September was a fairly busy month for me. Beyond my day job workload, I also released several versions of my (currently) main open source project, attended an edition of a big Brazilian software development conference and participated in an internal hackaton-style innovation event on my company. Here is a short summary of the main points of the month.
Achievements
JenAI
JenAI is an open source command-line interface frontend for chatting with local LLMs. It is the main personal project I have been working on during the past several weeks. I have written a blog post about it, Project - JenAI. In September, I deployed five new releases, covering major advances such as support for ollama (arguably the most popular way of running a local LLM these days) and the ability to save and load conversation states, as well as some minor improvements to the user interface and the codebase. These were the new released versions:
- 1.2.0, added support to ollama as a backend.
- 1.3.0, added the feature of saving conversation state.
- 1.4.0, added the feature of loading conversation state.
- 1.4.1, added a minor improvement to the way the conversation is displayed.
- 1.5.0, added the ability to use a custom filename when saving a conversation state.
TDC 2024-3
September also saw the third edition of The Developer's Conference (TDC) in 2024, with a hybrid format of sessions in São Paulo and remote participation. Although I couldn't attend all of the three days of the event, luckily the final day was a holiday here in my state, allowing me to take part in at least a few sessions. This time I mostly stayed within the Tech Lead track, and followed sessions about Documentation and Developer Experience (DevEx). I wrote a blog post about my participation, Event: The Developer's Conference 2024-3.
Innoweeks 2024
Innoweeks is an annual innovation event promoted by SAP Labs Latin America that brings together real customers with real world challenges to search for innovative solutions with SAP employees, in a hackaton-like format that runs for about a month. I had already participated in the 2019 edition of this event, during my first passage at SAP. This year the event started on the first half of the year, but unfortunately had to be interrupted due to the floods that hit Rio Grande Do Sul in May. When the event resumed in late August, I had the opportunity to join one of the existing teams, having re-joined the company in June (and thus having missed the initial stages). While I sadly missed the first week (which was not re-played when the event resumed) and all of its extraordinarily insightful activities involving direct interaction with the customers, I was still able to learn a lot and work with several very talented people, making it a great experience overall. The bulk of the event happened between the last week of August and the last week of September, with the final ceremony taking place on September 25th.
I saw myself working outside of my comfort zone for the most part of the time, implementing several features on the frontend of our prototype. It had been several years since I had done any significant work with React, and it was nice to see that I could still get the hang of it, despite having my doubts about the whole server-side rendering approach it goes for nowadays. I was also able to work a little on the backend, and it was definitely a much welcome change of air going back to Spring Boot, after several months of being buried into legacy JavaEE code. In the end, our team won the "Best Innovation Process" award, as a recognition of our agile, disciplined and customer-centric approach.
Downsides
Of course, being involved in so many extra activities meant that I had to balance it out by taking a slower pace on some others. Due to that, I unfortunately worked less on my personal studies habit than I would have liked to. I was still able to make some progress on the professional book I am studying, but for the hobby book, it stalled completely. While I feel a little bad about that, it wasn't really a big setback, as I expect to get back to my usual rhythm in October, when I will have less seasonal events going on.
Plans for October
Going forward, I expect to soon finish the initial scope I have planned for JenAI - the only significant addition I want to make to it is having a streaming response from the LLM, instead of synchronously waiting for the entire text before displaying anything back to the user. I intend to work on this in the first weeks of October. With the initial scope complete, I will be free to start working on the next "AI Engineering" project I have queued up (more info on my First Steps Into AI Engineering post).
Additionally, I also expect to return to the normal speed on my personal studies habit. As a part of it, I have a new book review in the works that did not move forward in September, but that hopefully I will be able to complete and post in October.
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