What Am I Up To?

I’m attempting to apply the known best practices from software engineering and data engineering to LLM-based apps. Testing, CI/CD, monitoring, observability, and more.

I do this at my current full-time job. I use side projects to test out new ways. I share my learnings in presentations and blog posts. I’m this close to dreaming about it at night.

Debate is historically quite meaningful to me. Improving reasoning is the first step towards truth-seeking, and debate is a great way to do that. (Though of course these days, I’m also very curious about the latest fads.)

Other than a garden-variety judge, I’ve been a member of the Competition Committee and a Board member of the main Czech debate organization (Asociace debatních klubů) since 2023. This means that I spend a lot of time thinking about the direction the organization and its didactics should take. Fun stuff.

I’ve always liked the genre of hyper-specific music that narrowly apply to a given situation. With the advent of AI song generators like Suno.ai, I’ve been sinning against my ears with the most specific songs I can think of. So I have

• A dance song about the way my girlfriend orders too many liquids at a café, and
• A Broadway ballad about yak shaving, or
• A rock song about using Terraform for everything.

I’m intentionally not linking to these songs, because they’re terrible. But they’re my terrible songs, and I love them.

My body is hilariously inflexible. I don’t imagine this will change easily. But there’s a yoga studio on the basement floor of my office building, and I’m coming around to the idea that publically humiliating myself in front of a bevy of skilled practitioners might be a good muscle to exercise.

With dawning horror, I recently came to a realization that I’ve become really good at opportunism. I’ve been optimizing towards the local maximum, and I’ve been doing it for so long that I’ve forgotten what the global maximum even looks like.

On the one hand, this is very zen and functional, and it’s not like there isn’t a skill to it. On the other hand, I kinda miss planning for a much better future; I miss working towards something that isn’t just the next step on the ladder.