I've started a slightly unusual job setup, with half my week at Dstny, the rest is primarily on a new venture called Haptap.
Earlier in the year I updated this blog to have a ‘Now’ page instead of a more traditional About page…
Perhaps the biggest risk with this style of change is the content becoming stale. If you can tell a “now” page hasn’t been updated in years then the appeal is lost.
That was in May and it’s now (late) November. I’ve updated the Now page on a high level but am expanding on the changes here for those regular readers who might wish to know a little more.
Job Changes
The main change is around the day job(s). I’m no longer full time at Dstny, rather my week is split between a couple of days at Dstny and a new venture called Haptap. Just for good measure I’ve also taken on some web development bits again as part of Goldbyte, which has been fun.
Haptap’s initial product is all around making it easy to setup and manage calling in Microsoft Teams. There is a lot that can be done to make the enablement process easier, and Haptap has the tech and people to make something really helpful in this space. I’m hoping to write a little more about Haptap at the start of the new year as the first version of the product should be available then.
How is the new work week going?
Knowing how much of a drag context switching is for developer productivity, I was a little apprehensive about the new mix of jobs. I’m pleased to say so far so good. I’ve been much more fastidious around note taking every day, which I believe has been the secret sauce to get up and running quickly when switching projects. If I sit down to work on Haptap code for a day, 5 minutes of reading my notes from the last session gets me well on the way to restoring all the historic context. It’s not a 100% restore, but close enough.
Tool Changes - Cursor
Expanding to a few simultaneous development jobs has given me an opportunity to work with some different tooling. The most noteworthy change has been using Cursor in some of my projects after a strong recommendation from jes earlier in the year. I would say jes is rather bullish on the power of AI/LLMs in programming, as am I after some real world usage.
I’ve been using Cursor on a few development projects since September. For almost all I’m the sole developer. It’s mostly been greenfield development in C#, TypeScript, PHP. My overall feedback is very positive. It has definitely been a productivity boost (particularly clear for the first stages of development). If you haven’t given it a go yet I’d recommend.
If you’re getting value from using ChatGPT and copy/pasting code ideas around then don’t underestimate just how powerful it is to have the AI chat baked right in to the IDE. It’s not just the time saved avoiding copy/paste, it’s all the extra context included in your AI conversation, plus the IDE can splice the responses/patches in to your existing files. A real game changer.
I’m still experimenting with how to get the best out of it. For example, in one project I’m interfacing with a few different APIs and it keeps mixing up the structure of responses (e.g. some are JSON with camelCase, others PascalCase, others have key attribute name prefixes). A suggestion here has been to have a file that describes each API format and include that as pinned context in Cursor chat. Perhaps I’ll report back once I’ve given that a go.