I'm sure you've heard the term AI by now. AI is short for Artificial Intelligence. In summary, AI is a broad field that tries to simulate human intelligence in machines. Getting machines to think like humans and mimic their actions. Any machine that exhibits traits associated with a human mind, such as learning and problem-solving can be considered Artificial Intelligence.

While I always heard about AI in school and in the general public, I first heard about Chat GPT when it burst out on the scene publicly earlier this year. I'm writing this in November 2023 and Chat GPT already feels like it's been around for years. It says here that Chat was released in November 2022. My Chat history shows the earliest prompts from March 2022. I can't remember if this was truly my first experience with Chat GPT, all I can say is this technology changed my life as a developer.

There are thousands of AI applications out there now, but I'll talk about the one I've personally used and that works for me. I don't use a whole lot of different tools because I can get most of all I need AI from Open AI tools. Just a personal preference for now. If it's not broken ..

My Degree

I grew up in Lagos Nigeria, and while I was a fairly tech-savvy teenager, I never really had any experience with code until I started my degree at the University of Manitoba. I remember taking the first computer science course and getting an A+, only to take the second, COMP 1020 Introductory Computer Science 2 and completely failing it. My first A+ taught me that I could do this and I could love it, my subsequent failures in school made me doubt myself and quite frankly put me through hell mentally. I doubted my self-worth, regretted all the resources I was wasting, and was ready to quit. I pulled through my degree only by the Grace of God. The hard work, sleepless nights, and God-sent friends were just a by-product of said grace.

Early Career

While the degree was fairly challenging, I never forgot my first A+. Graduating allowed me to experience coding on my own terms. I started working on this portfolio, started learning HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and building projects I could connect to. Things were still not very easy as there was so much information on the internet. I went down the tutorial rabbit hole. YouTube videos, blogs, paid courses, documentation, etc. I started this blog to display those projects and document my learning and here we are.

I started my job about a year and a half ago, and this was my first developer job. I got this job after being unsuccessful with other incubators in multiple languages and other companies. I wasn't sure what language I was going to get my first job in, so I focused on getting better with the languages I was exposed to in school. Java was the language I was most comfortable with out of school. I tried to build Java projects while I learned Javascript on the side. All by searching stuff up on Google. Fast forward to today and my learning is just really ramping up.

Today

Everything prior to this section was pre-Chat GPT. Learning was extremely slow and draining for me. These days, Chat GPT is my coding assistant. I say coding assistant because that's how I can best describe its use case in my life. Chat plays more of a teacher-assistant role at this stage in my life. There's so much information I still don't fully understand, but I have learned more about software development this year alone than I have in the 7-8 years I have been learning. That's also attributed to having actual industry experience. Here are the ways Chat GPT quickens my learning

• I ask Chat technical questions I have about concepts I encounter at work and during personal time. I do not waste time asking things like "What is Onion Architecture?" very frequently

• I discuss my design decisions with Chat. Say I want to start a project ASAP, I would use Chat to scope the amount of work needed to design it in the quickest most sensible, and easy-to-understand way

• I ask Chat to generate code for me. I find this more useful for my personal projects as I don't have any restrictions as to what to feed it as it is all my stuff. This helps me quicken the process of figuring out the exact syntax to make something work. And I can become more familiar with multiple languages quickly

• I ask Chat to explain existing code to me. Reading code is a skill that I figured was more important than writing code. Chat has quickened my ability to read and understand code even though it may be written in a language that I'm not familiar with.

• I use it to generate content like everyone else. This blog is not AI-generated, but I have a lot of AI-generated content that I use to keep productivity and output up in my life

Looking Ahead

While these are the ways I have found Chat GPT and AI to be useful to me, I can't imagine what other people are using it for. I will talk about specific ongoing AI projects in their own blog posts, but in the future, I would still love to use it to

• Launch my coding boot camp, which is in the works right now

• Automate my interaction with AI

• Generate more human-loved AI content