After CompSci

It’s the end of December, either the you are out of office for the holidays or you are the last remaining guard holding down the fort. Either way it’s a great time to sneak in some learning, tinkering or those pesky tech debt fixes that you haven’t been able to yet.

I particularly like this time of the year as there’s more of the times in between when you can sneak thirty minutes or an hour to try to make something better or learn. You can start looking at a new framework that you are interested in. Take a stab at a mvp for a side project or test out using a new protocol or architecture for an app. You can fix up that build pipeline in a separate branch or take care of those annoying flakey tests. If it’s the later two I hope you have tried to bring it up with your team and manager and get it fixed during standard hours though.

This year during this time of year I am on parental leave and there hasn’t been too much time on the keyboard. In this case though it is good, it’s really nice to have some time to just focus on the family and ensuring that the new little one is integrating into the family well. Please also use this as a reminder to take your parental leave if that time comes for you in life. It is time that you won’t ever get back and that you will miss if you don’t use it.

There has been a little bit of time though for tinkering later in the evening or early in the mornings. I’ve taken this time to start diving into the world of AI Agents. I think that in the next few years that something big will come out of this and that we are really early on a new wave. I am working through some of the examples with the pydantic AI library and modifying some of them for a new site on chickens. It’s not currently live but it will be at eggexplorer.com. On top of that I am also poking around at agent.ai as I think there is going to be an app store equivalent for the new ai agents that are created.

Take this time before and after the new year to get some rest and reflect a bit. It’s a great time to plan out what you want to do next year and also get some of the time in to learn something new. Happy Building!