Much has been written about the impact of AI tooling on software development, or indeed on any creative endeavor. Some of those blogs may already be written by AI, who knows? If the benefits for mundane coding tasks today are any foretaste of what lies ahead, I dare not contemplate what the next year will bring, let alone the next decade. I’m not overly worried. The price of job security was always continuous upgrading of your skillset - which is why I’m studying for the Oracle Certified Professional Java SE 17 developer exam. The OCP is reassuringly and infuriatingly old-school. It grills you on arrays, shorts, ObjectOutputStream, the flip bit operator ^, and much you’re probably not going to write or encounter. What is the point? I’ll tell you.
On the one hand, the programming profession has changed beyond recognition from when I started in 1999 and long before that. I look forward to veteran Jim Highsmith’s upcoming book Wild West to Agile. It’s supposed to be liberally sprinkled with personal anecdotes from the era of punch cards and overnight compiles. The teasers remind me of the classic Four Yorkshiremen sketch by Monty Python, boasting how tough they had it. “We lived eighteen to a room! – Luxury! We lived in a septic tank.”