Alicia Sykes

I’m not normally so active on here, but am just really saddened about the SBG/Flutter redundancies. I agree with so much of the sentiment already posted by friends and former colleagues - SBG was THE place to be in Leeds and the wider North region for such a long time. Obviously change is inevitable but it doesn’t make it any less sad and I feel for everyone currently affected. I thought I would follow-up on my earlier post and offer some tips to anyone now looking for work for the first time in potentially a long time - albeit still obviously happy to chat if anyone wants to reach out directly. 1. Don’t panic. You’ll be ok. I would hope Flutter will look after you which will give you some time. 2. For now, and throughout your search, look after yourself. Take time off, stretch your legs. Lean on friends and family if you can, offload! 3. Persevere and stay positive. The right thing for you is definitely out there! 4. Use AI, but use it well. - Ask it to review and critique your CV (albeit redact personal info before pasting into ChatGPT etc). - Ask it to compare your CV to a particular job description. - Ask it to act as the hiring manager for a particular role and perform a mock interview. - DO NOT use its output verbatim. Write everything in your own voice, that’s the human part. AI-generated text is so obvious. And no - this post is not that! 5. A good CV is definitely important, so make sure it’s up-to-date. Don’t just list generic skills, rather what impact you made and what value you can bring. 6. Update your LinkedIn profile and make sure it’s consistent with your CV. 7. Upload your CV to jobsite.co.uk - recruiters definitely do use this in my experience. 8. Know what you’re good at (and what you’re not); it makes recruiter calls easier. 9. Don’t rely on making applications through LinkedIn. Complete waste of time IMO, you’re much better off going direct through company career websites, recruiters, hiring managers if you can. 10. Be proactive. Use your network if you have one. LinkedIn, former colleagues, tech meet-ups, etc. And/or reach out to recruiters directly. Get lots of calls scheduled, sell yourself, be enthusiastic. 11. Be hyper-organised. Use a spreadsheet with something like task, status, date, and notes columns. Add a new row for any recruiter contact or role applied for, and update the notes after any communication and set the date for whenever a follow-up is scheduled, or when you plan to chase. 12. When you land interviews, prepare. Do all the usual stuff - research the company, practice situational interview questions (and STAR method answers), prepare your own questions for the interviewers, etc. Again, AI tools can be quite good at helping with this. Hope any of that is helpful and I’m more than happy to chat as well. DM if you want any CV sanity checking or anything like that.

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Unpopular Opinion: Experienced developers who '10x' themselves using AI are full of it. Sorry, I literally do not believe you. Of all the posts I've read of experienced SW developers who claim AI has made them '10x' more productive (and yes there are LOTs who literally say this) - not one has shown any evidence . The best I have seen is people who say "I finished this project in X days with AI and it WOULD HAVE taken me 10X days without AI'. Oh ? and how do you know that? One of the most important thing I have learned from 40+ years of SW development - 'we' suck at estimating how long things will take. Really Really Badly. Finally people have started doing scientific-ish studies to validate these claims. First result hot-off-the presses - 5+ year experienced SW developers given random real tasks performed 19% slower using AI then not. AND - most interesting, they believed they did it 20% faster. https://lnkd.in/gYSW4C8i

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Thoughts on Go after using it recently: - not being object orientated is a big plus. One of my least favourite parts of C#/Java - feels right at home coming from a typescript background - concurrency built into the language feels very nice - wish the type system had some more advanced features like discriminated unions - auto garbage collection makes the language very easy to use  - the fact that it compiles to a binary so no runtime is needed is a great advantage - seems like it's a language in between rust and C# which makes it a great tool for a lot of projects - love that go has errors as values and you can see which functions can return an error ahead of time, maybe one day we'll get something like this into typescript ( kinda is with effect.ts ) - interfaces being implicit instead of explicit is interesting and I'm not sure how I feel about it yet

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The second part of my chat with John Crickett on the Coding Chats podcast is out now, looking at how businesses looking to hire can get the most out of working with a recruiter. Quick clip below with me highlighting the importance of: A) partnering with the right agency and B) not just going for the cheapest option, because it tends to be that you get what you pay for Link to the full pod in the comments on the original Coding chats post. #recruitment #techrecruitment #staffing #podcast #hiring

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I mentioned one of my “down the pub” software development opinions to James Lewis at EventCentric. He suggested that I mention it to Kent Beck and so, while I remember. But definitely, the tone here, is “crazy talk over a pint.” ———- XP optimises software development for folks with ADHD. The Extreme Tuesday Club is likely a hotbed of ADHD diagnoses. TDD, CI, Small Releases: we need those rewards to keep coming in regular doses. Pair Programming: “Stay on target, stay on target” Refactoring, Boy Scout Rule: “Ooh, while I am here, I should fix that as well. Now where was I? Oh the test list.” Sustainable Pace: We can only focus so long in one stretch, even with the above. Planning Game: one story at a time, don’t get distracted by other things. Business value, not “shiny thing.” Small stories because we get bored easily. Whole team working so that we can get to that shiny story faster. Osmotic Communication: Quick, let me blurt out my idea before I get distracted and forget I wonder if there is a correlation between XP teams achieving flow, and XP teams filled with neurodivergent people who have figured a coping mechanism for productivity.

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The purpose of this post is to touch base on Ollama and how it can help with both privacy and running a cost efficient pipeline for indie devs. If you haven't heard of ollama, I highly recommend checking their website and read https://lnkd.in/gUvgcRSY. In a nutshell, it allows you to run certain models locally or in a docker container which can help with hosting models on your machine or server. It has a lot more features which I'm still learning about. I've been playing around with qwen3:30b for majority of the time and just recently updated to qwen3.5:35b. Both run smoothly on M4 Max / 48GB but could've run better on 64GB only if I knew better to get that upgrade. I'll write more on the projects that I'm working on in future, but in a nutshell, I used LLM to run a two-phase pipeline: - Filter 1.3million records from jsonl and reduce it to 50K useful records for the app - Run through all 50K records to select most meaningful samples among several examples for each record. In addition, fallback mechanism for any missing data needed

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Seeing far fewer Frontend roles right now Spoke to an engineer yesterday who thinks this is partly due to how easy it is to prompt AI to generate HTML, CSS, and JavaScript using frameworks like React, Vue, or Angular Whats everyones thoughts? Surely this can't be the only reason for the decline in demand

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