by luplex ·
Hey,
I have a question that might resonate with other early-career SWEs. How do I become better at the "serious" parts of work?
I got a maths-heavy master's degree in computer science. Formally, I now work as a data scientist, but really, I engineer software.
I am confident in my programming abilities. I write clean code, design elegant abstractions, test everything etc. But I still feel like there's a more "serious" degree of software engineering that I find boring and I feel like I'm not great at it: Writing design documents, properly tracking decisions, careful planning, building infrastructure and deciding on expensive infrastructure projects, all sorts of compliance stuff.
My question is: As I use more and more AI to help with programming, how do I get better and find joy in the more managerial tasks of software engineering? Does confidence just come with experience? Can I get better faster? Or is it all worthless anyways and I should focus on the code?
I built this for myself while trying to get serious about learning Japanese again:
I studied a little Japanese more than 10 years ago, but only for a short time, so most of it didn't stick. Since then, I've been to Japan many times because my girlfriend is Japanese and my older brother lives there. More recently, with me and my girlfriend traveling back and forth to Japan quite a lot and both of us having family in Tokyo, I wanted a better way to rebuild my foundation and keep practicing consistently.
The app started around kana practice, but grew into something larger:
hiragana / katakana practice kanji and vocabulary study review-based learning AI chat for more natural practice some light gamification
The AI chat is free, but requires Google sign-in. That is mostly to prevent bot abuse, since it costs me money to run, and secondarily because it allows progress syncing across devices.
I'd appreciate honest feedback, especially on what would make this more genuinely useful for learning rather than just more feature-rich.
by Erenay09 ·
My old 8-core MacBook Pro used to get wrecked the moment two Claude Code sessions decided to build at the same time.
To combat that, I wanted to make sure dev agents queue up when they want to make heavy builds.
At the same time, I like to keep a constant overview of my CPU usage in the terminal.
Busybee solves both by rendering a compact set of core usage gauges with a one-line queue status underneath.