The Auspicious Reboot

I know. It's been a while since I posted an episode of the newsletter and so much has happened since. I'm planning on rebooting things and start planning on how I'm going to approach next year, so I think you can expect more frequent updates.

The End of the Future

Last year, I had an idea to begin a weekly show, mainly to see if I could do it and I think it worked well. 31 episodes, 33 guests, 18 newsletter editions. The Future in Tech was legendary in scope and I learned so much from that experience. Putting together a weekly show on top of all of my other work was a challenging task.

Because I had some seriously huge guests, there was a ton of planning, scheduling, organizing, question preparing. I feel like that was a big part of what I learned.

Rolling with a new side Gig

One of the weird, but cool things about working for LinkedIn is that they allow you to do side gigs. It's part of the culture. Now a lot of times for us it means speaking at conferences and sometimes other tasks. It's quite a big process to get this officially registered and approved by the company, but I think it's a good thing.

I haven't been trying to speak at conferences for a while, making an exception for GitHub Universe last year. I still remember when I was doing the conference circle and my son came to pick me up at the airport. He asked his mother when they could come pick me up again so that I'd spend more time with him. That quickly made me rethink what I was doing.

So, I picked up a gig teaching some live courses at Standford. I get to teach on AI topics including Chat GPT and Generative AI and some GitHub. It's been a cool experience, which I think has really helped my teaching.

Why now, why AI?

One of the byproducts of teaching the classes at Stanford is that the class I teach has to be updated extremely often. This, combined with the fact that I'm now producing and editing most of my content myself (see below) means that I feel like I have to stay on top of things more than ever, but that I also need to have a way to communicate that to others.

So this is going to be the purpose of these newsletter going forward, to let you know what's really important about AI from a technical, developer perspective.

Case in point, you can see this test of Generative AI speech translation services I did in the picture above, check out the playlist. The strangest one is the one I wrote in Spanish and had the machine translate for me to English. It sounds just like me and because of HeyGen's tools the lips back it up but with a strange Spanish accent.

Small but Really Important Secret

Also, did you know that there's a secret way to get removed from AI training at OpenAI. It's a bit tough to find and it takes a while to get on the opt-out list. Go to this page and scroll to the bottom in the section titled What if I want to keep my history on but disable the model training. You'll have to fill out a form then wait a bit to get an email. You'll eventually get a confirmation that it's been taken care of. It too less than a week for me.

That's pretty much the type of content I want to have in this newsletter. Real useful information and not a lot of noise.

What's Going on Next Week?

Next week, I'll be traveling to SF. There are two important conferences, OpenAI is hosting it's first DevDay conference there. There are bound to be some great announcements and we may have gotten a small leak already.

I don't have this ability f being able to have Chat GPT do more than one thing concurrently. That could be real useful, specially with the Advanced Data Analysis tool. I just finished recording a course on that, should be out in a week. Hopefully the announcements won't cause errors with that course.

Of course, There's also GitHub Universe. The annual GitHub developer conference. One of the big announcements we've gotten are official GitHub Certifications. We created a whole Certifications Learning path for it, including four of my courses. One of those is a fast track course I edited myself.

FSTR Content

I mentioned I've been doing all types of shorter courses so we can publish things in the library is days instead of months. One of the joys of working on this content has been DeScript, A fantastic editor that is making this a lot simpler.

So far, I've got two courses using this process. One is the Benefits of the GitHub community and one on Prompt Hacking, a scary, but extremely useful topic.