Meet Sam Julien 🇺🇸! Sam is a director of Developer Relations at Writer, a teacher, and the author of Getting Started in Developer Relations. He loves helping people level up their developer advocacy or web development jobs. Recently, he became interested in AI engineering. And in this episode, you'll find out why you should, too!

Sam will teach you how to differentiate passing fads from the tech that's here to stay, how to stay future-proof, and why it's still important to learn the basics. AI as a tool has changed the scale at which we can make stuff - and that's the biggest reason to get acquainted with it. Sam and Alex discuss the current state of the job market in the realm of AI engineering, whether AI will make developers obsolete, as well as the novel use cases and key applications of large language models. Sam also shares how he broke into the field! You'll also learn more about Writer - their LLMs are available on Hugging Face!

🔗 Connect with Sam

⏰ Timestamps

How Sam Julien got into AI engineering (01:34)
What convinced Sam that AI was here to stay? (03:56)
Sam was strategic about pursuing AI engineering (05:55)
The spectrum of career opportunities in AI engineering (07:23)
Machine learning is not the only thing you can work on! (09:19)
The current state of the job market: there's a significant discrepancy between how people perceive AI engineering and how things are actually going
Break (14:02)
What is Writer (15:01)
Writer's own AI models - also available on Hugging Face (17:03)
Are there opportunities for front-end developers in this space? (18:28)
How to learn AI engineering? (23:19)
Using models to teach you how to use models (25:18)
Did Sam use AI to get a job in AI engineering? (27:48)
Quick-fire questions: favorite podcasts, music, and people to follow (28:49)
Do you need an ML certificate? (31:06)
Novel uses and core applications of AI and LLMs (31:58)
Should a new developer focus on AI? (35:33)
How to stay future-proof (40:44)
It just takes one breakthrough to catch you by surprise (41:43)
How to use Writer (41:53)

🧰 Resources Mentioned

Course: Level Up From Software Engineer to AI Engineer (Shawn "Swyx" Wang and Noah Hein)
Latent Space Podcast
The Rise of the AI Engineer
Scrimba's AI path
Kadasha Kerr

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