Especially if that helps to keep them in alphabetical order for emergency responders 😊

My first information system. It wasn't effecient or pretty, but as a learning exercise, I continue to reap the benefits of struggling to make it to this day.

I can't help but think about all of the other folks, creating things out of necessity, relying on the easiest (not best) tool for the job out there that are missing out on learning opportunities because of it.

Like a preemptive brain drain...

Thing is, if there were LLMs available years ago...I could've done all of that in like...an afternoon. It would've been buggy, but usable. No one was relying on that app to diagnose anything...but I also would have learned *nothing*

Flash forward a few months, and I'd enrolled in a Master's of Information Systems. I learned a little SQL along the way and eventually got into the back end with server code. I could finally write an app server...

Eventually, I learned enough to create an interactive staining widget. Trainees could watch a vial fill a coplin jar with reagents and watch the colors *change*. Probably wayyy too many lines of CSS to make that happen, but it worked, and I *learned* all of it...

As I went through the free lessons on freecodecamp, I'd apply them in code sandbox, which hosted my code, for free, through a URL that any of my trainees could get to.

At first, they were quizzes with interactive widgets,i.e
"Change the settings of this processor to optimize paraffin infiltration"

I'd had a little experience with coding, between making games with Game Maker and a high school web design class. I started with the basics. I didn't know how to code a web server, and I sure as hell couldn't host one at the hospital.

I started with code sandbox and freecodecamp.org.

We had a few techs that were allowed to perform basic work, but did not have their certifications. My job was to teach them what I'd learned during a year-long internship in a much smaller time frame.

Enter web apps and self-guided learning.

Folks were playing cards, putting together puzzles, anything short of just leaving early as the ~10 of us were sharing a workload of cutting microscope slides from 30 pieces of paraffin tissue embedded in paraffin. That's about 0.5->1 hour worth of work for one person.

But let that plugin run for more than a few minutes (until the RMI connection expires) and it'll throw errors until you restart the app server...which fixes it again!

Inappropriate static variables are now my red flags for AI use in that platform.

I can't count how many times I've cleaned up static-scoped utility variables because they included objects with - you guessed it - RMI-dependent objects.

The insidious thing is, they'll work the first time, which means they'll pass someone's initial testing...

Add things like RMI connections and file servers, and there's just too much for it to handle.

For instance, LLMs LOVE singletons. They're an awesome design choice when you're creating utilities, except LLMs don't understand that RMI connections expire.