Finding Growth in the Gaps: How Career Breaks Fuel My Tech Journey

As a technology professional, I've discovered an unexpected rhythm in my career - one that turns the spaces between projects into powerful catalysts for growth. Every successful project completion brings not just a sense of accomplishment, but also a valuable gift: a few months of dedicated learning time. These self-directed sabbaticals, occurring naturally in my three-year career cycles, have become essential periods of exploration and reinvention.

Denis Hassabis and Hannah Fry

My current sabbatical feels particularly significant as I navigate the transformative world of Artificial Intelligence. Building upon my foundation in Machine Learning and data science, I've immersed myself in the AI landscape over the past two months. After exploring numerous AI podcasts, I've found two standout sources that consistently deliver valuable insights: "Google DeepMind: The Podcast" for cutting-edge AI research and developments, and "The Artificial Intelligence Show" by Marketing AI Institute for practical business applications.

This deep dive has also included extensive hands-on experimentation with leading Large Language Models (LLMs). Through countless hours working with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, I've developed a nuanced understanding of each platform's strengths and refined my prompt engineering expertise. This practical experience has been invaluable in understanding the real-world capabilities and limitations of current AI technology.

This intensive learning period has already yielded tangible results. I've developed a comprehensive two-week learning module focused on AI fundamentals and practical applications, designed to help professionals enhance their productivity through AI tools. This resource embodies what I find most rewarding about these career interludes - the ability to synthesize new knowledge and share it with others who are eager to embrace technological advancement.

These deliberate pauses between opportunities aren't just breaks - they're investments in staying ahead of the technology curve. Each sabbatical allows me to emerge stronger, more knowledgeable, and better equipped to tackle the next challenge. In an industry that evolves at lightning speed, these learning periods have proven to be my secret weapon for sustained career growth and innovation.

Thank-you Keyin College

Another successful three years (well, three years and five months) working in an area I love; technology and adult learning. This was a great three years where I utilized my research and experience in integrating agile technologies and techniques into education. As a faculty we managed the complexity, and risk, of integrating an additional 40 students per semester into the program. And best of all, I taught over 200 students JavaScript, Node.js, SQL, PostgreSQL, Mongodb, GitHub, and how all these fit into FullStack development. It was definitely three years and five months well spent.

Three year successes

My career success seems to occur in three year cycles, I've written about this in the past. It would seem that my time with Keyin College follows the same pattern, I have just finished another three year cycle. Background to this three year theme (with focus on adult learning) can be found here;

1. career success in three year cycles
2. Increasing access to legal education

Gratitude

I like to share the success. I may have been the leader for a few things at Keyin College, but I couldn't have done it alone. These are the things where I am grateful for the staff at Keyin College;

Steve Taylor for encouraging me to participate in the early program design and for supporting me in becoming program head while we onboarded 60 students a semester.

Christa Mitchell for filling the role of career counselor while I was being onboarded to Keyin. So much to learn so little time. Also, for acting as my proxy when important items needed to be escalated to senior management. I know I can be demanding as an employee, I believe we should all be heard and an organization never knows where their diamond on the beach may be.

Sushanta for being good at want you do and your follow-through is exceptional!

Eric Bailey for helping me understand the overall technical architecture of Keyin's network, infrastructure, and approach to IT. Couldn't have made sense of things without you!

Maurice for being 5 hours older than me and providing the wisdom I needed to understand Keyin College (Or understand the best I could).

Roy Brushett and Will Durocher for those brainstorming sessions four years ago where we covered many important topics that defined the overall FullStack curriculum. Where Agile methodologies fit with Software Engineering and with Pedagogy, our use of O'Reilly for text books (saving students and Keyin considerable $$), the programming languages to be used, where source management (GitHub) fit within our Agile approach, Which board (Kanban or Scrum or both) we would use, etc. So good, great to be involved with the initial design and too see it through to teaching many courses as the whole program stabilized.

All the Faculty for allowing me the privilege of being in your service. We reduced risk and successfully went from 18 students to over 50 in one semester. Job well done. Thanks for your support. It was an honour to be your program head.

And of course, the Students! Honestly, I learn more than I teach. Your questions, your feedback, all our 1 on 1's, the tutorials, and encouraging me to develop workshops on an introduction to and intermediate github. Students are the best! We wouldn't be here without you!

Next Steps

I am being drawn back into the technical realm. Give teaching a break again for a while, focus on shipping software and building a team to exceed expectations. I am good at this so why not lean heavily into a startup, manage / mentor a team, leverage my knowledge of big data, database design and administration, draw upon the family (and personal) history of engineering, or even consider a director or executive position (if someone will have me, I'm so much better in a supporting role).

If you need someone with my background or experience please reach out. Thanks again Keyin College!

Blogging in a time of AI

I am renewing my frequency in blog posting. This will come after an almost 5 year break from blogging. I am returning because I am back to working on open-source software, educational projects, and the digitization of oceans. And I know I have a learning and success journey to share. 

Some Background

I started blogging twenty years back. Yes, 20 years. I was an early adopter and I was involved with technology startups and how the internet was influencing education. At this time I was a big believer that blogging was about content creation. Adding to the collective of the internet by adding meaningful and descriptive content rather than only being a consumer of content. To date, I have published over 500 posts to my assorted blogs. Most of this work was in the first 10 years of my blogging. I essentially posted once a month for the first 10 years. I did have a year where I posted over 100 times. As a summary this is how I posted over the last 20 years.

2004 to 2014 - I published 420 blog posts with good readership. I had a year where I posted more than 100 times. I set this as a goal / experiment to see if I could post twice a week. I did this while holding full-time work, which meant many early mornings and late evenings writing. I learned a whole bunch and my writing skills improved. 

The themes for these first ten years was mostly; 

• technology leadership for startups, 
• hard-core technology and approaches, 
• innovative and emerging education, 
• and the intersection of these three.

2015 to 2024 - I published only 41 blog posts during this 10 years, and nothing in the past three years. Honestly, I was distracted by raising my family of three and doing a whole bunch of life living. Not so focused on work and career advancement. 

The themes for the last ten years have mostly been; 

• integrating with technology community in St. John's NL (I moved), 
• continue my work on digital badges and micro-credentials,
• development of an ocean data startup (still a work in progress),
• and working the idea of a reference architecture for the digitization of oceans.

Most exciting of all this is more than 1/2 million views during the 20 years and at some points having over 2500 weekly views. What have I learned from all this blogging? Mostly, that having to write and publish openly to the internet helps the overall community knowledge and it helps me learn more deeply in these chosen subjects.

Next Steps

Again, I will use blogging as my cognitive gymnasium. My subjects themes haven't changed and I will focus upon two main subject areas and continue with updates to this critical technology blog;

1. Education technology, Heutagogy, and the self-directed learner.
• The Happy Heutagogue - https://heutagogue.blogspot.com/
2. Many things related to, and in support of, the authoring a reference architecture for the digitization of oceans.
• The Ocean Set CTO - https://oceanset.blogspot.com/
3. And my continued musings about technology through my gen X view of the world.
• Critical Technology - https://criticaltechnology.blogspot.com/

With all my work and R&D efforts I will learn a bunch of stuff and apply this to the real world through the successful projects I am a part of. I will reflect upon these successes and all that I have learned I will create content that can provide further learning for those around me. And hopefully they will also be entertaining reads.

Collaborating with your AI partner

Blogging has changed for me. There has been a lot of technical and social change since I did most of my blog posting over a decade ago. I had a few focused subjects I was very passionate about, and I wrote about them often. I wrote unincumbered for I would consider myself an early adopter and there was less people publishing to the internet in my chosen subjects. Today there is much more content covering these subjects. And all this content comes in photos, videos, audio, and written articles. Artificial Intelligence is doing a great job of creating and summarizing the content which addresses the complex audience needs and their questions and prompts. Content creation has changed. For a human content creator I believe our work needs to be more intelligent, critical, and creative. Content creators in a time of AI need to do what the AI cannot; daydream, reflect on unrelated subjects, see unlikely connections, be critical, add meaning, create new content that falls between the generated content, fact check and confirm, and add more human intelligence.

How will my blog writing process change? Um, it already has...

I must reflect and draw upon my mastery and do my best to add the new content that AI cannot... AI needs our creativity because it has already parsed the published body of human knowledge. For more insight on my approach, use your favorite large language model chatbot (ChatGPT, Gemini) with the prompt 'limitations of generative AI' followed by the prompt 'How would you suggest a human writer overcome these AI limitations'.

Step by Step my blogging will partner with AI and follow this basic approach;

1. Capture ideas for new posts, be verbose, be imaginative, think about context
2. Put these ideas to incomplete blog posts, work ideas for days, for weeks...
3. Read extensively, add to the understanding of any specific idea
4. Keep references, cut and paste to the bottom of the related incomplete posts
5. Prompt AI with phrases from the idea generation
6. Take blocks of text from written ideas and push them into generative AI, be critical, harvest what you can.
7. Take the written blog post and ask AI for a rewrite. Change your audience. be critical, harvest what you can.
8. Try and see, try and write, what AI cannot... add to the body of human knowledge.
9. Add story telling to improve the overall post
10. Find pictures to support the writing, format for engagement. Use AI to generate images from passages of text taken from the blog post.
11. Format, edit, improve, repeat. Be bold... Publish.
12. Use AI to improve the quality of the writing... Publish again.
13. Rest, reflect, improve... Publish again.
14. Yes, I am an advocate to publish before writing is perfect. Publish and then make improvements over the days and weeks that follow. Once the post is considered finished finished... promote it on social media.
15. Identify what is most important about the post and rewrite for the LinkedIn business audience. Publish to LinkedIn.
16. Repeat...

Suggested reading: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/02/ai-can-catalyze-and-inhibit-your-creativity-here-is-how/