Hi, I'm Jian. I build full-stack web apps, and I'm starting this blog to capture what I've learnt.
I studied Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London, where I specialised in signal processing and machine learning. I picked up coding after national service (NS) and got deeper into it in uni. These days the work is full-stack: front end, back end, and applied machine learning on the side.
I decided to start writing because I'm learning a lot in a short span of time. Some of it comes from building projects by hand, the slow way (one function at a time). Now, a lot of it comes from building with agentic LLMs. I describe what I want, the agent writes a few hundred lines, and the job just flies by. It's great, but the code shows up faster than the understanding does.
This blog is where I slow down. I want to catch the lessons and write them up in a way that's short, honest, and actually useful.
LLMs and coding agents are a good thing. I love writing code by hand and I'll keep doing it for the fun of it, but the tools are excellent and it's hard to pretend otherwise. People said the calculator would make kids bad at maths. They said it about the TV, about search engines, about every tool that took over a chore we used to do ourselves. What actually happened is we adapted and spent the freed-up attention on harder things. I don't buy that agents will make us dumber. As a junior developer, I have a lot to learn from them, and not only about code. Asking an LLM to explain its reasoning has been insightful, and has taught me about how to communicate clearly (which engineers are notoriously bad at).
Who's this for?
Mostly me. But also you, if you're a developer who feels like the ground is moving too fast. The space shifts every week, and agents tear through thousands of lines while we're trying to keep up with last month's concepts. That feeling is real, and it's easy to feel like you're falling behind.
I think we can still learn deeply and build real experience in the age of agentic coding. The trick is being deliberate about what we slow down for. Hopefully this blog inspires you to try things. Build the side project. Wire up an agent and see how far it gets, then switch it off and write the next feature by hand, just because it feels good. They're both valid approaches.
When I'm coding I like to have a coffee going. Or a beer, but not both at the same time. When I'm not coding I'm usually at the piano, working through pop and RnB songs.
There'll be more coming soon. Thanks for reading the first one.
Jian
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