Reinventing The Wheel
Reinventing the wheel?!
You may wonder, Oh wise one! Why reinvent the wheel when you can just go to Discount Tires?
And I say, Come here, little one, come sit with me, for you have much to learn.
If you are in tech, especially in large tech, then you are no stranger to seeing the same wheel being reinvented by 5 different teams. It usually starts with a promise of changing the whole world, followed by a slightly different name and then compensated by doing literally nothing new! And yet we do it. Now, people reinvent the wheel for many reasons. I myself have seen a bunch -
- Because of the joy of learning (Never stop!)
- Because you can offer the same thing 10x cheaper and 10x better (Hallelujah!)
- Because you live under a
rock and don’t know any better (Go for it! In the words of Captain
Jack Sparrow: Ain’t no shame in that dear … we all gotta … earn a
living ey!) - Because you want to measure the length and girth of your
… you know what with your fellow executives (If you can’t spray pi$$
your ego on everyone, bruh! are you even a VP?)
Recently, I have embarked on a journey to do the same — partly because learning is still one of the few unadulterated happinesses in life, and mostly because I have been living under a rock. Also maybe, just maybe, I am not infallible to the intoxicating charms of marveling at myself.
Once upon a time, being a hands-on engineer was my hobby, my profession, my solace, my thrill. But alas! Why do something that I truly love when instead I can just sit in meetings after meetings dealing with grown a$$ people throwing tantrums because somebody didn’t tell them that they look like a pretty princess that day. Days kept going by. 80% of my awake hours were spent in trying to save products and teams from some of the most incredibly worthless tech executives and the rest in saying “oooossaaah!!” When I opened my eyes, I realized that nearly a decade more has gone by, and the world has come a loooong way. So, on a fateful Monday, it dawned on me that a piña colada is a true magical wonder. Mixed with some contraband rum and paired with cool Atlantic breeze of a Caribbean Island, life is good. And that was it!
It turns out that yours truly is indeed a masochist and is indeed craving for some punishment. Quoting Grey’s Anatomy: “Why do I keep hitting myself with a hammer? ’Cause when I stop, it feels so good.”
Like the rest of the world, I jumped on the ChatGPT bandwagon. MAN! THAT FOMO WAS REAL! Moving on from playing with the web UI, I started poking around the API. As I attempted to write my first “hello world” code after all these years, I felt like my fingers were about to break. Since then, I went from making random API calls that say “tell me a joke” to building a personal Slack bot. Hosted in Azure and powered by an LLM endpoint (See! I’m not even saying ChatGPT anymore… I’m so fancy), I now use this app every day! I even published my first PyPI… saaaay whaaa! Yeah yeah, basic $hit, I know — but it felt like climbing Everest. Some days were nice, but most days I swayed between needing an inhaler, a CPR, a hip-replacement surgery, and a huggy-bear (sometimes not even in the same order).
I discovered that apparently there are more people on a similar boat, and for some of them getting started is even harder. I started writing down the “new” things I learned every day so that one day when I feel like an attention ho, I can share with some poor soul. And you will be glad to know that the auspicious day has arrived (it sounds much better when you say it in King Julien’s voice).
This is my journey, my reinvention of the wheel. I will tell you all about it. Because after all if you don’t post it on social media, is it even real? In other words, this is a very long way of saying I will be writing some poorly phrased blogs mostly about trivial things. Whether you actually decide to read it or not — do the social media thing: like, share, and comment “you is smart… you is kind… you is beautiful.”
And yes, I just wrote a blog saying I will be writing a blog. But you spent the time reading it, the time you could have spent catching up on your favorite episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. HA HA! IN YO’ FACE! Is Grey’s Anatomy still a thing? Back in my golden days, that used to be the shhiiieeet.
[Credits: All images were generated by DALL-E/ChatGPT 4.0. To OpenAI team — I LOVE YOU!]
Same $hit Somewhere Else
If you are trying find an excuse to read this exact same thing in YET ANOTHER platform here is one: Tax season is approaching. Its either this or doing taxes. I know my pick!
