Lately I’ve been in a few podcasts and interviews and one question came up almost every time:

What is left for developers to care about or define themselves with when all the code is written by AI?

Here is the quick answer: being a developer was never about writing code. Code is a tool to achieve the thing we really care about: solving problems. Every developer I know loves solving problems and when there aren’t any problems to solve, we invent them.

This is the reason why so many frameworks and libraries exist. We take a coding solution we built and make it generic so that it can deal with whatever problem that is thrown at it. And then we lose interest and start all over again.

Don’t get me wrong, writing code is great fun. Having witnessed and helped new languages and environments evolve and change from an OK concept to a platform almost every software solution relies on is also great. Squeezing the last bit of optimisation out of a script whilst keeping it understandable and maintainable is a great feeling. But the code is not the end goal. If we find a tool that does the job as well, we will use that.

Every great developer I know is open to change and eager to learn about new things to do and try out. Asking if the code is what defines us is a sign that people still do not take the role of programmer as a normal thing for humans to do. We’re not some freaks in the corner that nobody understands and that stand just outside of “normal” society.

We’re doing a job and we are honing our craft constantly and to find better ways to make computers help others simplify their lives. Creative people thrive doing the thing that makes them happy. Writers write although the web is 90% AI generated and algorithm optimised slop. Musicians play in their garage and then pubs with 10 people because they like making the music they do. Painters paint although a prompt could give you a seeminlgy perfect picture. People knit, sew and weave although there is already far too much fashion available to ever wear in a lifetime.

Developers use code as a tool to create. So when you ask me if I feel threatened by AI and agents I can safely say that I am not. These things can take the task and the typing and the releasing from me, but I still feel a lot of joy popping open the hood and looking at things the machines created knowing that I can read and understand it. I can take it apart and put it back together. I can make it do things that the machine didn’t think of. I can make it better. I can make it mine. And so can you.

In July, I will run another live edition of CODE100 at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress and if you want to take part and earn your spot on stage in front of 5000 people, why not have a go at solving this year’s challenge?

The char explosion problem

Oh dear, we wanted to show you some data insights about the WeAreDevelopers World Congress speaker submissions, but things went very wrong and our bar charts exploded …

Now we call on all you coders, hackers and developers out there to help us recover the data we wanted to show.
Each bar of the chart has been rotated, moved to a different part of the screen and scaled.

We were able to analyse the location and other data though. For each bar chart you get the `x` and `y` screen coordinate where its bounding box starts, the angle of the `Rotation` in radians, the `scale` as a factor of 1 and the `width` and `height` in pixels.

All the data you need is in dataset.csv in the format of comma separated values.

Item,Group,x,y,Width,Height,Rotation,Scale
JavaScript,Languages,239.97,391.67,56.71,29.15,0.28,0.76
Python,Languages,401.44,353.55,59.43,43.76,0.54,0.77

Now, what we want you to use your coding skills for is to find the widths of the bars…

Can you tell us:

• What bar is the biggest?
• What bar is the smallest?
• What are the averages of each chart (Languages, Tools, Categories, AI topics)?

For example (no, not the real data):

Biggest item is JavaScript with 14
Smallest item is Cobol with 2
 
Averages:
- Languages: 30
- Tools: 23
- Categories: 78
- AI topics: 12

Do you have your results? Then why not apply as a Challenger for the CODE100 in July ?

I was lucky enough to witness the beginnings of social media, working on the platforms that made it happen. I’ve also seen the decline of its first iterations and products. Currently I am witnessing the idea of a social web being perverted, weaponised and automated out of any trace of human or social aspect…

In my current job I’m running a 200k+ subscribers newsletter and a quite successful podcast. I had my own social presence since around 2004 with varying degrees of success. I really don’t care for the numbers and I never in earnest tried to make a living solely off my social presence. So I never tried “growth hacking” or took deliberate steps to reach millions. I use social media as a channel out, a scratchpad to note down ideas and experiments and invite other people to comment and together create better solutions, share information and joy. Social media to me always meant humans writing things as they wanted to tell the world about them.

Two things that gave me quite some reach over the years have never changed though: it’s important to post a lot and in a reliable cadence and it’s important to have a voice and take a stand, voice an opinion.

Whilst collecting tools to cover in our newsletter, I came across one service that annoys the hell out of me.

AI Social Media Writing Assistant for LinkedIn, Twitter & 6 More Platforms
Your AI reputation coach that learns your voice, reads your feeds, and tells you exactly where to show up, then writes comments and posts that sound like you, drawing from your real stories and experience.

Excellent, isn’t it? Instead of having to do all the reading, thinking or creating you point a machine to the things you did in the past and make it appear as you. And not just for posting, also for commenting and interacting with probably people but more likely other bots. We automate away the human or social part, trading it for growth and numbers.

The speed in which highly successful people publish huge treaties and books lately makes me understand that tools like that are pretty widespread and used. I do get about 10 emails a day offering AI tools that automate my job as developer relations leader.

The thing is that I don’t want that. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m part of a conversation and available for advice when I’m clearly not. I don’t want to publish for the sake of having published at a certain time or in a thread that causes lots of comments.

Social media has become a toxic rage bait machine with the companies that run it clearly being ok with this. I really would love people to call out more when others are obviously replaced by automation and to tell the platforms to bugger off when they ask you to create more content geared towards interaction rather than information.

I remember a long time ago foursquare was a social thing to do. You checked in at a place to show that you’re there and ready to interact with people and meet contacts.

I was at an event that time and bummed out as my flight to the office was early and I couldn’t attend the party with networking booths. So I told another speaker that this is a shame and his answer was to go past the venue on the way to the airport and check in on Foursquare so people thought you’ve been there and it was their fault for not finding you. I lost a ton of respect for that person on that day.

As an actor or author you don’t send your body or stunt double to attend interviews or sell autographs at comic con. Don’t create a virtual double that posts for you on social media when you can’t be arsed or feel overwhelmed. Take that overwhelming feeling and write about it, showing the world that your mental health is as fragile as the one of the people who follow you and read your work. Be human and only there when you can be there.

I was on the We l❤️ Open Source podcast and talked about the threats to open source and software.
Trading openness for convenience: From app stores to AI assistants

I liked social media. I love learning and showing people how things are done there. I’m a LinkedIn and Skillshare trainer and wrote a few books. I also published tons of information on various social media channels.

I also like that creators get benefits from publishing information. A social media platform should reward great contributions and they did that in the past.

From views to interaction bait

The problem began when lots of views weren’t enough. Either because it was too easy to automate them with bots or because the real worth of a social platform started to get measured in “time in app” rather than “quality of information”. Advertisers reward those that make people the most addicted and lock them in. And the platforms themselves started measuring quality of contribution as causing as much conversation and interaction with other users as possible. Which is a race to the bottom in terms of quality as the most engaged pieces of content are not those that educate or delight, but those that cause controversy and rage. Some platforms excel at that. Others do encourage their contributors to play the system by forcing interaction, no matter how inane.

The “comment to get access” bait

Lately I’ve seen a pattern emerge across social media by growth hackers, tech influencers and other chancers that annoys the hell out of me because of its utter uselessness. The “Comment to get access” bait.

• Someone posts and impressive thing as a screencast
• They don’t provide a link to the resource (or sign-up)
• Instead, they ask people to comment with a certain word to get access via direct messages

Behold it in all its glory :

Now, my question is who benefits from that?

• Not the people commenting “banana” as they sound like idiotic minions
• Not the original poster, as they still need to follow all posts and then send direct messages
• Not the platform, as hundreds of posts stating “banana” are not content to mine and re-use, but just noise
• Not other readers, as finding interesting comments in this noise is a drag

All in all, this feels seedy, unprofessional and superfluous. If LinkedIn wants to be an educational, professional platform, it probably should punish rather than promote posts like these.