This week, Nick, an instructor of ours at NBCC had a former colleague come in to speak with us. They worked together back in the early 2000’s, so it was nice to see that they had kept in touch after all those years.
Addison works for an AI company and gave us a breakdown of the projects she spends time on. She maps workflows for call centers. Even she joked about how it wasn’t the most enthralling of subjects, but something that paid the bills.
What I realised after listening to her is that it all comes back to just putting pieces together and making them work. That’s how life works and it often times involves a lot of trial and error.
I also gleaned some insight from the novel problems that she ran into. She told us how she came up with novel solutions to resolve problems with the AI systems that haven’t been mapped out yet. This to me is what being on the bleeding edge looks like.
She said the greatest compliment you can receive as a programmer, is another programmer stealing your idea to implement within their own project. This means that they see value in your idea but weren’t able to make it work themselves.
She told us you won’t know what coding languages you’ll be working with after school. You simply have to be ready to: “Just do it and figure it out. That’s how life works”.
This also puts the process of studying in my current role as a student into perspective. It’s about the end it serves, not status gained. As a result I’m pivoting my focus to working well with code as opposed to knowing the languages thoroughly. I’m going to focus my learning things like reading code, code comprehension, and solid debugging skills. Simply building small projects from scratch that sit idle once done can only get you so far in your coding journey.
Peter Linton
Software Developer
