Adding AI to legacy code doesn’t have to be a challenge. Many devs are hearing this right now: “We need to add AI to the app.” And for many of them, panic ensues. The assumption is that you have to rip your existing architecture down to its foundation. You start having nightmares about standing up complex microservices, massive AWS bills, and spending six months learning the intricate math behind vector embeddings. It feels like a monumental risk to your stable, production-ready codebase, right? Here’s the current reality though: adding AI to an existing application doesn’t actually require a massive rewrite.…
Author
Julian Sequeira
Latest articles
by
-
-
Why do we insist on struggling alone?
·
·
2 min readA realisation about my son’s basketball team reminded me that we should never be ashamed to ask for help, or better yet, seek formal coaching/support. Last year, for two straight seasons, my son’s team got absolutely smashed on the court. They had the energy and the determination, but they were effectively running in circles without any real guidance (and I’m definitely not a basketball player!). Sound familiar? It should! It’s exactly what it feels like when you can’t figure out where you’re going wrong, stuck in tutorial hell or banging your head against a wall trying to architect an application by…
-
How do you know if you’re actually growing as a dev? Last week I was chatting with a developer who’d hit a wall. (I talk to a lot of devs now that I think about it!) Like him, you might consider yourself a scrappy coder. You’re an all-rounder, can generally figure things out and write some sort of scrappy script to solve a problem. It’s actually a badge of pride! I myself have a bunch of scrappy scripts running in my home lab to do various things. The thing is, sometimes this confidence we feel being scrappy, may actually just…
-
How Even Senior Developers Mess Up Their Git Workflow
·
·
4 min readThere are few things in software engineering that induce panic quite like a massive git merge conflict. You pull down the latest code, open your editor, and suddenly your screen is bleeding with <<<<<<< HEAD markers. Your logic is tangled with someone else’s, the CSS is conflicting, and you realise you just wasted hours building on top of outdated architecture. It is easy to think this only happens to juniors, but it happens to us all. Case in point – this week it was the two of us butting… HEADs (get it?). When you code in isolation, you get comfortable.…
-
The issue with traditional performance tracking is that it is often an afterthought. We treat performance as a debugging task, (something we do after users complain), rather than a quality gate. Worse, when we try to automate it, we run into the “Noisy Neighbour” problem. If you run a benchmark in a GitHub Action, and the container next to you is mining Bitcoin, your metrics will be rubbish. To become a Senior Engineer, you need to start treating performance exactly like you treat test coverage. The Solution: Continuous Performance Guardrails If you want to stop shipping slow code, you need…
-
One of my readers replied to an email I sent a couple of weeks ago and we got into a brief discussion on what I’ll call, Skills Erosion. They brought up the point that by leaning too heavily on AI to generate code, people were losing their edge. It’s a good point that’s top of mind for many devs. I’m guessing you’ve thought about it too. After all, if AI writes all of our code, how are we actually learning anything? The exchange made me go down a rabbit hole and I found the data quite interesting. We all know what Vibe…
-
I interview a lot of professionals and developers, from 20-year veterans to people just starting out on their Python journey. But my conversation with Asif Pinjari was different. Asif is still a student (and a Teaching Assistant) at Northern Arizona University. Usually, when I talk to people at this stage of their life and career, they’re completely focused on passing tests or mastering syntax. Asif on the other hand, is doing something else: He’s doing things the Pybites way! He’s building with a focus on providing value. We spent a lot of time discussing a problem I’m seeing quite often…
-
I hate coding solo. Not in the moment or when I’m in the zone, I mean in the long run. I love getting into that deep focus where I’m locked in and hours pass by in a second! But I hate snapping out of it and not having anyone to chat with about it. (I’m lucky that’s not the case anymore though – thanks Bob!) So it’s no surprise that many of the devs I chat with on Zoom calls or in person share the same sentiment. Not everyone has a Bob though. Many people don’t have anyone in their circle that…
-
7 Software Engineering Fixes To Advance As A Developer
·
·
2 min readIt’s January! If you look back at yourself from exactly one year ago, January 2025, how different are you as a developer from then to now? Did you ship the app you were thinking about? Did you finally learn how to configure a proper CI/CD pipeline? Did you land the Senior role you were after? Or did you just watch a lot more YouTube videos and buy a few more Udemy courses that you haven’t finished yet? If the answer stings a little bit, you aren’t alone. Over the last six years of coaching hundreds of developers in PDM, Bob…
-
Bob and I have spent many years as Python devs, and 6 years coaching with Pybites and we can safely say that being a Senior Developer is only about 1/3 Python knowledge. The other 60% is the ecosystem. It’s the tooling. It’s all of the tech around Python that makes you stand out from the rest. This is the biggest blind spot keeping developers stuck in Tutorial Hell. You spend hours memorising obscure library features, but you crumble when asked to configure a CI/CD pipeline. (That’s not just made up by the way – many of you in dev roles will have seen…