A I & C h i l l

If you’re like me — a dev who grew up Googling error messages and living on Stack Overflow tabs — you probably never cracked open a 900-page {Insert you programming language/framework} book to learn how to do "that thing". Sure classics like "Clean Code" didn't go away but on day-to-day stuff my learning curve didn’t start with books — it started with copy-pasting from stackoverflow, blogs, lynda/pluralsight turtorials, documentations, and piecing things together from a dozen open tabs. The impact from books to the web was huge and I feel we havent experienced a similar shift until today. Just like the devs before us moved from books to the web, we’re now moving from the web… to AI. We’re in the middle of another huge shift in how software engineers learn, debug, and build. That shift empowers us but also greatly changes the skillset required and the ceiling of expectations. Ultimately it raises existential questions, will we still be needed?

In a world where AI tools like GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, and Cursor are transforming how we write code, there's a new breed of software development taking shape: vibe coding. You're less of a line-by-line coder and more of a systems orchestrator, prompting and guiding an AI assistant that drafts the scaffolding, fills in the functions, and even writes your unit tests. But despite the automation, one thing hasn’t changed: debugging is still a core engineering skill.

So you’ve got data to move, transform, or wrangle into something useful — welcome to the glorious world of ETL. If you're in Azure-land, you’ve probably hit this classic dilemma: Do I roll my own ETL with Azure Functions and .NET? Or should I use Azure Data Factory (ADF), the low-code, drag-and-drop platform designed exactly for this? I've tried both. Here's how it went down — and how I decide which path to take.

I wasn’t burned out by coding. I was burned out by everything around it. Then Codex (and AI coding tools in general) came along — and suddenly, side projects didn’t feel like unpaid overtime anymore. Let’s be real for a second — I love building things. Side projects are fun in theory. But in practice? They were slowly draining the life out of me.