PegaWorld 2025 (and my general thoughts on AI in 2025)

 

PegaWorld was a few days ago, and once again it was a huge blast. I'm fulfilling a promise to myself to actually write about it this year after neglecting to last year. I'll include a few things from 2024's edition though, as this year was sort of a sequel to the events from last year.

AI is here, and even low-code tools (which already do most of the code writing for you) are embracing it to the max. Last year, Pega announced several AI tools coming to their platform and this year followed up with the newest fad in AI - Agentic AI. For a platform that focuses on processes and workflows, I suppose this fits.

The conference itself

The conference itself, once you can get past some of the cheesy humor and jokes during the keynotes, is actually pretty fun. Alan Trefler's talk was a great introduction to the conference, and the point I took away from his talk was that you cannot stuff just any AI into a solution and think you will be okay - you need to use the right AI for the right problems. He compared it to attempting to use Chat GPT to help him with a chess puzzle. Chat GPT could not solve the problem, and instead gave Alan several incorrect/illegal moves in chess. As soon as Alan went to another AI that specialized in chess, it was solved in under two seconds. Thus begins a conversation about Pega having the right AI to solve workflow automation problems.

For the developer though, the keynotes are nice and some of the workshops and breakaway sessions can be really useful. But going to the innovation hub and seeing the new capabilities in action, talking with Pega engineers that built and specialize in that tool, and seeing how it can fit what we do on a day-to-day basis is the best part of the conference. I was able to meet some folks who are trying some new ideas in the Pega community, and I was able to learn about automated testing and network with people who have found creative ways to do it in Pega (a sticking point for our team right now).

I came back with several takeaways from the conference:

1. Become a bigger part of the Pega community
2. Pega Blueprint has changed quite a bit since being announced last year - I need to retrain myself on it and check out the latest updates.
3. I want to learn more about automating testing within Pega via code scripts and accessing JSON files via their API.
4. Pega Insights is a cool tool that we currently under utilize in our app at work - maybe we can use it?
5. There will (hopefully) be a small Pega event in my city later this year, so I look forward to going to that.
6. Pega recently released a whitepaper on AI in Operations, so I've downloaded that and plan to read it in the next week.

My AI thoughts in general

This conference both has me excited for the use of AI in application development and also terrified for the world we are creating. One of the Pega keynotes introduced their newest intern, Iris. Iris is a young girl who started working for Pega this year. She's fully remote, lives in Europe (Pega has a solid presence there, especially in the Netherlands), and has become a top contributor who has helped their employees with admin tasks - the type of stuff interns typically handle.

She's made mistakes on the job, as any person would. But to be frank, she's probably more of a professional and less green than I was when I was an intern. Iris loves her work, she loves where she lives (I believe it was an island with a northern lighthouse in the Netherlands?), and she enjoys working with her colleagues.

And as you've probably already guessed, Iris is also not real. She's completely made up - an artificially intelligent agent. 

On the one hand, this is cool. We've gotten to the point where computers can talk to us and be hyper-realistic. She has an employee picture, Pega employees refer to Iris with the she/her pronouns, and she has a personality that seems to make her human. 

But I cannot help but think we are starting to automate ourselves out of work. Right now, Agentic AI is being billed as the AI that will help you do the tasks you don't want to do. That's nice. But did Iris fill in a gap that would have been filled in the past by a real college intern? How about when Agentic AI gets to the point where it can do entry-level jobs - how long will it be when a CMO or VP of Finance decides that the entry level marketing or finance position can be handled by an Agentic AI instead of hiring a real human to do the same work? Because let's be real: computers have always been faster than humans at tasks that computers are capable of doing.

We're not far from this reality. Agentic AI, and AI in general, has made a lot of strides in the past few years since GPT 3 was announced to the world. And now, we have companies like Artisan in San Fransisco running marketing campaigns to stop hiring humans and instead hire their AI for massive cost savings. (Their marketing campaign is a sad one at that, purposefully created to make people angry and gather likes, clicks, impressions, etc. They should not have been rewarded for that, but alas here we are.)

All that to say, we may be coming to a point where we have to make some decisions with AI. How far are we willing to go to use it? Are we willing to let one AI handle the job of several people for the cost savings and speed? How many jobs are we willing to replace with AI if so? If all companies get on board with this, how quickly does it take us to automate 30% of the workforce out of a job? Will we make decisions today that harm the community at large over a long period of time in order to report good earnings and cost savings for the next quarterly investors call?

You can probably tell where I land on this. 

I was going to write about this in a separate post, but PegaWorld both last year and this year had me leaving with these apprehensions. I didn't come away from these keynotes fully excited for the future we are currently creating. I hope I'm wrong about it, I hope that companies still keep people employed and AI doesn't contribute to the death of several valuable industries and jobs. But after observing the past few years, I get ever so closer to feeling that we're all beginning to hand our jobs over to the control of just a few AI computers.

Setting 2025 developer goals

2024 is behind us and 2025 is here. New year. Clean slate. Last year was my first full year as a developer and it was full of learning, moments of extreme doubt in my abilities, and some fantastic moments as well. To recap, I attempted the Pega SSA exam three times and fell one question short twice. At some point I plan to study and take the exam again, but I'll be taking some time off from that.

My overall personal goal in 2025 is using a planner for the full year and being more organized through consistent planner use. That sets up the foundation for smaller goals that I hope to achieve this year for myself, which are listed below.

So without much else to add, below are the developer goals I hope to achieve in 2025. Unlike last year, I'll try to keep the blog updated with my progress.

1. Blog more. This is sort of a gimme. I blogged just a handful of times in 2024, mostly because I was busy studying or working. Taking a break from studying will hopefully allow for more casual learning and time to write. My goal is one post a week, and I'll review at the end of January to see how that goes. I may adjust it in February if needed.
   
   
2. Work through freeCodeCamp's new curriculum. freeCodeCamp just released new updated content and have started focusing on free developer certifications. The content includes video lectures, workshops, labs, quizzes, reviews, and one large final exam. I'm very excited for this, and will probably write more about it in the future, but I think this is the type of setup I've been waiting for. Currently I'm in the HTML section doing review before moving on to CSS, but once we get to more advanced topics, I think this will be a massive help for my learning. Most blogs will probably be geared around new things I've learned while going through the certification program. While I won't be spending a lot of time each day on it (due to life and such), I'm going to be extending this into 2026 and hope to earn the certification during that year.
   
   
3. Pass the Pega SSA exam. This will be in the later part of 2025, but I want to attempt the SSA exam again and hopefully pass. It's not required for my job, but everyone else on the team has it at this point and I want to be able to say the same. Related, I'll need to renew my Security+ this year as well, as that's an exam I never ever want to take again!
   
   
4. Read more. I'm aiming to complete six books this year - an average of one book every two months. That's a good goal for me, but it's also something I can also surpass pretty easily. I'll be writing on some books I read this year here on the blog, so be on the lookout for some of those. I've started 'Chip Wars' by Chris Miller, which my manager read and said it was very good. President Obama as well mentioned this book as one of his favorites in 2023. But I won't be reading just tech-focused books. I hope to read a fiction book or two, or maybe some random non-fiction historical books. I'm taking it one book at a time.

So there we have it - these are the developer goals I'm shooting for in 2025. These are not resolutions, and they may not all happen. But it's something to work towards and share with others. 

What goals do you have for 2025?

8 months in to my first Dev job

This time a year ago, I was starting to study for my Pega CSA certification exam with a hint that a job on the Pega Developer team was going to open up in the fall. How much has changed in the last 12 months! I studied for 3-4 months, passed the exam on the second attempt, and started my first Dev job as a Pega developer 8 months ago. How has it been you might be asking?

The first few months were stressful. While I had passed the CSA exam, almost nothing from that exam was useful in my new role. Our team uses Dev Studio for 100% of development, and the codebase is pretty large. The CSA on the other hand focuses more on App Studio and higher-level topics. Using App Studio is a truer "low-code" experience, whereas I feel Dev Studio is more closer to hardcoding everything.

I had to ask for help on almost every User Story I was assigned, even though they were on the easier side. What would take one of our Senior Developers a day or two would usually take me several. I've been incredibly lucky that my team has been incredible. Every time I would reach out, they would be patient, explain concepts to me, allow me a few moments between each explanation to write down notes in my personal documentation, and help me finish up a story. I consider myself incredibly lucky to be on a team like this one.

Probably around late April, early May of this year, I finally did my first User Story without asking for any help. It was all on my own. That may have been the watershed moment in my mind that I could do this job. That was around the 6-month mark for me, so for any other Junior Developers out there in their first job, it can take awhile to get comfortable.

I've went through a string of a few sprints where I required little help. A lot of this was due to having UI/UX stories that are for our upcoming move from the old Pega UI-Kit to Theme Cosmos. It's going to be a fantastic update to our app and is much needed. The old Pega UI-Kit look is not impressive and not up to date with modern web-app standards. 

Working on the UI/UX side has been nice. I can see my changes quickly, and when the update actually does go to production, it will be fun to go to the sections I worked on and think, "yeah that was me!" My favorite so far has been updating some admin control pages, since I suggested a different layout for the whole page and was told to build it so our Product Owner could see how it looked. And they liked it! So my redesign idea for the admin controls was implemented. 

Anyways, these have been a few highlights and thoughts I've had reflecting on the past eight months. November will be the 1 year anniversary, and in the meantime I'm studying for the next Pega certification - the Pega CSSA. I took the exam in June and failed by one question (which apparently happens a lot...), so I plan to take it again in September.

I also need to write about my first work conference I attended - PegaWorld 2024 in Las Vegas. I took some neat pictures, and I need to put some pen to paper about the experience. Anyways, that's all for now.

My software development journey

A few months ago, I accepted my first software development position with my company. It was a really cool moment, and it was a culmination of around four years of work, practice, courses, and being swayed back and forth on different languages and techniques. Several people in my life now have learned that "I work in I.T." and ask about how I made the career switch, and when you get the same question several times you know what comes next - a blog post!

Below will be a brief recap of my career, what I did and my motivations for doing it, and a few lessons I've learned along the way that I would give to anyone else looking to get into I.T. or software development more specifically. 

Where I started

I went to school for Sports Management. I wanted to work in the front office of a major sports team. That was the line I repeatedly told anyone who asked. I did not have a specific role in the front office defined in my goals but usually would default to something like "probably sports marketing." That's a role that has a sexy title but keeps you away from being in sports sales. Funny enough, sports sales has the highest number of job positions available and seemingly the lowest amount of people interested.

I graduated from school (both a bachelors and masters degree in Sports Management), and found positions with the Washington Nationals first (Inside Sales) then D.C. United (Account Executive) where I spent roughly the next four years of my life. I loved it at D.C. United despite the atrocious stadium we had to work in (that could be another blog post, but we were young and could work through anything). But I spent almost four years in the same job and knew that sales just wasn't my thing. And with life changes occurring in my late 20s, I needed to find something new that would fit the life I wanted. I guess that's a vague way of saying I wanted to be paid more and work a normal amount of hours in a week (sports can have you work way over 40 hours per week and the salaries can be heavily diminished due to "demand" of people wanting to get into the field).

The interest in I.T. begins

In 2018, I made a bold jump to take my first job out of the sports management career. It was scary, since I felt I was starting over at 28 and even though, yes, I was still young, I didn't feel young. But I found a position at a real estate tech startup (Compass) as a Customer Success Manager for the real estate agents. I loved it there. While at Compass, I started editing the HTML for our Agent's profile pages. I was just following a script made my someone else, so I didn't know exactly what I was doing. But my interest in learning about HTML started there. In the summer of 2019, I enrolled in my first HTML course at Codecademy and built the brown bear website. I think that course, as of this writing, is still there today - good times! I found freeCodeCamp shortly after and did their HTML/CSS course, and I did a short Python for Data Science course to close out 2019. I was hooked - I wanted to be a software developer.

But how could I do it? Bootcamps are quick but were expensive and I'd have to leave my job, plus take the extra time after the bootcamp to find a job. That's a lot of money to spend/lose and the opportunity cost could be very high. Learning on my own is mostly free, but it can take much longer to make that transition. And as much as I would have loved to go and get my Computer Science degree, that's another 2+ year commitment that would cost a lot of money that I didn't have. For the time being, I would learn on my own.

The strategy

In 2020, I left Compass due to moving out of the area, and in early 2021 I joined Cybrary as a member of their customer experience team. It was a good role that gave me access to a lot of online training for I.T. and Cybersecurity. On one of Cybrary's podcasts, they invited Meg West onto the show. She described how she was able to get her first Cybersecurity role by laterally moving within her company from her non-I.T. position to a cyber role. The hardest part is getting that first job, and sometimes the best opportunity to land that first role can come at the place you're already working. That was a lesson which sticks with me to this day.

One of my good friends in I.T. recommended that while at Cybrary I should get my Security+ certification. It's a great entry-level certification, and it's a door-opener for I.T. roles of all types. It took about four months of hard studying, but I passed the test! Almost immediately a service desk position opened up at my friend's company that required the Security+, and I applied and got it. With Meg's story in mind, I got to know our software development team within the first few months and started studying the tools they used to maintain our applications.

While at the service desk, I worked as hard as I could to learn the job, build a reputation of consistency and excellence in the office, and be open about my career goals with my manager. My manager told me he expected that his service desk technicians would want to move elsewhere in tech and he envisioned the service desk as a training ground for better things. I told him early on I wanted to be a software developer, and if there was ever a fit I would want to check out opportunities within the company. 

The Offer

Over the summer of 2023, I worked to earn two required certifications for our software development team. I didn't know if anything would materialize, but I wanted to put myself in the best position in case an opening came up. The manager on our development team included me on some of the team's meetings, and I was given a small application assignment to work on while having down time at the service desk.

In the fall, I was informed that a position would be opening shortly that would be using Pegasystems for development (it's a low-code Platform as a Service (PaaS) for creating business-process apps). The position required a certification for Pega that I did not have (Pega Certified System Architect), but I started studying while going through the application process. The exam was hard, and I failed the first time by one question. The second time, I passed and was offered the role on our software team - I had made it! My first day was December 1, 2023.

The lessons I learned a long the way

It's been a few months since I started my position on the development team at work. I have loved it, but it's been the hardest job I've had. There is a lot still to learn, but my team is really great and has helped me when I have questions or get stuck something. I tried to be as brief as possible while providing as much context as I could, but there were a lot of things I left out in the essence of time. But below are several lessons I want to pass on in hopes that it can help someone else who transitions careers like I did.

1. Look at where you currently are: if you are already working at a company, see what types of software development opportunities already exist. Find the manager of the Dev team and let them know about your interest. Ask to shadow someone for a few hours, or if there are any volunteer projects you can hack on. Also, ask if you can join their meetings every once in awhile. Also, look at the job board on your company to see what job requirements are provided for the role you want. After you gather this type of information, start studying those languages and tools.
   
   
2. Don't be afraid of the service desk: the service desk is a great place to get your foot in the door. There are many in the I.T. field who will absolutely refuse the service desk ("I just don't want to work with customers"), but don't be that person. The service desk is a straight-up skill-builder and will only help you get better.
   
   
3. You don't need a Computer Science degree or to be some sort of math genius to code: you may already know this, but a CS degree and exceptional math skills are not required. They certainly help for sure, and being good at math is needed if you want to be on the cutting edge of AI and machine learning. But a software developer does not need to have a CS degree. Math-wise, know what PEMDAS is and some basic logic, and you'll be good. Those who require a CS degree are, frankly, way behind the times.
   
   
4. Consistency is the king of learning: having discipline and consistency in learning, especially if you're self-taught, is crucial. Make a goal of spending X minutes a day coding based on your schedule, and really try to hold yourself to it. In 6-8 months of being consistent with learning, you'll be thrilled at the process you have made. (Check out Atomic Habits by James Clear by the way- fantastic book).
   
   
5. Build your portfolio of work: This is a mistake I made and will not make again. When I applied for the developer role at work, I didn't have a portfolio saved to show them what I had done. That almost cost me the job. If you haven't started one yet, start saving your projects to Github. Proof of learning and building side projects is very helpful.
   
   
6. Build your reputation wherever you are: my last piece of advice is almost one of the most important - build your reputation at work. Be professional. Be on time. Find the metrics that you are judged at for work and exceed them. Be friendly with everyone and also be present and visible in the company. This can greatly help you later on. And this is possible even being 100% remote! I was 100% remote at Cybrary and in a vastly different time zone, yet I was active on the company Slack and I went to as many company meetings as possible.

So that's it! That's my story up to this point. I was as brief as I could be, and I left out other things that I may write about in the future (tutorial hell, being distracted by the next shiny object, imposter syndrome). All of these topics happened to me along the way as well. Thanks for reading, and I'll see you at my next post!

My First Developers Job

Originally posted in December 2023 on an old blog site.

Hey everyone, it's been about a month since I last wrote, so I figured I would give a short update on what has happened since then and what I have been working on.

In short - I got my first Developer job! I started last week as a Pega Developer for the contracting job I'm on. If you have not heard of Pega, don't worry. I had not heard of Pega either before I started.

Pegasystems is a low-code application platform that allows you to create Business Process Management (BPM) applications for your business. Instead of writing a lot of code and connecting/moving data with code, we use more drag-and-drop, drop-down selections, and other GUI-based configurations to create the application and manage the flow of processes. There are areas of the codebase that use code, and it's all Java-based on the backend.

While it's mostly GUI-based, there are still if/else logic, 'when' rules, and the 'and &&' and 'or ||' operators as well. Pega also has 'Activities' which are little algorithms built into the application to handle mundane tasks that can be automated without human intervention. Learning coding fundamentals with Python and JavaScript definitely helped me to understand the way Pega operates.

The first few weeks has been mostly writing unit tests for various features in the application and performing some tests myself. I have been able to take on a few user stories and have received a lot of help from the team.

Outside of the job update, I'm continuing through the Computer Science path on Codecademy and have almost finished the Python section. One of my goals in 2024 is finishing the Computer Science path, and I'm also starting to dabble in AI and machine learning. There is a Tensorflow course on freeCodeCamp that I'm slowly getting into, so maybe I'll build my first little AI soon.

Anyways, that is the big update. I'm excited for 2024 and will try to be more consistent in my blog posting too. See y'all soon.