How do you become "technical"?
I have a roadmap for you to become technical in the age of AI. I'd say it's possible to do in a 2-3 month period, part time.
This is for the folks who are productive but never coded. It will make you drive agents like a pro in a few weeks. Let's go!!
Introduction to coding in C - 2 or 3 weeks:
"But Gui! coding is going away!!". Yes it is, but don't think "coding" was ever the hard part. A text of law in English is in the same language as your lazy brain rot. Hence a lawyer learns English.
You likely won't work in C, hell you won't even code. But C teaches you about loops, data types, memory. Don't aim at becoming a pro but talk the lingo. Chars, constants, binaries and all that fancy lingo that we use to make you feel dumb. It's actually not that deep. (for real)
AWS cloud practitioner - 1 week:
The "cloud" is really just somebody's computer you are renting. It's Netflix for a bad server and a tiny hard drive.
This course is free on AWS and will show you in 20 (or so) hours all the crazy parts about devops, cloud databases and this. Again fancy lingo we use to make you feel not special.
There are a lot of topics in there. You won't get everything and that's fine. Being "technical" is about moving up the abstraction ladder effectively. This will show you what is at the base of the ladder.
Play from
@catmcgee and
@ziginiz - daily
LLMs are ultra fancy word predictors with a shit ton of knowledge and special "training". If you think it's god in a can, you will pray and hope for the best.
This website is amazing to teach the mentality. It forces you to uncover the hidden relationships in language. In step 1 and 2 I gave you the lingo. Now use that lingo to get the LLM to uncover the next steps for you. No need to know everything, just learn prose and express yourself vividly with as much precision.
The LLM will do the rest.
Matt Pocock: 1-2 weeks
Engineering moved up to a higher abstraction once again. But it's still the same recipe, just faster:
1. Define the problem
2. Spec it out
3. Implement
4. Test it
5. Ship it
Matt's course will show you how to apply engineering principles to coding agents. Practice that recipe a few times and you should start to get the pattern.
Ship a small project and understand it.
You end with a small project. Be careful to have a small scope, don't spend 6 months on this. Spend 1-2 weeks. Make it good, unslop it. Make sure you understand the moving parts: the DB, the server, the UI.
Go small but go deep. You are building a muscle. Don't be the silly one at the gym yelling proudly on a 1kg weight.
Practice the muscle and learn. Then of course share it with everybody.
Also never ever again say you are "not technical".