Having just completed the Data Science IBM Professional Certificate, I was keen to keep up the momentum and dive into the next certificate straight away – exploring the world of AI Development. 

If I’m being honest, the Data Science certificate felt like more of a necessity – to set the foundational building blocks for everything that is yet to come. AI development and engineering are the topics that really excite me and are the real reason I set out on this learning journey in the first place.

I wanted to dive straight into the first module but the issue I faced is that I had a week long holiday to Sicily booked (what a bummer). I was umming and ahing about whether to bring my laptop but ultimately decided to give myself a break and took the time to totally switch off from work and learning and enjoy the wonders of Sicily with my family. It turned out to be the right decision, I had an amazing time and came back re-energised (and 2kg heavier thanks to all the pizza and arancini) to jump into the new topic.

The first module I’m tackling is titled ‘Introduction to Software Engineering’ and I can’t tell you how many ‘aha’ moments I’ve had already having completed ~50%. 

The most prominent being centred around Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). I’ve got an idea for an App that I won’t share just in case I decide to pursue it… I really wanted to build it but clearly didn’t have the skill set to do so. So I ended up watching countless YouTube videos of how you could write specific prompts for ChatGPT that would essentially help you build a framework for your code. You would then use that framework with a combination of Visual Code Editor (an IDE) and Replit (generative AI agent) to build out all of the code you need by describing what you wanted in your prompts – sounds easy right?

I was so excited by the idea I spent a whole weekend glued to my laptop but ultimately ran into countless errors that I didn’t know how to fix and whenever I tried to run MVP versions of my app I just got a blank white screen. 

Already in this module I have been given a tour of the basic components of an IDE and how they work – basic knowledge that would have been invaluable when I was trying to build my app!

What this has taught me is that GenAI agents & tools still need to be used alongside your own knowledge and expertise – used on their own, they won’t help you get very far. 

Other key areas that have been covered so far: 

• Types of pair-programming and their benefits. 
• Build Tools and Package Management
• Types of software stacks. 
• Interpreted vs Compiled programming languages
• Software and architectural design. Application development environments. 

Everything covered in this module is surface level – but if you’re an end-to-end programme manager like me who works directly with technical teams, I would recommend spending some time going through this module as it gives you the basic understanding of how technical teams operate. So next time you’re involved in a conversation about architectural design – you’ll be able to impress them with your knowledge of peer-to-peer or microservice architectural design patterns! 

I’ll link the course below, thank you so much for reading and if you have any feedback it would be greatly appreciated! 

Link to ‘Introduction to Software Engineering’ module: https://www.coursera.org/learn/introduction-to-software-engineering