[swozey]

So lately I've been using it to build things against APIs I've never worked with. I needed to write something that would check circleci (ci/cd system) for jobs in ANOTHER repo running and hold off starting a job in a DIFFERENT repo if there was one running in the first. Basically something to check every 30s-1min and succeed and move on to the next job if that repo wasn't running a workflow. Instead of having to dig through circles API docs or stackoverflow for examples I just typed in something like "How can I use ruby, go, bash or python to check a different circleci repo for running workflows before starting a workflow in a different repo?"

I had to go through several iterations and I bounced from wanting to write it in go to I think eventually just doing it in bash, just simplicities sake, but it absolutely saved me days of research. I definitely had to fix a lot of things and tailor it to my needs and it lead me astray quite a few times but it really was more like asking a professor the question vs googling it and hoping that SOMEONE out there has done something similar. Or combing API docs.. It was such an ancillary thing that I didn't want to get hung up on it for more than 1-3 days and it literally got me going in maybe 3-6 hours.

I also write a ton of very advanced terraform and cdk with it. I already know both very well but it absolutely speeds me up if I haven't used a specific function or what not in awhile, or it's newer to me.

It's great at leading me to the water, sometimes I have to still teach myself to fish but it will give me ideas and get me going if not even more.