I've always been an enthusiast when it comes to use new technologies in software development. In the last years, with the growth of AI I feel often I'm behind the market's tendencies.
As many brazilians, I started to work very young (15y), so I was focused to develop abilities that could keep me employed, or that would help me grow in certain companies. So all my effort to study was focused on Web development and business stuff.
By doing so, unintentionally, I was totally diverted from the academic path (which is where the true innovation and cutting edge tech reside) So if you are not able to work in a place where the investment in research is a priority, you probably will follow the same path I did. - Feel the same already?
So if I had to guess, I’d say you probably don't have enough time to study other subjects you don’t use in your daily, right?
So in the last year, I've made an active effort to keep up with the latest news from tech, not going deep in anything, but at least, following it. And this was enough for me to know some tendencies and to SEE new possibilities to apply them.
Before I have this initiative, the feeling of not having time to study new edge tech was always an anguish for me - which took me some time to understand. During a conversation with my buddy and mentor Professor André Câmara, he referred me the book "Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” saying I could recognize myself with the author's point, and I need to say, his feeling was totally correct.
Basically, the author defends that you don't need to be a specialist to solve problems - and it's even better if you are NOT an specialist* - and this fits perfectly in the case of new technologies and our daily problem solving.
Now, see this thoughts, have you ever heard them too?
- I want to apply edge cut tech, but I'm not a researcher.
- I'm not academic enough
- this should be something those guys that study algoritms should use! Not me.
- I just know react.js lol. Give me my CRUDs back
Feel the same already?
There's nothing wrong with doing non-complex cruds systems. They pay the bills, that's true. But as developers, we have so much potential to be rewarded for solving problems, and these thoughts are often limit us, putting constraints about how far we can go. If you don't put an active effort on it, you will be dragged by your daily tasks.
You don't need to be a data scientist to use complex algorithms. you don't need to be a researcher to use a new AI applied to your context or product.
You will need, yes, to understand how to apply it. This will also have a learning curve, and will probably not be easy. But it's possible.
And believe me, there's so many researches working on public projects, available in the open source community. Like Moirai: a time series model for universal prediction from SalesForce. Both his paper and code are available in github.
We can go further on this, we can check what are the latest articles scientists are publishing in the top universities in your region, or even check at sci-hub for some topics.
This post is the signal you’ve needed all this time to give more attention to open source initiatives. Go after it.
Imagine you work in a software that you have to deal with some time series - as far as you know, there's no direct demand to create a forecast to it. But, what if? naturally, you would think that this is something for data scientists and would be far from it's usage. you are not totally wrong, it's their business to create and maintain the algorithm - but you don't need to know all the details about how the things are working behind the scenes - but you might be able to implement it (after some study) to apply an existing algorithm to an existing problem.
Conclusion
So this is the main objective of this post: incentive you to be open minded, be aware of the latest tendencies, identify possible issues in our daily context, and be the person who will make the synapse: bring the solution to the problem.
* The author defends that a specialist tends to solve all the problems with the same tool, or to summarize everything to the area they master. Specialists are important and they will always have demand, we should NOT be against the creation of new specialists.
peace
So good
Awesome content, Victor!