Skip to content

Every Tuesday at 12pm Mountain Time

weekly-dev- chat logo

A casual weekly virtual chat mostly focused on web and software development.

Weekly Dev Chat is a place to ask questions, hear different viewpoints, and get to know your fellow developers. Every week there is an initial topic posted to get the discussion started. Sometimes we discuss the initial topic the entire chat, and other times the topic changes several times through the natural flow of the conversation.

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others.

What If... You didn't become a software developer?

Think back to that one point in your life that put you on the path to being a software developer and now take an alternative path. Aside from your career how else would your life be different? Would the company(s) you worked for be better, worse, or the same? Would you live somewhere else? Different hobbies? Different friends and/or spouse(s)? What else do you think would be different or the same?

Inspired by me going to visit relatives and wondering how my life would be different if we hadn't moved to Edmonton when I was a kid. Also by the popular Marvel comics and TV show.

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others.

P.S. - The featured image was created with ChatGPT where i asked it to create image similar to the Marvel What If? covers.

What if you didn't become a software developer comic cover

Other Emerging Tech

Are there other emerging technologies in the computer world that you find interesting? Maybe even other implementations of AI outside of the current mainstream? AI, particularly LLMs, is obviously the hot topic of the day, but what about other innovations that are going on?

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Zoom link will be posted at 12pm MDT.

What is Magic to you in Software Development?

Arthur C. Clarke famously said: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." What is your "this is magic" in software development? Put another way what is something you currently don't understand but would like to?

As an older developer I'm struggling to fully understand LLMs and agents. How do you train one? Why are some agents/LLM models so much better than others? I'm curious to hear what others struggle with.

Clarke's Three Laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Zoom link will be posted at 12pm MDT.

P.S. - The featured image is from Claude Opus 4.8. In my personal experence Claude is the best for development but horrible at images. The output from Claude about the image made me laugh and reminds me of when a kid draws a picture and you have to sneakly ask them what it really is.

Here's an illustration for your post—a wizard's crystal ball displaying a neural network and glowing nodes, resting on an open spellbook whose pages show streams of code. The Clarke quote sits at the top, with your discussion prompt anchoring the bottom, and magical sparks scattered throughout to tie the "technology as magic" theme together.

A bad Claude generated image that is supposed by be crystal ball over a spell book