It's time for another art image from your trusty editor. I like to call this the Pile of Possibility: pencils, pens, paint, Legos and Crayons. These are all the tools and materials capable of endless artistic possibilities.
The tools and materials of the software developer consist of code, compilers, text editors, and, every so often, a carefully chosen icon. And just like art materials, they're capable of endless possibilities.
I think the realm of the possible is what makes being a software developer so amazing. We take raw ideas, transform them into designs and code, and, with any luck, a functioning application. I love the phone calls from teammates or clients where they say, “Hey Rod we need to do X - how would you tackle this?” “Holy cool idea, Batman!” I answer in my Robin voice. “Let me take a look.”
Many years ago, I was having a discussion with a client just like the one above. Here's how it went: “Hey Rod we need to replace our call center scripting app with something more extendable and maintainable. Have any ideas?” My reply: “Oh cool, I just read about a feature in the latest .NET Framework. Here, we can take our C# code and embed it into Microsoft Word documents. This might work.” The client replied “That makes sense because our call center managers use Word for this anyhow. Let's give that a try.” Music to my ears. I went to work.
I decided to create a small application using legendary developer Ward Cunningham's philosophy: “The Simplest Thing That Can Possibly Work”. I added a Smart Tag that opened a .NET WinForms with a text field and a button. This form added the contents of the text field to the document as well and then saved that content internally so that it could be retrieved later. That's it: short, sweet, and to the point.
Lo and behold, it worked. I scheduled a call with the client and showed my results. They were happy and we went to work on the real application. This simple proof of concept resulted in us creating a fully functional call-center management system. Call center scripts could be fed to a “Runner” which opened the document, parsed it, and created fully functional applications generated by end-users with zero coding capabilities. This is the power of possibility realized. This is what makes our job fun and interesting.
I'm not sure how or why I paid attention to this new tool set when it was created but I'm happy I did. My thought process was probably something like: “This is a pretty cool feature. I wonder where it would be useful?” I saw potential and was given the possibility to create something cool.
This philosophy of looking for potential has served me well and continues to this day. That leads me to the current state of the technological ecosystem. We're currently in a realm of huge potential and possibility. I'm talking about what everyone's talking about: artificial intelligence, machine learning, and LLMs. We've all been using these tools for some time, but recently, the power and accessibility of these tools has grown exponentially, and it's up to us to take advantage of the possibilities that these technologies give us.
I'm not sure how we'll take advantage of these technologies in our day-to-day development but here at CODE Magazine, we'll be researching these ideas and developing content to help you see the potential and possibilities of them in your daily development. We'll try to help answer questions like:
- Where are LLMs useful?
- How do I use my own data to populate an AI model?
- What is machine learning and how do I use it?
Of course, there are multitudes of questions that seem to arise daily and we'll try to roll with them as they come up.
We live in exciting times and these tools seem to present endless possibilities, much like creation of the internet and mobile phones presented possibilities never seen previously.
I'm going to conclude with one of my favorite sayings, which shows us how we need to keep potential and possibility in our hearts:
“Every child is an artist. The problem is staying an artist when you grow up.” –Pablo Picasso
Never grow up. See what happens.
