Last week I was helping a friend of mine to get one of his new apps off the ground. I can’t speak much about it at the moment, other than like most apps nowadays it has some AI sprinkled over it. Ok, maybe a bit maybe more just a bit – depends on the way you look at it, I suppose. There is a Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) hiding somewhere in most of the AI apps. RAG is still all the RAGe – it even has its own Wikipedia page now! I’m not sure if anyone is tracking how fast a term...| Cybernetist
Intro Last week I was catching up with one of my best mates after a long while. He is a well-recognised industry expert who also runs a successful cybersecurity consultancy. Though we had a lot of other things to catch up on, inevitably, our conversation led to AI, LLMs and their (cyber)security implications. I’ve spent the last couple of months working for early-stage startups building LLM (Large Language Model) apps, as well as hacking on various silly side projects which involved interac...| Cybernetist
Throughout my career, I’ve learnt, usually the hard way, the importance of getting the foundations of whatever I was working on right. Or at least as right as possible. I learnt how fundamental it is for setting your project — and by proxy, your team — up for success. I’d argue it’s one of the most important things you should pay attention to. Getting the basics right is notoriously hard due to the inevitability of changing requirements, external factors, etc.| Cybernetist
I have been aware of Cuelang (CUE) pretty much since the early stages of its development. It always seemed to me the language had the potential to solve a lot of problems in the ocean of YAML which we found ourselves drowning in the Cloud Native ecosystem. CUE excels in validating data against strictly defined schemas and is equally capable of generating code for data models from them. These are wonderful features, though I hadn’t found the perfect application for them in any of the project...| Cybernetist
This blog post is a collection of advice or rules I’ve learnt to live by as a software engineer. It’s an accumulation of experiences I’ve gained through working for software organizations of various sizes. Most of the advice in this post is aimed at software engineers, but some may be applicable to other roles and industries. Understand the problems you are solving This isn’t a revolutionary idea. But the very sad reality of life is that it still hasn’t been internalised by so many ...| Cybernetist
UPDATE: 4th January, The way out of burnout The beginning of 2021 marked the point when some of us were bracing with hope for the year that lied ahead. The year that we hoped to be “better” than the one that we were leaving behind. Little did we know we should have braced for impact instead. For me personally, if 2020 was bad enough then 2021 wiped the last shreds of whatever mental resilience or energy I had left in me.| Cybernetist