programming

I've been thinking about this article for a while but it is only recently that I have been able to sit down and really have a think about it properly. Or at least collate all of my thoughts into a single article.

Over the last couple of years the term "AI" has become a sort of marketing term that is banded about (and abused) by all sorts of companies with the intent of trying to make life easier.

In this article we will define the term AI in the context of programming, look at some services that you can use to produce code, and go through some pros and cons of using AI systems to code.

2022 marks 20 years since I started my MSc in computer science degree at the University of Aberystwyth. So, I thought I would take a look back at my thesis for the degree and see how far I have come since then.

The title of my thesis was "Using The Java3D API To Visualise Molecular Compounds". I used a system called Java3D to create ball and stick models of molecules. A second requirement was to allow the application to compare two molecules together.

The course I did was known as a conversion course and was designed to compress the three years of the undergraduate computer science degree into a single year, along with an introduction to Java programming bootcamp the summer before the course started. This was a year of hard work with 12 hour days and weekends of constant study. The drop out rate for the course was about 80%, with most of that being in the first few weeks.