u/robint88

My band (Horrid Fog) just released our new EP yesterday and I just wanted to share a track here. We are very much influenced by a lot of prog, psych and dark folk - the sound is pretty much somewhere between King Gizzard, Lankum, Fairport Convention, Strawbs etc. So I figured people may be in to it!

We play a lot with time signatures (13/8, 9/8, 5/4 ... ), experiment with different instrumentation - anything from the fiddle to heavy synths (this track has both!), as well as trad vocal melodies.

Hope you guys enjoy it. Open to feedback too!

I've been offered a junior software developer role and I'm excited, but also feeling quite out of my depth.

I've only really been seriously focused on programming since around August last year. Before that it was something I'd picked up on and off over the years. Most of my recent work has been AI/ML focused rather than traditional software engineering.

I've built a few projects that I think are decent such as:

- Property contract summarisation SaaS application with authentication, payments and Stripe Integration

- medical report summarisation project using a fine-tuned T5 model trained on medical data

- a few EDA projects and code along projects like a CV/Resume analyser.

I think these seem like decent projects, but I still feel like I don't really know anything. A lot of what I've built has involved reading and following tutorials, googling solutions, and stitching together different ideas to create something that works. I feel ok looking at the code and explaining what each bit more or less does but if you asked me to reconstruct a project again from scratch off the top of my head I'd be lost.

The role I've been offered sounds like it will involve working with data from different sources, transforming/cleaning it, and building applications around it. They also create their own ML models with the data to predict risks etc. It also focuses a lot on geolocation.

The company is more or less a bootstrapped startup.

So I guess I have a few questions really :

- How much learning is expected to happen on the job in a smaller startup like this?

- If you had one month before starting your first developer role, what would you focus on learning? Nothing that I was told "a lot of the work is pulling data, changing it to the same format and making it look pretty on a web app"

-What skills or concepts would give the biggest return on investment in that month?

I think a lot of my anxiety comes from feeling like I've managed to build things that work, but I'm not sure whether that's because I've genuinely learned software development or because I've become OK at forcing together bits of code found on GitHub/tutorials etc. Also, I think there's anticipation not really knowing what tech I will be using and how to go in to the role with a bit of skill in the stack they use.

I’m currently doing an AI conversion course that comes with a job guarantee, so realistically I expect I’ll be given a proper work laptop once I land a role. Right now though, my personal laptop is on its last legs — it’s slow, running out of storage, and the screen is cracked — so I need something new to use at home.

This wouldn’t be my main long-term career machine. It’s more for building portfolio projects, properly learning ML/AI, running some smaller local models, and general coding with Python, VS Code, Jupyter, etc. I want something that will last a few years and not feel limiting while I’m learning, but also isn’t overkill given I’ll likely have a separate work laptop in the near future.

Where I’m getting stuck is all the conflicting advice online. On one hand, I keep seeing that NVIDIA GPUs (CUDA) are basically the standard for AI, which makes me think I should go for something like a gaming laptop such as the HP Omen Transcend 14. On the other hand, a lot of people say MacBooks are perfectly fine for AI work, especially at the learning stage and when you’re relying more on cloud tools. So I’m unsure whether I actually need that level of GPU power right now.

I’m also not clear on specs. Some people say 16GB RAM is enough, others say you really need 32GB, and then with Macs there’s the 24GB option in the middle which seems like a compromise. Storage-wise, I’m assuming 1TB is probably the safe minimum, but again I’m not totally sure. I’m trying to figure out whether it’s smarter to prioritise a nicer daily-use machine like a MacBook or Dell XPS, or go for something more powerful like a gaming laptop even if it’s less pleasant to use day to day.

For context, I’m currently using a Huawei MateBook 14 from 2020, which has honestly been great up until now, so I’m not tied to any particular OS.

In terms of what I’ve actually done so far, I’ve trained a T5 model on a few thousand samples for a text summarisation API, worked through standard regression and classification problems, and done some basic image recognition projects. Everything has been fairly small-scale so far, but I want a machine that won’t hold me back as I build more projects.

I’d be looking to spend up to around £1200, but I’m totally fine going cheaper if that’s enough for what I need.

One other thing is cloud vs local. I see a lot of people saying to just use cloud computing for training models, but everything I’ve done so far has been local. So it makes me question what I truly need.

Would really appreciate hearing from people who are already working in AI/ML or who’ve gone through a similar stage. I’m probably overthinking it, but I’d rather get it right than regret it in a year or two.