What to do with this newsletter?

For a brief moment of boredom, I created this newsletter for no particular reason, mainly a. I am a Software Engineer, b. I love products and build stuff, c. I really enjoy or just having conversation related to this topic. Hence I created this newsletter on a whimp, let's see how far this can go.

Since this first post, I don't know what to write, how about recap on the current situation of the SWE industry ? Let's go then.

For the last 5 years, software in general growed at a relatively steady pace - by steady i meant there are handful of famous frameworks / library for you to choose, especially when you're working for an enterprise / medium-big size company, the tech stack just bounce around with these following name (MERN, Java / Spring, React.JS / Next.JS, PHP / Laravel, Python / Dijango, Ruby on rails, ...) you get what i mean. Then the obvious choice during your career, you pick one tech stack, you master it, then you're good to go.

But now the landscape completely changed, with the first introduction of ChatGPT from OpenAI, then Claude, Gemini and a bazzillion more of these application of LLMs. Then you can learn pretty much anything at a high pace, depending on how much your brain can handle, the sky is the limit here.

I was joking around with my friend back in the days "I am a Full Stack Engineer, "Full Stackoverflow Engineer" you know wink wink" but now I have to change the jokes to "Full Stacked with AI Engineer" lmfao.

Enough of the fun joking around, we've experienced a lot of changes for the last 5 years

• 2020 - We see React.JS from Meta dominates the web application buildling landscape, from basically a MVP model to a component-based way to develop your frontend application
• 2021 - The clouds boom, when CPUs & GPUs are reaching the threshold of scaling to infinity, strong super computers, people go towards Cloud Native, ditch on-prem & baremetal machines to go to the cloud like AWS & GCP to save cost and faster delivery. Now cloud is the new hot topic
• 2022 - We see a lot of standardizing here and glismes of innovation, Copilot rolled out beta version - it was wonky back in the days. OpenAPI Specs, Swagger v3 and more pretty boring year to be honest, nothing new here or my knowledge 404 not found at this period, oh ye crypto was booming at this time of year.
• 2023 - Now we're talking, Copilot is live here but still needs improvement, everybody deploy on Vercel, Next.JS, React Server component, in Backend you have Go which came into the picture, Kubernetes, IaC, Gitops, now people start to talk about DDD, microservices, again, yay new Java Framework: Quarkus
• 2024: The holy year of GPT, this is the boom, your wife, your kids, even your neighbors are talking about GPTs. Everywhere you go, just use GPT, Prompt Engineering, Diffusions, and AI start to move into your day-to-day work life, as for me, I just stopped searching Stackoverflow for fixes, just ask GPT 😂.
• 2025 - May: As of speaking GPT is on steroid, Nvidia keeps pumping out new GPU and GPT just growing and growing, SWE isn't the same any more. You can learn a programming language, code, search, do anything relatively easy, you don't have to pay the price of days of debugging and scoure the internet for information anymore. Tools like Cursor, Copilot, ChatGPT, Notebook LLMs, Gemini, AI TTS, Img gen, n8n, ...

For me with just 5 years in the market, I find these period quite exciting, it is the best moment for you to ever live, you can visualize your idea, test it, and see results in just days.

But what now? For SWEs I think the status quo has been broken. You don't need a specialist in that programming language any more. But rather things will shift to:

• Domain specific knowledge (Banking, Security, ...)
• Design first approach (You think of the design, before you implement, or at least now, the AI will do the implementation for you if you have a really good design)
• Broad knowledge with deep understanding of the core of being a SWE (DSA, Architectures, System design, Product mindset, ...)
• AI Tooling (Your tools will be your most valuable asset coming into the future)
• Human to human interactions, remote or onsite, this is the key skills going to the future, still your coworkers are still human.
• Automate your day-to-day operations (Testing, scripting, ...)

With that I think we're good & well prepare to the future, I have a strong believe that AI isn't here to replace us, but rather improve us, to break your limitations and level the playing field.

What a great time to be alive.

Some endings for my first post, I'm really don't know what I am doing, just random stuff, if you have any topics that might interested you, just put down the comments, if you want to discuss stuff and share the same passion of SWE, feel free to comment also I will do long & late night discussion with you xD!

Best.