A bit late with writing an update this month. Partly because I started a new job at the end of March, so I’d been focusing on things for that.
I’ve spent pretty much my entire career working for small companies, this time I’ve joined a large multi-national. So far it’s been both as expected and better than expected. I’ve had some troubles getting setup properly, things like missing permissions on my accounts and out of date on-boarding documentation and being provisioned the wrong laptop. But on the plus side I’ve managed to get code, run code and start contributing with 2 weeks. That might not sound like much but I was expecting it to take longer.
I’m having to figure out MacOs again, it’s been 10ish years since I last used a Mac. It’s going slow, but at least I’ve got a shell I can use and brew is used in the organisation so I’m sure I’ll get along. The organisation also defaults to vscode, which as a neovim user is odd. I immediately installed the vim extension, so at least I can navigate.
Programming 🔗
This new job is working with AI. I’m ambivalent towards AI at the moment, I’m not sure if it’s overall good or bad. I figured what better way to figure that out than work with it. That means I’ll be helping to build agents and the like for internal business functions. So I did spend a bit of time in March trying to get my head round what MCP and LangChain were. So a little bit of python to try some examples, not sure I really understand it. But I always find it better to work with actual working examples to get my head around things, so we’ll see.
I’ve still not used AI myself when coding though. Maybe one day I will, I know the company has Claude but I’m not sure if it’s generally available.
I did also do some more go. I’ve been doing the odd challenge from Coding Challenges for fun and learning. This time I did the wc challenge. That was fun and allowed me to figure out some more ways to do things in go, working with strings and buffers.
Cycling 🔗
I went out and did a ride in the Cairngorms, taking advantage of some nice weather and the time off. It was a nice ride, but I probably both under-estimated the route and over-estimated my fitness. I’d planned a 39km route to Loch Eanaich and back to the car. I fell short, I didn’t make the loch and only managed 33km. I turned back at a river crossing, the spring waters and my tiredness made me less confident on the stones at the crossing. So rather than falling in I had some lunch and started the return. It was only my second ride of the year, so still getting the legs used to riding after a few months off. It was a good ride though, scenery was lovely and the route was nice.