The Software Engineer's Guidebook

CHAPTER 26

LIFELONG LEARNING

What separates some of the best software engineers out there, from the rest? One thing is that the great ones never stop learning. As well as picking up new languages and technologies, they dive into new, interesting approaches.

Take Simon Willison, co-creator of the web Django framework, former director of architecture at Eventbrite, and an independent software engineer at the time of this book’s publication. Simon has been coding for more than 20 years and is a very productive engineer, who has not stopped learning new approaches. A few months after the general release of ChatGPT, Simon documented his experiments⁠¹ with the large language model, and what he’d learned about its applicability in helping ...