MARRIAGE AND AI, IN THAT ORDER

In just a few short days, I will be getting hitched. I am marrying my best friend and the love of my life. I am so excited to spend the rest of my life with Erica. We've been real busy with all sorts of preparation for the wedding and more. Plus, I'll be going on a real vacation pretty soon: our honeymoon. For two weeks, I'll be in Asia for the first time, in Bali!

While I'll be away from coding and tech, I did want to take some time now to write a little bit for its own sake. I'm sad to see a pretty consistent streak of GitHub commits be going by the wayside, but I'm happy for the mental break. Like with all problem-solving, time spent away from it can be a wellspring for the creative process.

I've been burning the candle at both ends for upwards of a year, since my General Assembly bootcamp started in June '23, and here we are almost to the day. I've not stopped working (guidance counselor at a high school), and while I am now happily on summer vacation, it's been really hard to squeeze in time for everything. I have numerous ideas that are collecting dust, and I've been less able to throw myself into learning some truly exciting things for lack of time: real Python data science and machine learning applications, stuff really beyond the fluff (and fun) of frontend design.

Taking care of yourself is always number one: I'm happy to say I've been hitting the gym far more regularly, along with better sleep hygiene. I've not been able to read nearly as much as I want to, but I'll be reading plenty on the beach in Bali. I'll be bringing:

• V. by Thomas Pynchon
• The Death Ship by B. Traven
• assorted Philip K. Dick novels and whatever else is on my Kindle
• Maybe Libra or Underworld by Don Delillo, finally.

Automation

At work I've been trying to sneak in ways to automate work as much as possible. It's a creative endeavor in itself, truly: what are the most repetitive, computer-based tasks that I do, and are these tasks able to be programmed?

• Emails: to spin up a rough draft, sans any confidential info of course
• Queries: On a daily basis, I navigate our school database, and making direct SQL queries would save a whole lot of tedium when generating reports (attendance, grades, credits, etc.)
• Automating emails: Reminder emails to parents or students about upcoming career fairs, college visits, and so on.

On the whole, my experience trying to incorporate generative AI into my guidance work has been rather underwhelming. Copy-pasting things into ChatGPT and other engines has been helpful, but it saves me keystrokes rather than time.

Nota bene: I have used some engines such as Perplexity to great help, such as finding a Reddit-sourced Google Sheets for a great number of universities' undergraduate admissions email addresses. This saved me a ton of time.

I want to spend some time this summer working on some custom GPT projects. Ideally, a sort of copilot (to use an entirely overused word) for various writing. Since ChatGPT is so useful for boilerplate, I want to have a structure for a given purpose (e.g. a student with excessive absences), and be able to just give the GPT a list of students' names and their related number of absences. Then, I'd hopefully have a bunch of text to be copy-pasted in.