Is this mic on? 🎤

I’m a software engineer with about eight years of experience, and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s next for me and my career.

The last time I held a full-time role, I was working with a team I genuinely loved. The work was exciting, it pushed me outside my comfort zone, and I got to build and ship a real production application (and thank God I never accidentally dropped a database 😅). I felt invested in the product, trusted in my decisions, and excited to log on every day.

Since then, I’ve spent most of my time doing client work, working directly with founders on some pretty cool products. And while that experience has been valuable, I’ll admit it doesn’t light me up the same way anymore. A lot of SaaS applications tend to follow similar patterns: CRUD backends, a few controllers, a polished UI, and some thoughtful API integrations. There’s nothing wrong with that, but after a while it starts to feel repetitive.

Over the past few years, AI has reshaped entire industries, and software engineering is no exception. Even in my own work, I’ve noticed how much faster I can problem-solve and iterate when AI tools are part of the process. That curiosity eventually turned into a bigger question: how does this actually work under the hood?

So I decided to dig in.

I’m currently about halfway through my first formal course on Retrieval Augmented Generation, and somewhere along the way I realized I may have “lost the magic” of AI… in the best way possible 😂. Once you understand the math, the probabilities, and the systems behind it, the mystery fades, but the engineering challenge becomes even more fascinating. I’ve been having a lot of fun learning how these systems actually work and, admittedly, nerding out a bit.

All of this has made one thing very clear: my next chapter is in AI product engineering.🚀

The field feels wide open, fast-moving, and full of problems that sit right at the intersection of product thinking and deep technical systems. For the first time in a long while, I feel genuinely excited to build again. Not just for clients, but for myself. In the last six months alone, I’ve built three small micro-SaaS tools to make my own life a little easier 🛠️. That desire to build for curiosity, learning, and joy is something I don’t want to ignore.. And I’m really excited about what’s next!