TL;DR - I got let go from my job and am looking for the next thing. Check out my CV to see what I could do for you.

My time at RetailMeNot Group (formerly Ziff Davis Shopping) is abruptly over as I got laid off in what was explained to me as "an immediate budget reduction due to revenue". It was emphasized to me that it was a "purely financial decision" and that they had been happy with my work and was thanked for all my contributions to the project and the team.

That is pretty standard corporate stuff -- I got told a similar thing when I get let go by Mozilla back in 2020. My experience at Mozilla did teach me that loyalty in the corporate world means very little, so to my former teammates at ZiffDavis -- I will miss working with you and I hope the project goes well.

I am not upset about this -- I learned the harsh realities of Working For The Man a long time ago.

A big undercurrent to all this was the decision (like many other companies) to commit heavy resources to the use of LLM's as part of the software development process. They want as far as to make the use of LLM's a part of your work evaluation.

As many of you know, I am not a fan of these tools. The people who created them very clearly stole most of the training data (my books were in the notorious 'libgen' web site) and have made promises about their effectiveness that doesn't seem to match reality.

I expressed my opinions to management (at several levels) and decided that I'd rather keep my job than get fired for not using them. So, I used the tools they provided. They were okay -- they helped get working code a lot faster but required the same level of attention during the review process. I treated them like I was pair programming and would slowly go through the work, telling the tool what I wanted done.

In the end, it didn't matter. I got let go and they are hoping that spending some percentage of my salary on LLM tokens instead of having me around to help with stuff an LLM cannot do will work. They might be right...but there is lots of evidence that LLM's are not delivering on the promises.

So, I am back on the market looking to help your team. Want to speed up getting your code into production? Tired of fixing the same bugs over and over again? Want to know some better ways to use LLM's to build maintainable software? I can help you with all that.