https://owl.billpg.com/tags/professional/Recent content in Professional on billpg industries™Hugoen-us© William Godfrey.Sat, 18 Jul 2026 08:41:28 +0000https://owl.billpg.com/am-i-worried-ai-will-take-my-job/Sat, 18 Jul 2026 08:41:28 +0000https://owl.billpg.com/am-i-worried-ai-will-take-my-job/<p>People sometimes ask if I’m worried that AI will put me out of a job. My honest answer is <strong>no, not really</strong>.</p> <p>In fact, I’ve been here before.</p> <h2 id="the-first-time-the-machine-out-coded-me">The first time the machine out-coded me.</h2> <p>When I graduated in the 90s, assembly language was still a respectable skill. I wrote most of my code in C, but there was always that one tight loop or fiddly routine where a bit of hand-tuned assembler felt like wizardry. I was working in embedded systems, targeting a single CPU and we wanted every cycle to count.</p>https://owl.billpg.com/my-crazy-software-engineer-tattoo-that-i-didnt-get/Thu, 04 Apr 2019 17:19:00 +0000https://owl.billpg.com/my-crazy-software-engineer-tattoo-that-i-didnt-get/<p>I had an idea for a nerdy tattoo a few years ago. It would represent myself as a software engineer and I thought it was quite clever. I seriously considered having it done but decided against it in the end, despite its cleverness.</p> <h2 id="inkd">Ink&rsquo;d</h2> <p>This is my idea, the &ldquo;end comment&rdquo; symbol in many programming languages:</p> <div align="center"><tt style="font-size: 500%;">*/</tt></div> <p>In C, and other languages that can trace their lineage to C, comments start with a /* and end with a */. Anything inside is ignored by the language, allowing the programmer to describe what&rsquo;s going on. This is tremendously useful when reading other people&rsquo;s code or even your own code from the past.</p>