aadv1k's comments

Yeah, I think that's a fair point. I mean, we have SRE, which is a whole set of skillsets in itself and it does involve around maintaining "CRUD-apps"; Heck there is the cybersec industry as well, ensuring CRUD-apps aren't exploited. My para was certainly a bit more 2D, I was speaking more from what I might benefit learning now, to get a job, say end of 2026. I have observed many roles like SRE etc, require certain experience which is hard to get by working on your own projects without much traction; similiar case for cybersec but to a lesser extent.

It's this paradox where in order to become a senior engineer, you must get hired as a junior engineer, to learn and observe how production software works, but that is pretty hard these days.

This is less of a prediction, more of how I see this industry progressing.

I really feel "web dev" is going to get highly commoditized by GenAI, by web dev I mean 99% of building CRUD-adjacent apps, we are already seeing it now with tools like Claude Code etc, this pipeline is just going to get more refined, with tigther testing feedback loops, PR-workflows and a CI/CD deployment pipeline which the GenAI will control. This might be amplified by the fact the sheer amount of tested, high quality there is in the JavaScript-ecosystem for the AI to train on and learn from.

Software engineering in general will tend more systems and embedded software, fields where GenAI can't perform well or can't be trusted to produce good code (I am thinking writing device drivers, or maintainence of legacy C applications) as well as deep research fields. The average software engineering job might be either that of a "technical product manager", or "researcher" or "low-level systems expert"

That's just what I feel. Honestly, I am probably much younger an others on this forum, so I haven't really seen this industry "evolve" this is just how it looks to me now. I believe there was a time in the early 2010s where there was a boom of this "generalist developer" where if you knew your JavaScript-ecosystem (or App Dev ecosystem for that matter) pretty well, you could land a pretty decent job right out of college, or without a college degree at all.

To me, at this stage the world in general needs software engineers who understand the "world" if that makes sense (in terms of physics, mathematics), or who have a really good mental model of computation. Better put, software engineering will become a tool in the larger context of research & development of tech that advance humanity.

Advent of code is such a fantastic event. I am honestly glad it's 12 days this year, primarily because I would only ever get to day 13 or 14 before it would take me an entire day to finish the puzzles! This would be my fourth year doing AoC. Looking forward to it :)

I plan on doing this year in C++ because I have never worked with it and AoC is always a good excuse to learn a new language. My college exams just got over, so I have a ton of free time.

Previous attempts:

- in Lua https://github.com/Aadv1k/AdventOfLua2021

- in C https://github.com/Aadv1k/AdventOfC2022

- in Go https://github.com/Aadv1k/AdventOfGo2023

really hope I can get all the stars this time...Cheers, and Merry Cristmas!

Hey, thanks for your comment :) I had a look at your blog, it's looks really useful and high quality! I will go through it with vim open on the side and a nice coffee

Yeah and I'd agree with your point. One BIG critique I have for my own 2-year-past code was that I did not know how to do dynamic heap allocation very well, hence you may have seen everything is stack allocated lol

Particularly egrigeous example:

  typedef struct ListingItem {
    char lTitle[CONFIG_MAX_PATH_SIZE];
    char lDate[CONFIG_MAX_PATH_SIZE];
    char lContent[CONFIG_MAX_FILE_SIZE];
    char lPath[CONFIG_MAX_PATH_SIZE];
    int lOrder;
  }  ListingItem;

(I had read "clean code" by uncle bob at the time, so I was trying to emulate clean code I saw in the book. Needless to say, pretty good example of the nuance needed when writing clean code haha)

So with the V3 release, I am re-writing the markdown compiler for instance, and being a bit more mindful of the structure

Example: https://github.com/Aadv1k/kevlar/blob/markdown-compiler-rewr...

I think once I am done I will create a separate "Show HN" post to get valuable feedback (like this one!) from smarter folks than me. Once again, thanks for the fantastic blog :) will be sure to go through it

Cheers!

About 2 years back I began working on a very simple markdown compiler, it was “immediate” in that it would consume markdown and immediately spit html. That project turned into a whole static site generator called Kevlar — https://github.com/aadv1k/kevlar

Entirely built from scratch in C without any dependencies. Now I wrote this code when I was 16, so many memory leaks and generally issues that I wanted to rectify and begin using third project for my own blog (currently old version is used — https://aadvikpandey.com)

The Kevlar v3 (https://github.com/aadv1k/kevlar/tree/kevlar-v3) here is all that it includes; more spec compliant markdown AST-based parsing; A better .ini config parser (right now it’s literally strtok on ‘=‘ and generally very hacky) as well as name spacing; more powerful templating tags like IF, FOR with lisp-like configuration

Of course staying true to the spirit of “from scratch” :)

Honestly I did scope creeped a little since I mainly wanted to fix a memory leaks issue in the markdown compiler lol; anyway I will share it once it gets completed on hacker news :)

This is very useful, I was unable to find a simple, clean implementation of the harris corner algorithm, this might help. Appreciate it!

Hey this is great! Thank you :)

Hey, this is great :) I attempted to do something similar a while back https://github.com/aadv1k/deimos basically trying to build many of OpenCV's functions from scratch in C from first principles, though I was using stb for handling the images. I ended up putting the project on hold, primarily because I lost interest in computer vision at the time.

For a while I went deep into OCR, and built a rather rudimentary stroke width transform (https://github.com/aadv1k/swt.h) but again, the results were very hit or miss, likely because I never took the time to understand the logic behind why these functions would work.

1) Optimise many of the functions (a lot of room to use GPU, multi-threading and what not!). 2) Add new functions and improve the existing edge detection ones

I would love to know of a good resource for computer vision, the various algorithms, optimisation techniques etc. Thanks for sharing this project! Cheers

I've been thinking about AI-assisted development for a while; I've tried out Claude's pro plan, Gemini Pro and many "top models" and I must say, this is going to create a chasm for junior/intermediate developers like myself, senior engineers reached to the point they are through deliberate practice-- interrogating code, making and breaking assertions, reading through the documentation or actually comprehending the code through the debugger or mental models. I don't "need" to do any of this. I can have an AI just spoon-feed me a large codebase in "ELI5" language, I can ask an AI about the best practices, I can have an AI look something up for me, synthesize it and wrap it up nicely for my mind to consume (equivalent to how hyper-processed junk food isn't good for our bodies either)

It's intellectual slop. It will get the job done (atleast for a while) but without the actual growth that comes along with it. When I use an AI to one-shot a "small one-off script" I don't learn anything from it (when as a relatively new developer I SHOULD be learning something from it) And this is unlike stack overflow or googling becuase you can turn off your mind, just become one of those drones from Wall-E.

I make a point to avoid using any AI for coding (even for looking things up) when working on personal projects, at the cost of "productivty" and "efficiency" , but I get to retain my humanity and soul in programming.

Sorry if this sounds cheesy, it's just I care deeply about code craftsmanship from my end, to see that skill be diminished to an random number generator? Yeah No.