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AI has already replaced junior and mid-level developers. 🚫

Wrong.

There has never been a better time to start a career in software. Here’s why 👇

1. 📚 Resources have never been better - courses, tutorials, and tools are at their peak after 20+ years of evolution.
2. 🤖 You have a 24/7 private tutor - in any topic, any language, any framework (yes, I mean ChatGPT).
3. 💻 Endless paths to explore - frontend, backend, mobile, data, gaming - all accessible if you’re curious and motivated.

Yes, the landscape is changing - fewer internships, tighter competition. But if you’re passionate about building, solving problems, and creating through code, the best time to start is right now. 🚀

💬 Feeling lost about where to start? Send me a message - I’m happy to offer a free consultation to help you get started.

Originally posted on LinkedIn.

Developers aren’t just adapting to AI - we’re grieving. Software development has changed forever, and that’s a kind of loss. Each of us goes through the 5 stages in our own way 👇

🩶 Stage 1 - Denial

• “It’s just another hype cycle.”
• “We had LLMs in the 1950s too.”
• “My job is way too creative for AI.”

🔥 Stage 2 - Anger

• “I write better code than this thing.”
• “It hallucinates!”
• “Stop suggesting console.log()!”

🤝 Stage 3 - Bargaining

• “Maybe I’ll just use it for boilerplate.”
• “It’s OK as long as it’s free.”
• “If I supervise it closely, it’s basically still my code.”

😞 Stage 4 - Depression

• “I can’t believe I’m installing the Copilot extension.”
• “What if my PR gets reviewed by a bot next?”
• “It writes faster than me — and doesn’t complain about Jira.”

🧘 Stage 5 - Acceptance

• “Let me enable this MCP for my emails.”
• “I just asked my AI to write my onboarding doc.”
• “Remember when we thought Stack Overflow was cheating?”
• “Is there an auto-accept option somewhere in settings?”

Any of this sound familiar? Where are you in the five stages right now? 👇

Originally posted on LinkedIn.

Are you into data analytics? 🗃️

Then if you haven’t heard of DuckDB, you’re missing out BIG TIME! This bad boy is the newest game-changer in the field. If you haven’t checked it out yet - omg, saddle up!

Here’s what I love about it:

1. Ridiculously easy CSV ingestion and joins

SELECT *
FROM read_csv_auto('/Users/aston/company.csv') c
JOIN read_csv_auto('/Users/aston/company_revenue.csv') cr
  ON c."Company Name Column" ILIKE cr."Some Other Column";

And BAM! You’ve got your joined dataset.

2. Serverless simplicity

Your database is literally just a file on your machine. Open it in DBeaver and use it like any other DB server — no setup, no daemon, no fuss. You don’t even need to install a binary! (But if you want to, it’s in basically every package manager.)

3. Blazing fast

Joins, aggregations, gigabytes of data - no sweat. Forget uploading to a remote PostgreSQL server - DuckDB flies circles around Postgres and SQLite for analytics.

Give it a go - once you go DuckDB, you never go back.

(Okay, maybe not as catchy as “once you go Mac,” but you get the idea 😎)

Originally posted on LinkedIn.

What do I want? 🤔

It’s a question I’ve asked myself countless times - and one that others have asked me just as often.

For years, my answer was confident: “Of course I know what I want.” Then one day, it shifted to: “Wait… do I actually know?”

Over the past 20 years, I’ve tried different ways to find that answer. Here are 7 strategies that helped me figure it out - maybe they’ll help you too.

1. Career Break

I took two career breaks - each one deeply transformative in its own way. During my second break, I tried streaming PUBG, one of the fastest-growing games at the time. It didn’t take long to realize: being on camera wasn’t for me. But that clarity was gold.

2. Travel and Have Fun

In 2014, I packed up my life into storage, bought a one-way ticket to Asia, and spent three months exploring. No plans, no pressure - just doing the things I’d always dreamed of. It was freedom, pure and simple.

3. Changing Companies & Roles

Fifteen years ago, I dreamed of becoming a manager — it looked cool, important, and like the next step beyond being “just the tech guy.” The path turned out to be the hardest one I’ve ever taken, full of challenges I never saw coming.

4. Study

In 2012, I was bored with my job and felt drawn to psychology. Instead of overthinking it, I went back to school for a second master’s degree - and ended up becoming a published scientist.

5. Personal Projects

While my friends were out partying, I often spent nights and weekends building passion projects. Those projects became my playground for learning - about networking, business, and the startup mindset.

6. Books & Self-Education

There’s a book for almost everything in life. Over the years, learning from the best through books has been one of my biggest advantages - it’s like having mentors on every shelf.

7. Counselling & Psychotherapy

I’ve spent six years in therapy and therapy training - facing my inner demons and learning to understand myself. That inner work gave me the courage to step out of my comfort zone and try all six strategies before this one.

Originally posted on LinkedIn.

🚀 When you need to make small changes to existing code, here’s a pro tip 👇

❌ Don’t do this: Try to describe all the changes in a long prompt - it’s error-prone and the AI may misunderstand the context. You’ll end up trying and failing multiple times. 😩

✅ Do this instead: Go through your code and add clear TODO comments, like:

// TODO: Add request validation to this endpoint
// TODO: Make this method take an extra parameter
// TODO: Refactor this to use async APIs

Then use a prompt like:

Go through the code and collect all TODO items, then for each item implement the changes and update the tests.

🎯 Why it works:

• The AI has extra context right in the code
• You get more predictable and accurate changes

Try it out - it’s a simple shift that makes a huge difference in codegen workflows. 💪

👇 Let me know your experiences or tricks in the comments!

Originally posted on LinkedIn.

If you ever find yourself reading this page - which you definitely aren’t supposed to, because who reads the very first post of a blog anyway? - please send me an email with just the words hello, world in the body, and I’ll invite you for a coffee somewhere convenient. We can chat.

And thanks for reading. I really appreciate it.

Fast forward ten or twenty years from now, I hope to find this post and let it fill me with the warm glow of nostalgia - reminiscing about all the great times I had on this site, writing these articles.

But to write something of actual value: I plan to cover a lot of ground here, mostly tech, with a focus on the human side. And AI. Or whatever the latest trend happens to be.

Hopefully not jQuery and Internet Explorer bugs anymore.

Onwards!