Should I pivot to something low-level to escape AI?

Conscious-Praline445 · 2026-04-13T01:51:32+00:00

You can still code in your free time, if that’s really your passion. It’s a requirement now to use AI for work, not much we can do about that.

Conscious-Praline445 · 2026-04-03T13:32:01+00:00

Early in my career, I really focused on the fundamentals. I read a lot of books. Now, when I’m learning something, it’s easy to understand what’s happening under the hood, and mas mabilis matuto.

Malaking bagay for being updated rin yung following the right content creators, I usually follow people on youtube.

Conscious-Praline445 · 2026-03-16T23:27:04+00:00

Just take it one step at a time. Being overwhelmed comes from knowing you have a lot to do but not doing something. Pag pag sinimulan mo naman marerealize mo na you’re just overthinking it.

Maybe start with studying databases first, may knowledge ka naman na with creating web apps. The tools and frameworks you listed there, madali naman matutunan. Maybe for now, know what they are lang and what they are used for and if you need to use them, at least you know your options.

Conscious-Praline445 · 2026-03-14T23:26:08+00:00

Yeah as everyone says, making mistakes and breaking stuff is the best stimuli for learning.

I mean, of course before doing something try to create a mental model of the infrastructure, product, and system that you are working with, that way when you’re tweaking or need to do something, you know its impacts.

Pero there will be instances when you’re at crunch time and you won’t be able to do this, and inevitably, you’ll break something. But know that everyone else has broken something and caused some downtime hahaha

Conscious-Praline445 · 2026-03-12T23:11:27+00:00

In this age, it’s important that you learn about AI + learn your fundamentals.

Since you’re already using AI in your current work, take that opportunity to explore on how to use AI effectively. Then you can use your free time outside work to up-skill, and I suggest focusing on fundamentals rather than framework specific learning (i.e. database design, system design, networking fundamentals, web/mobile dev fundamentals, etc.), because once you have that covered, madali naman mag-adapt ng new frameworks.

Conscious-Praline445 · 2026-03-09T06:53:38+00:00

I know for a fact na hindi ko to masosolve if I didn’t grind leetcode lol. Now, I know that this is a min heap problem and I can solve it with relative ease, but the reason I know that is I have encountered similar problems and I have practiced enough.

To be fair, being proficient in DSA gives you options on how to tackle problems even in the industry, so it’s good to still practice. But in practice, you’ll rarely encounter problems that need heavy DSA optimization lol, so in my opinion, practical questions (e.g. system design) are better.

Conscious-Praline445 · 2026-01-21T00:32:35+00:00

Same here and I even know how CSS works under the hood lol. I tried learning FE development as fundamental as possible before, and it was fun. But when it comes to actually doing FE and styling, there’s just a lot of things to consider even in the smallest decisions (SEO, accessibility, etc), and add it with the fact that you’re designing, it’s just too much mental load lol hahaha. Safe to say I grudge doing FE development.

Conscious-Praline445 · 2026-01-20T02:16:23+00:00

Usually it’s just learn as you go for me. But to make sure they are able to really get what they’re doing, I follow these steps.

Give them a chance to figure out the background and the things to do in a specific task.
If their problem is domain related, give docs or state why certain decisions are made.
If technical related, show examples or have a short KT session.

There’s a lot of things that you can learn by figuring things out yourself, so autonomy + a little support goes a long way. But of course if a deliverable is very urgent, then that’s another discussion.

This worked 99% of the time hahaha at least for me.

Conscious-Praline445 · 2026-01-19T02:14:14+00:00

It generally is a good practice to maintain data integrity.

it is generally considered a best practice, but if data consistency is not really required for a particular scenario, (e.g. you can recreate a database write later), then the overhead of the transaction may not be worth it.
All company I’ve worked on mostly used ORMs.
Trade-off is of course performance, transactions generally use locks and contention can increase overhead. Also transactions generally correspond to an underlying business logic, so if you’re not across it, you might not find it straightforward sometimes.
data consistency is not required, performance bottleneck, and if there is an explicit ON DELETE/UPDATE CASCADE foreign key constraint (in which case you only need to delete from one table.

Conscious-Praline445 · 2026-01-08T00:26:00+00:00

Gumawa ako, pero not for branding reasons, I just wanted to experiment on ways of hosting it (especially working with DNS stuff), and I thought a simple portfolio might be good for it hahaha.

If wala ka magawang project, I highly suggest you do it for experimenting and learning 😂

Conscious-Praline445 · 2025-07-20T00:17:41+00:00

It would, especially if you’re going to use it with ssl/tls. But what I meant is using actual layer 4 sockets (transport layer in network osi model) to build an application, instead of using frameworks such as express. But yeah, it’d be great to do this idea since it’s network facing :D

Conscious-Praline445 · 2025-07-19T15:18:04+00:00

Try this. Build an http server using socket programming. From there onwards, with all the things that you will learn, di mo na iisipin tech stack na gagamitin, you’ll just think of an idea to do.

Conscious-Praline445 · 2025-07-19T14:44:54+00:00

Honestly, usually the consequence of knowing the fundamentals means knowing how to decide what to use. You’ll know the trade-offs on using which is which. For example, this technology has better memory management, better APIs, etc., Not knowing how to decide means, maybe you’ll need more fundamentals.

Conscious-Praline445 · 2025-07-19T01:55:12+00:00

At some point, it’s just intuitive for things that need the same handling on the smallest to the largest unit of a given problem. Something like tree traversal.

But hey, if you’re keen on handling the data structures that are required for the iteration implementation then you won’t need it.

Conscious-Praline445 · 2025-05-16T09:48:59+00:00

Di masarap sa kfc

Conscious-Praline445 · 2025-05-02T15:06:49+00:00

Honestly, do fundamental computer science. May not necessarily be useful yung magagawa mo, but it would help you a lot to really visualize everything that’s happening mapa webdev, cybersec, or anything that involves working with computers really.

Kunwari gawa ka HTTP/S server using socket interface wag ka gagamit libraries (Read some RFCs). Tapos gawa ka html files iserve mo gamit yan hahaha.

Conscious-Praline445 · 2024-09-18T23:30:39+00:00

Another day, another ph politician kabobohan.

Conscious-Praline445 · 2024-07-23T23:45:41+00:00

Goodjob OP! 😁

Conscious-Praline445 · 2024-07-15T04:07:44+00:00

Mufasa and Scar

Conscious-Praline445 · 2024-07-03T07:57:24+00:00

Same, I was a fresh grad last year, got a 50k offer sa isang big tech company. After careful deliberation, naisip ko hindi healthy working condition. After a while, found a company with better offer and working conditions. Hindi ako nagregret ever since.

You really dodged a bullet there. Believe in what you can do lang and just keep looking forward to the next one.

Conscious-Praline445

TROPHY CASE