Welcome to Hanzkrafted.IO 👋
Hi, my name is Shoeb Ilyas! I have been working as a software engineer for many years now. To be thankful, since pre-AI era when we used to write code by hand. I love two things dearly, traveling and writing. This is my latest project where I am trying to provide you, the reader with high quality technical blogs curated meticulously by a human :).
Everything that doesn't have a purpose is usually devoid of meaning. So what was my purpose behind starting Hanzkrafted.IO? If you want an extremely short answer and don't want to read through this whole page - AI written articles. Recently, I have been seeing more and more AI-written content. With a few exceptions, I have a personal moral and intellectual compass that doesn't allow me to accept this mediocrity. Before you deem me as a conspiracy theorist and anti-AI nostalgic developer, let me clarify that I use coding agents and AI heavily in my work. I know how LLMs work behind the scenes.
What I am against, is us, as humans, forgetting to be human in the wake of AI. If we do not use our intellect and if we refuse to go through the mental struggle of understanding difficult concepts, using our brains to design systems and if we offload our thinking itself to AI, then it's not a good direction we are going in if this behavior is scaled to thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. What happens when, ten years down the line, when no one is reading research papers, no human is writing content and when you have LLMs, data generated by other LLMs? This will lead to a self-eating behavior as well as a decay in the quality of output from an LLM model. It's true that this is more of a theoretical concern and this side effect is something we have yet to witness. However, my concern is primarily us. More specifically, my concern is directed towards software engineers.
Being in the corporate world, I have reviewed many resumes and interviewed candidates as well. One conclusion that I can confidently draw is that - AI is not going to take our jobs and software developers are not going anywhere. There is a high demand of good software engineers. And they are hard to find in this saturated market. While we do have hundreds or thousands of resumes flowing in just for a single role, there's a scarcity of good engineers that take pride in their work.
It has become easier than ever to be ahead of the crowd because most people have the consumer mindset. Thanks (no thanks) to AI, they seem to have given up on the effort to become good engineers. Well, that leaves us and you with a great opportunity to become great engineers. And we do that by reading research papers, understanding system design well, learning from the bugs we encounter in our software systems at work and, most importantly, doing the hard things that most people are resistant to.
And that's why, dear reader, I started hanzkrafted.io. This is first, for my own personal efforts to become a better engineer, and second, for you, the reader, to learn along with me. All content on this platform is crafted meticulously by me. However, I am not lying when I say that the illustration images, and the entire website itself are done by AI. I only did the work of guiding the AI to construct. This is so I can focus on what this platform is built for - high quality technical articles meticulously crafted by a human.
I have tried to keep this platform as minimalist as I can to not make it distracting. Great now, you should delve into one of the items that you see there in the sidebar. Have a good time reading these and if you have ideas or topics that you would want me to write on, then you can also connect with me by clicking that link at the bottom in the sidebar.