On Trying Harder This Year

I remember when I completed 18 hours of coding with barely a 30-minute break in 2021. I ate and drank where I sat. I can’t remember if this was for an interview take-home or for deliverables at work. But it was just one of the many moments where I would be so focused on work and lock out the outside world. The early stage of my career was mostly like this — hard, grueling hours, and it was worth it. I was able to level up very fast and leverage my new learnings into finding better jobs or building side projects that demonstrated my knowledge. Which is why, after a slight period of lull and stability brought on by a decent job and raising a family, I believe I need to go as hard as I can this year once again.

There is an opportunity in the winds with the shape LLMs and ‘AI’ is taking. And I truly believe it’s a great time to leverage this technology in my career and become a domain expert as I have done with so many languages and frameworks in the past. I can proudly say I am likely one of the first people who started with ChatGPT when it was launched in 2022. I started using it when it was little more than a glorified autocomplete in VS Code. We have come a long way since then. With apps like Cursor and Claude Code now (which I use daily), there’s so much that can now be achieved with these agents. As the industry is still experimenting and trying to figure out what sticks, there’s been so many features/standards being introduced that it’s can be difficult to use them all at work (especially if you are putting in ~10 hours daily Monday to Friday).

This is where I believe I need to try and go harder. Sure, I have a family now, and I have a toddler daughter who demands the attention of her parents. But I believe I can squeeze in hours here and there to keep myself up to date, learn new standards that are being introduced (MCP, Sub Agents, HITL, etc). Of course, not all these would stick around, but my learnings would surely make me a better engineer. I also plan to harden my system design knowledge as I believe this would be a differentiator as LLMs are getting good at one-shotting greenfield projects. It will be hard, but the theme for this year is to try harder and bet on myself. Which is why I have also decided to get serious with my technical and personal writing again. I have been stuck in a rut for so long where I have failed to document my learnings, little technical tweaks I discovered that could be of help to others, and my Ws and Ls. I am changing that this year and would be documenting more of my progress personally and professionally.

In 2020, still in the early stage of my career, I once wrote a script that was running locally on my machine to send a love quote to my then-girlfriend (now wife) every morning. If I remember correctly, it was my way of learning how cron jobs worked and figuring out nodemailer and email services. And she did love receiving those notes. This was pre-LLM/ChatGPT era so I think I was scraping google or some page to find those quotes randomly. I think I lost the code when I changed my machine then. My wife has requested for her cute little quotes multiple times in the past 4 years, and I have always put it off. If I had tried harder, I would surely have built some automation to do this in little to no time. Well, I tried a little harder on the third day of the new year and built a cute little app currently at Couples Daily in about 3 hours with Antigravity(Gemini and Opus) and Cursor(Opus and Composer). There might be a few people out there who may love the idea of this. I hope it brings you as much joy as it brings my wife. Be aware that the invite email could be in your partner's spam as I have not 'finessed' this application

Stay with me on my journey as I share my learnings and progress this year. Maybe I will make up for the 'lost years' and write about some of my past growth and progress.

Much love, Ibrahim