Technology and Innovation Musings - Alenka Caserman

So ChatGPT, large language models, generative AI etc is so awesome, right  Well, let me tell you a little story. Yesterday I had to renew two Microsoft certifications. Renewal exams are open book so you can search the internet to find the correct answer. I'll interpret that as, "you may use ChatGPT / Copilot / whatever to help with exam questions". They were the two "solution architect expert" certifications too that I really don't want to let expire. I won't say I was lazy, but I was feeling particularly unenthusiastic about having to use my brain on that day when I just wanted to get out of the house ASAP and go spend my time on something useful, such as... building a boat, for example. A brilliant idea popped into my head - hey, why don't I copy paste the exam questions into Copilot as fast as I can and smash through this renewal exam in like 15 minutes. I did just that. Now I won't say I'm proud of doing

  Today, I decided to organise my bookshelf to make some space for my more recent favourite pieces. I opened the bottom "closed" section of the bookshelf, which already acts as an archive space of some sort, and I immediately chuckled at these three rather chunky volumes. SQL Server 2005 - that's ancient history! I purchased these books more than 15 years ago, in the early days of my IT career, when I was studying for my first Microsoft certification exam. Many years have passed since then I had a very successful career as a software developer and solution architect. I can definitely say C# is still one of my favourite programming languages and I could whip out some C# code with ease even if you roused me from sleep a 3AM. It's well and truly time to throw these out.