June was a very atypical month, mostly driven by transitions. In my personal work I moved on from the previous set of projects with AI engineering onto exploring other ideas, and in my career I went through the process to join another team inside my company, which is much more aligned with my current vision and goals. Here's a quick summary.
Achievements
LLP version 1.1.1 Release
Local Language Practice (LLP) is a desktop application to practice languages through contextual chat roleplay with local AI models. I first released this project back in April. A part of my First Steps Into AI Engineering series, I consider it my main software project of the first half of 2025. In June, I released version 1.1.1, which fixes a bug that prevented it from being launched from the JAR file and added more sanitization cases for the messages. I also took the opportunity to update the Readme, making gemma3 now the default model in the examples instead of llama3.1.
With regards to software development, I have been taking some time off from major public releases, as I am focusing more on exploring some ideas on my own. I expect this to last a few months, and I will probably only go back to have major public development in the last quarter of 2025. I am very happy to have this pause, as I need some time to just test out several approaches and see what works and what does not, without any commitment to sticking with the code. I am mostly still staying in the generative AI enabled applications space, though.
Personal studies
I was able to continue and make great progress in my personal studies habit. For career studies, I finished Building Successful Communities Of Practice, which offered great insight into an area that I have been more and more involved with in the recent past. And for hobby studies, I finished The Prompt Report, a nice overview and catalogue of techniques for prompting generative AI models - I have been following the AI field with great interest since 2023, and this was a great material to shine some light in the topic and learn a few new tricks.
Blog post about LicLacMoe
Although I released LicLacMoe (a simple tic-tac-toe game in which you play matches against LLMs without any conversational interface) back in early May, I only got to writing the blog post about it in June. That shows how busy and chaotic my routine has been. Better late than never, I guess!
Internal move
As mentioned at the start of the post, during June I went through the process of applying and being accepted at a different team inside my current company. I am very, very happy about this change, as it allows me to work more aligned to the global vision of the company and on internal developer experience tools. I expect to gain a lot of knowledge and insights about how to build great tools for developers out of this experience, but we will see how it goes.
Downpoints
TDC with little participation
The second edition of The Developers Conference (TDC) took place in June. Although I was very optimistic about it, mainly because it was a full-fledge version (instead of the "AI Summit" format, which I have already complained about in a previous post), I was so involved in my daily activities at work (the entire interviewing process also taking its toll, of course) that I was not able to attend many sessions. I still plan to go over the recordings in the near future.
The session that I felt was most productive for me was one about the product development process for a Brazilian company that develops video games. I am very intrigued at the prevalence of waterfall-like processes and cycles in that industry (AAA games often taking half a decade or more before ever making it to the players hands), and this has been in my mind for quite a while now. It might be something I will look into further in the future, as someone who both loves games and believes deeply in Agile for any kind of creation.
Internal move in effect only in August
Another negative point was that, although I had my movement to the new team at my company approved, it could only be in effect from August onwards. Which meant that I had to wait for about a month and a half from receiving the approval to actually moving. Definitely a longer waiting time that I would have liked, but, once again, better late than never!
Plans for next month
Vacations
I will spend pretty much all of July in vacation. Since I had a lot of available days piled up (which HR would soon kindly ask me to use), and it would not make much sense for me to start new things considering I would move teams soon, I decided to take several weeks off and start fully charged at the new position. I intend to dedicate most of this time to gaming (I am horribly late on my backlog of games, to be honest) and music, though I never really stop studying and coding in my free time.
Next portfolio project
Speaking of coding, I plan to start working on my next portfolio project as well. I expect to go several months purely exploring ideas and building little sketches for independent parts of it before starting the "official" project, so it will definitely not be anything public for now. This new project should have roughly the same size of my last one (LLP), and will also be focused on applying LLM models to a specific problem (I already have the scope and initial set of features in mind). I expect it to be quite fun, and very useful to myself - while hopefully being insightful for anyone who is also interested in generative AI as an enabler for our future activities. I will share more about it in the near future.
No comments:
Post a Comment