any company, now this was more like it. I was hooked, that sounded like a great idea. I have felt like I don't know enough about how business works and with him I could get a firsthand look plus I would have direction towards building things.

We agreed that he would give me a feature to build for his platform, something minor but something to see how I worked and used LLMs. He was very busy, so originally he gave me access to the repo and I cloned a local copy to my computer so I could play with it. My first task I set myself was to have Claude and Codex review the code, explain it to me, and point out any issues it had seen. This was a good exercise, when he showed me the app there were lots of terms and things I didn't understand so reading both of these helped me understand the workflow as well as some industry terms I didn't know. The next part was harder, at this point, I still hadn't heard from him exactly what kind of feature to build so I tried to have Claude come up with some ideas. We did one very small tweak that was mentioned in the readmes but not implemented. However, without actually connecting to the database and without knowing what was needed from the company's perspective I struggled to come up with any ideas. When he finally got around to giving me my feature I dove headfirst into it. It turns out, this was exactly what I needed. Once I had my heading I dove straight in and didn't stop until I hit my usage limit. Within a day and a half I had a working prototype that I was proud of. I still had some questions and didn't have access to their database, so I was still running a little blind but I was happy with what I had made. He ended up loving the feature and they are currently finishing a big update. After that, he should be reaching out with another feature, this time I will be paid for my time! This is all very exciting and hopefully something to look forward to in the future.

Telling people

On a more social note. I think I've said this before but I don't really have social media. I've been experimenting with X and LinkedIn since all this started but I don't really use them. I've, also, more or less kept all of this AI stuff hidden from everyone I know. I decided at the conference to start telling people. I sent my mom and sister a picture of me winning my award and, more importantly, had my wife post that picture to her Instagram. Obviously most of the feedback was positive, and it's not necessarily that I was afraid to tell people, but I wanted to make sure I was committed and invested before I told people I was trying to change my life. Needless to say, this was actually a huge relief, it felt nice to talk about it with people and some people were genuinely interested and I was happy to talk about it. I, also, competed in my first hackathon.

My first hackathon

The HuggingFace build small hackathon, the goal was to build an app that would run a small LLM. I, stupidly, only had one day to work on this because I misread the dates. My friend came to town the week of the contest, which I thought was 2 weeks long. It was not. Fortunately, I had spent the week thinking about what I wanted to build. I was handicapped though because I ran out of usage twice during the day, because I do not know how to read dates. What I ended up making was kind of a visual codex of my favorite fantasy world. The Cosmere is the universe Brandon Sanderson has made for his books. How the small models were involved was a lot of fun, but I can't take credit for it because it was Claude's idea. In this universe you have god-like beings called Shards. Each Shard is invested with a personality trait or a virtue. Some examples are Odium, Cultivation, Preservation, and Autonomy. What we did was have you talk to these Shards in a chatbox and you could ask questions about the lore of the Cosmere and it would respond just like the characters. I'll admit this was a pretty niche idea but it was one that really excited me. I did not win but I did have a really good time working on it and I would like to do some more hackathons.

My wife

I would say the most exciting thing about the last couple of months has been the inclusion of my wife. Now, I haven't talked about my wife much but she has always been my rock. She has spent the last several years studying for her Advanced Sommelier. She, unfortunately, failed the test again so she is taking a year off from studying and the one thing she said she wanted to do was help and support me. I was thrilled. I met my wife at a restaurant we both worked at many years ago back in Virginia. A couple years ago we ended up working together again in the restaurant I currently work in. I have always said that if I were to ever open a restaurant my wife is the first person I would want to work with. Not only is she the hardest worker I know, but we complement each other very well in a work environment. We have very different approaches to work but we make a good team. As a huge plus, literally everyone loves my wife. She's very approachable, a very good team player, and a good teacher. She's soft where I'm hard, she's a good front person where I like being in the back. So, I've assigned her the task of helping me start the business. Every time I sit down to try and set up my own LLC I get overwhelmed and freeze. I told her, I'm very good at knocking out courses, learning everything I can, and doing what is instructed of me. So I asked her to figure out what she needs me to do and start setting me tasks to complete. She also asked me to teach her, which I love. It helps me articulate the things I've learned about AI and gives her a better understanding of what we will be doing. There is no one else in the world I would want to do this with and her being by my side gives me a lot of courage and strength.