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Joel Buckingham

POCs from an Engineer's Perspective

POCs From an Engineer’s Perspective

Joel Buckingham Articles, Consulting, Soft Skills Leave a Comment

In enterprise software development, one type of project stands out from most others – a Proof of Concept. At times, you may come across planning or technical questions that have far-reaching consequences and no clear or easy answer. In these cases, it can be a good idea to spend a small amount of time and resources to build either a single example project or even a series of similar projects using various languages or libraries to determine what works and what does not. These kinds of projects are called Proof of Concepts (or POCs).

Can AI Write Code

Can AI Write Code Now?

Joel Buckingham AI, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools Leave a Comment

The topic of AI seems to be everywhere lately. At this point, I’ve consumed many hours of content regarding what it is and how it’s going to change the world… whether we want it to or not. However, I haven’t actually developed much code with it.

I’ve been writing code in some form since the early 2000s, but I have almost no practical experience with AI as used for development. Sure, I understand the basics, and I have a personal subscription to Chat GPT. But besides a couple of fun pictures that I’ve created of two of my past dogs that were never alive at the same time, I’ve not had much experience using it for code.

In this article, I’m going to test Chat GPT to see how much I can accomplish while writing as little actual code as possible.

Macros: To Code or Not to Code

Joel Buckingham Articles, Development Technologies & Tools Leave a Comment

No matter what project I find myself working on, it seems like I have a batch of actions I need to sift through to find all the instances of some conditions and then do something with each instance found at least once a week. You only need to do it once and then move on, so buying a tool or writing some fancy code to handle it seems like overkill. This is where text editors with macro recording functionality can save the day, or at least a few hours of the day.

In this blog, I’ll share a practical use case for macros. I’ll walk you through the example, and then we’ll dive into what it looks like to use macros. I hope that this demonstrates the value and versatility of adding macros to your programming tool belt.