Learning with AI help, server talk and parenting – our meet up on 12th February 2025

February 18, 2025

On 12th February twelve freelancers met in the Lord Nelson pub in Brighton to talk all things tech and self employment.

This is some of what we talked about:

Getting suddenly booked up with work is very welcome!
People still using bare metal hosting in 2025? “Get cloud servers because they’re more better”
Upgrading your server OS in place vs rolling out a VM and porting data onto it
On site sewing repairs
Properly old lobsters are huge
PHP Sussex talk on HTMX – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If3ZdkDRx9g
The good and bad sides of code in presentations
Watching the Super Bowl with Americans is fun
Is the development of Laravel driven by the apps that make Laravel money?
Building on Laravel over the long term
Games industry problems
Using AI tools to learn development piecemeal by getting past the blockages errors used to cause
Advanced parenting
The difficulty in helping your children learn when they’re taught using different techniques than how you were taught
Early jobs
The naff hotels we’ve stayed in when contracting

AI tools and learning

In the on-running thread about whether AI / LLMs are good or bad, a positive story: one of our members who does sysadmin and devops work has been finding AI tools very helpful in learning to program. Before, he found the wall put up by incomprensible errors messages difficult to overcome because even after searching for help, the help was often incomprensible in a different way.

Now, using Large Language Model driven tools, he’s able to put some code and the error into a chat window and get actionable help that actually gets past the problem, rather than a different set of problems to understand. He’s finding this is opening up an area he felt locked out of in the past.

While there’s a lot of problems with the LLM part of the AI world – copyright infringement, very high power use, water use – at least someone is getting some positive help out of it.