I started this blog with the intention of documenting the things that I was working on during the year I took off of work to learn new things. My hope was that I would produce artifacts in the form of completed projects and blog posts describing them.

I had a couple of projects that I worked on that didn't work out, either because of poor upfront choices or limitations in the tools I used. Even those should have led to blog posts. For example: don't create an API Gateway project and Lambdas in the console and then try to import them into terraform, define them in terraform and then build them.

The real problem was that I got caught up in the trap of spending too much time reading about things, studying for tests, and not enough time building projects. From the start, I was thinking about preparing for my next job, and building credentials. The last 2 certifications I got, TensorFlow and Kubernetes were both practical exams, so preparing required working with the technology, but it still isn't the same as working on actual projects.

What's changed

A week ago, I started a new job. Now preparing for a next job is very hypothetical. My tech learning is going to have 2 foci. The first is going to be getting better at the details of my current job (I though I knew docker, but I have never seen a multi-stage dockerfile before!). The second is what interests me most: AI.

Maybe it is a little ambitious to say that I am focusing on AI, since my thoughts on the topic are so unfocused. I want to use chat-gpt to build things. I want to build things that use chat-gpt. I want to use chat-gpt as a tutor as I try and learn things. I am really interested in reinforcement learning, but I really don't know where to start.

I am not sure what blog posts are going to come out of either the work focus or the AI focus, but I do hope to do a better job of recording things.