Hello World

This is new for me. I haven’t shared any of my technical work since the days of VB6. And yet here I am, embarking on a serious (hobby) career as a prompt researcher. Let me set the stage just a little bit (if you’ll indulge me) and show you why my path to research seems surprising, and yet is just the beginning of a new wave of AI-enabled development from non-traditional sources.

A non-traditional start for an AI career

Let’s start with non-traditional. I studied Information Systems Technology at Red River College, graduating in 2003. I was a desktop programmer, pretty good with VB6, Java, and the brand new Visual Studio family of languages. I liked being a developer, but it didn’t feel like a calling or a vocation yet. I had a sense I had just spent a lot of money learning something that would suit me as a hobby, but I wasn’t yet convinced it should be a career.

I worked in industry for a while, bouncing around developer and helpdesk contracts. I took a detour in sales and sold technical solutions to business for a few years. This kept me close to tech even if I wasn’t working as a developer. Through all of this, I was also a member of the Canadian Army Reserve, learning the ropes of being a professional military intelligence analyst.

A BIG career pivot

Sales wasn’t where I needed to be, so I made a change. A big change. I quit my job and volunteered to deploy to Afghanistan in 2008, serving as a military intelligence analyst in Kandahar. Over the next four years I would find myself with three deployments to Afghanistan, a promotion to a leadership rank, and a growing role in my Canadian-based army reserve unit.

Landing where I belong

Eventually I found my way to Canada Life, my current full time employer. Canada Life took me in as an unpolished, rough-NCO-style experiment. Through the patience of many leaders and colleagues, I have slowly coalesced into a decent civilian professional. In my current role as Director, AI Product Owner, I have the privilege being able to use my non-traditional skillset to help lead and deliver AI products and services to power our business. It’s a tremendous job, a killer team, and a fascinating space to work.

Why on earth am I starting a prompt engineering blog with this long story of my career? Because it’s going to become important to understand how I got here as we start to evaluate some new prompt engineering techniques that I have been working on and experimentally validating.

When we hear about prompt engineering, we almost certainly think right off the bat: “That’s for the technologist crowd.” That was certainly what I thought. And then I started to tinker. And develop. And research. And I discovered something remarkable:

You do not need a technical background to get involved in prompt research.

In fact, I have drawn more material for my prompt research from my love of philosophy, rhetoric, public speaking, leadership, professional analytical practice, and a number of other unexpected sources. While my technology background is a strong foundation, it’s my other experience that makes me a good prompt engineer.

What to expect from this blog

Over the next few blog posts, I hope to show you how I leveraged a very atypical skillset to deliver a novel approach to prompting, how I transformed my novel approach into a research project that gave my argument rigor, and how I was able to go from a good idea to a full fledged research lab based only on my atypical experience and intuition.

If you are willing to come along for the journey, I’d love to show you how we can all use our diverse background (whether technical or not) to drive the AI outcomes we want to see in the world. AI is for all of us, not just the technical crowd. AI is for everyone.

If you have a non-traditional path to this world, or have an example of how you’ve drawn from atypical knowledge sources to advance AI or Prompt work, I would love to hear from you. I suspect there are lots of us out there. So let’s find each other and share. Let’s make sure that AI isn’t confined to the domains of the technologist and carve out our niche as the “non-traditional” thinkers. Let’s prove together that non-traditional experience brings value to prompt research through deliberate and rigorous testing.

Let’s see how we can change the face of prompt research and give non-traditional approach its appropriate place in the growing corpus of literature. It’s going to be a lot of fun.