Rui CarmoUnlike last year, I feel little need to mark the occasion. I could repeat most of last year’s reflections, with a few nuances.
Actually, let me do just that and save you the trouble:
- AI has finally become a core consideration in business (pretty much all the customers I’ve worked with now understand the need for governance, foundational designs, standardised patterns, etc.), so we’re well past the experimentation phase.
- Unsurprisingly, corporations have very different expectations from startups, so the Cambrian explosion I see outside work is much more muted and nuanced among customers, who are much more interested in getting actual value than in doing science experiments. The entire situation reminds me of the Big Data & ML hype cycle, only faster.
I am constantly reminded of this line from William Gibson’s Neuromancer:
“Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.”
- Geopolitical implications and polarisation are very much in people’s minds (inside and outside work). There is no avoiding discussions about the risks of relying on US inference providers, and the insularity of Europe regarding ownership of both core infrastructure and skilled resources is excruciatingly obvious to everyone even as they try to keep the business running.
Work is… worse than last year, I think, and yet on average the same:
- My current organisation has been seesawing between regional and continental blueprints, which has again made being in Portugal a limiting factor in multiple respects (I guess this is cyclical, but it is extremely discouraging every time it happens).
- I am definitely feeling stuck under the “Architect” label–I mentioned that last year, but the combination of constant reorgs and doing more and more things “outside the box” has become oppressive–if not, in fact, somewhat depressive.
Personally, things are OK in most respects, except:
- My general physical condition: some back and neck trouble, and other things I’m figuring out
- The biggest issue I have right now is clutter. And by that I mean largely mental clutter, given the sheer number of things I keep juggling.
- Thanks to AI and my never-ending curiosity, I now also have trouble deciding what to do in my free time (there is just so much I can achieve), but I just can’t seem to relax–or stop having ideas.
And, of course, I am still letting my work define who I am, which I probably need to revisit at this point–I still want to build products, but that is just not happening here, at least right now.