With the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, there has never been a better time to produce digital products so quickly and with so little expertise. Artificial intelligence has enabled non-technical thinkers to create products with their imagination and ship them to production. As programmers, we are inherently curious about how things work and why. After all, what we do is program, not command and verify. Artificial intelligence has robbed us of the ability to be curious and, inevitably, skipped the learning journey.

So, a couple of weeks ago, I started receiving numerous email notifications for people signing up for my newsletter. Initially, I thought nothing of it. Perhaps my LinkedIn profile got a few extra views for whatever reason.

I recently embarked on a journey to create a to-do list to manage shopping lists between my wife and me. As part of managing a family, it is important for my wife and me to be able to collaborate on shopping lists to ensure we can effectively purchase everything we need to make the family function.

Let me take you through my journey of looking for a software engineering job this year. Although it was long and arduous, I got a lot out of it, including sharpening my technical skills, refreshing my data structures and algorithms, learning system design from the ground up, reflecting on my past jobs, what my behavioural flaws are, where I am at in my career and what I am looking for in my future job.

I have some interesting logic on my Blog Posts page that animates a Blog Post card onto the screen upon being visible to the user. The intended effect I required was for the Blog Post cards to animate into the screen one after another. This is not an easy task as Blog Post cards are unaware of what row they sit in, or even what index they are (and nor should they). They should be agnostic as to whether they are rendered in a list, grid or as a singular entity. This is one of the keys to building reusable components.

To get more eyeballs on my blog posts, I decided my website needed a newsletter feature to notify readers when a new blog post was published. I pondered using a service such as MailChimp but did the most developer thing possible. I rolled my own. Don't get me wrong, there are many advantages of using a tried and tested platform to handle my newsletter but what fun would that be? Not to mention, I would get zero learning experience from doing that.