My Goal

I sit here having just had Claude Code spin up this website as one of my first tasks using it. I feel very unsure about what I'm doing but I feel a lot more confident about it than I did 6 months ago. To be honest, I don't have a fully constructed goal or plan yet, and I'm hoping this blog will help me unravel that mystery. As of right now all I know is that I want to be involved in AI in some way, shape, or form. My ultimate goal, as of now, is to have my own business in AI so I can do something for myself, that hopefully helps people, that I can be proud of. Now, I'm not doing this for purely altruistic reasons, as I want my own business because of the autonomy and for the, hopeful, financial freedom eventually. I would like to help out the world in some small way though, and do believe that doing things that would better people's lives would be a much more exciting and enticing goal.

How I got here

I did not always want to work in AI, or tech, or anything even closely related to this field. I spend the last 12 or so years actually not wanting to have any major goal or career outside of restaurants. I've been a server for 17 years now, and I've loved doing it. The lifestyle of the server always drew me in because I could spend my day rock climbing or skydiving and then I could work in the evening. I always saw it as a sort of freedom, the 9-5 or any corporate jobs has never and still doesn't appeal to me.

About a year and a half ago I started to wonder what it would be like outside of the restaurant industry. I had spent most of youth on a computer and I wondered if I could get into programming. Knowing that there are plenty of online coding courses, I signed up and jumped in. I was immediately shut down. Not long after starting my first coding camp, on Python, I realized that I absolutely sucked at typing. You have to understand, in the 10 years I had spend since I moved to Arizona, I had mostly shunned technology. I had bought a laptop a couple years prior that I almost never used and didn't have pretty much any form of social media. So, while this might not sound like a major issue, as someone who struggles a little when things move slow, I was moving at a snails pace when it came to trying to type out my code which made it hard to stay focused.

Next thing I did was start using typing website to help improve my typing, which was one more thing that I had to work on every day as well as my coding camp. As the summer progress I wasn't getting very far. The slowness of my typing set me back but also I was struggling to understand programming, for and while loops, and the different layers of them just were not computing(hehe). So I turned to watching some youtube videos and more importantly listening to podcasts.

I wanted to immerse myself in programming and I wanted to feel like I wasn't so out of date so podcast seemed a good way to start to listen to people in the industry.

Ah Ha!

This brings me to my ah ha moment. While listening to the Lex Fridman Podcast, I stumbled upon his Sam Altman interview. I had heard of OpenAI and had experimented with ChatGPT 3.5 a while after it had come out. However, this set me off on a string of Lex's podcasts with Yann LeCunn, George Hotz, and Stephen Wolfram just to name a few. Obsessed feels like the most appropriate word. I went from someone who didn't really know what a podcast was,a year ago, to all of a sudden listening almost none stop any free moment I had, specifically about AI. I wasn't doing much else, I had started Harvard's Intro to Computer Science course thinking it would help me understand coding better but I only made a couple of weeks in because C sucks.

That's what I did for the next 4-6 months. I wasn't really working on coding anymore but I was obsessively learning about AI. It was about this time I had had another revelation on a more personally level. I've done better than I even expected too, financially, being a server but the money was never super important to me. I loved the fact that at most restaurants if I wanted or needed more money I could just work more then stop when I didn't need it. Last year, that more or less changed. My wife changed jobs a couple of times right after we had bought our first house. We struggled financially, and I say this with a grain of salt. We were not struggling to eat but we had to be a lot tighter with our money than we had in years. After some reflection, I realized that, even though money hadn't mattered most of my life, I enjoyed having more of it because of the freedom I felt. It had nothing to do with needing more things and more about not having the stress of I can't buy that one item because it might affect my bills on the future. I know that I won't make that in the restaurant industry because I'm more or less capped out. All of this happened when I lost my love for the industry and was falling in love with the world of AI.

Fast forward to the last 6 months and I've been working relentless to be involved in AI. I have started to taking many more courses in many different areas of computing. I did that Harvard course, CS150, which I enojyed immensely once I got past the C section, specifically with SQL. I've been taking TryHackMe's into to cyber security because it's a field I have always been interested in, even when I was younger, and a field my dad told me to get into over 16 years ago before it was cool. I have taken, as of today, 8 courses on DeepLearning AI, including 5 certificates. Now, I am trying as many AI tools as I can, including n8n and replit and more recently playing around with Claude Code.

My Future

I still don't really know where exactly I'm headed but I do know that as I learn more I realize more of what I don't know and I crave that knowledge more. I will continue to learn on TryHackMe and do planning on finishing their Cyber Security 101. I will continue to finish more courses on DeepLearning's website and I might push for one of their professional certificates. I, and this is something that I want to do more of, will start doing more personal projects using Claude Code and other such AI powered programs. Lastly, I am, very nervously, going to go to an AI Dev Conference put on by DeepLearning. I have never done anything like this before and it makes me incredibly nervous, I'd much rather jump out of an airplane. I, also, want to make it a goal to post on this website more with my progress and my thoughts. I've always wanted to organize my thoughts on AI and this seems like the perfect place.