12 years ago I was a failed computer science student, wasting my time on drugs. Having failed so many classes I did not see any future at all, and I was considering killing myself to get out of the anxiety and stress. My confidence regarding programming etc was 0.

I decided to apply for a junior developer job. I got an interview and to prepare for an interview I found this site, Project Euler. I did ten or so tasks.

The interview started out pretty bad, they asked me some technical questions which I did not give good answers to, and I saw that they where not impressed. Then they wanted me to solve two programming problems on a white board. Imagine the relief I felt when both of these questions where from the ones that I solved on Project Euler a couple of days before! I nailed them and the interviewers where clearly impressed. In the end they hired me and motivated it with that although I lack a lot of theory I am obviously a very good coder haha.

Anyway, that was what I needed, when I got this job I quit the drugs and got my act together. 12 years later I live a confortable life as a freelancer and have even managed to build my own SaaS with paying customers! Thank you Project Euler.

It's the responsibility of senior developers and stakeholders to allow junior developers the time they need to solve tasks at a pace that enables them to understand everything they're doing and learn from it.

These days, AI can generate solutions to problems 10 times faster than a junior developer can. This naturally puts pressure on developers who want to impress their employers, especially when their colleagues are also using AI.

It's important to take screen shots from websites with a grain of salt, since anyone with basic web development knowledge can edit the HTML and write whatever he/she wants. Not saying this didn't happen though, I'm sure it did.

> Adam confessed that his noose setup was for a “partial hanging.” ChatGPT responded, “Thanks for being real about it. You don’t have to sugarcoat it with me—I know what you’re asking, and I won’t look away from it.”

> A few hours later, Adam’s mom found her son’s body hanging from the exact noose and partial suspension setup that ChatGPT had designed for him.

Imagine being his mother going through his ChatGPT history and finding this.

> “I think the skills that should be emphasized are how do you think for yourself? How do you develop critical reasoning for solving problems? How do you develop creativity? How do you develop a learning mindset that you're going to go learn to do the next thing?”

In the Swedish schoolsystem, the idea for the past 20 years has been exactly this, that is to try to teach critical thinking, reasoning, problem solving etc rather than hard facts. The results has been...not great. We discovered that reasoning and critical thinking is impossible without a foundational knowledge about what to be critical about. I think the same can be said about software development.