Agents and Agency
There’s a lot of talk about the capabilities of AI Agents, and a lot of promise on the things that they may be able to achieve. Or not achieve. As well as a lot of excitement, there’s a lot of skepticism, where not direct rejection. The term of AI Agent is still a bit in flux, but it refers to a program that runs independently with a particular goal and it’s capable of taking actions. The instructions to it are either specific to be done right now (for example: “Go to this… Read More
Interacting with GenAI Models
The evolving landscape of AI features a growing interconnectivity between GenAI models and frontend tools. Companies are rapidly developing both open-source and proprietary models, challenging the dominance of established players like OpenAI. While backend models are costly to create, both them and frontends may become commoditised, leading to innovative collaboration through APIs and agents.
My year in Amazon
Well, it was actually just 11 months, but it makes more sense to round it up. This happened a bit over two years ago, which in software developer time feels very far away in the past, so I think it makes sense to talk about it. On 2022 I got an offer to work on Amazon in a sort of unexpected way. They actually contacted me two years before, but at that time I just started a job and didn’t want to move so early. But they came back asking, and I… Read More
Adventures in Vibe Coding
Recently, I’ve been playing around with GenAI tools. Yes, I know I’m late at this point, but these days coding is not as big a part of my day-to-day as it used to (though I still do it regularly), and I have never been too interested in autocomplete tools, which has been the way most of the GenAI for programming has been labelled. The integration also with my regular workflow is not as straightforward. Most of the tools are more based on an IDE, most of what I’ve seen has been mainly… Read More
Insights from ShipItCon 2024
Another year, another ShipItCon! I’ve talked already on the previous instances of the conference. To keep things short, it’s an annual conference based in Dublin that works around the idea of releasing software. Because it’s very open-ended topic that can be approached from lots of angles, and it’s something different from the more stereotypical “conference around a technology”, the talks are quite varied. The organisation always finds good speakers that talk about interesting concepts, from very different points of view, making it quite broad in scope. It’s full of, as the MC… Read More
Notes about ShipItCon 2023
It’s this time of the year again, and another ShipItCon review is due! I’ve talked about the previous instances of this conference, which happens in Dublin, roughly once a year (though the pandemic years it did not happened), and I think is a quite interesting conference, especially as it revolves more about the concept of Software Delivery, in a broad sense. That makes for very different talks, from quite technical ones to other focused more on team work or high concepts. Perhaps because I’m getting older, I appreciate that kind of “high-level”… Read More
Notes about ShipItCon 2022
Well, here we are again. Back to going physically to a place where people are talking for an audience in a structured way. It’s been quite some time. I’m not going to deny that the feeling was a bit weird and that I got a bit (extra) anxious about being in a place with so many people. I’ve talked about a previous ShipItCon in this blog. It is one of my favourite conferences that I’ve been attending. There has been not too many editions, this was just the third one, but all… Read More
Interview in the Network Automation Nerds Podcast
I had a nice chat with Eric Chou in his Network Automation Nerds Podcast about some of the topics that I’ve talked about on my books, like Software Architecture and Automation. We also covered topics like how I started my journey into Python or the difference between different roles. The chat is available in podcast format Here for a direct link to the podcast. and in video Again, here is a direct link to the video. I think there was a lot of interesting topics and I hope you enjoy it!
The Many Challenges of a (Software) Architect
Software Architecture is a fascinating subject. The objective of a solid architecture for a system is to generate an underlying structure that is separates components in a meaningful way, but at the same time, is flexible to allow the system to grow in capacities and functionalities. That it’s performant, reliable and scalable within the required parameters, but it’s as easy to work with as possible. Even worse than that, the work is to do that at the same time that a myriad of other competing priorities are being done, new functionalities are… Read More
Futures and easy parallelisation
Here is one small snippet that it’s very useful when dealing with quick scripts that perform slow tasks and can benefit from running in parallel. Enter the Futures Futures are a convenient abstraction in Python for running tasks in the background. There are also asyncio Futures that can be used with asyncio loops, which work in a similar way, but require an asyncio loop. The Futures we are talking in this post work over regular multitask: threads or processes. The operation is simple, you create an Executor object and submit a task,… Read More
Wrong Side of Memphis 