SivaLabs

A few years ago, I was working at a fintech company in Germany. Our business unit planned to build a new offering for customers in Germany and the UK. Our team — product owner, business analyst, developers, and QA — gathered at a location and ran brainstorming sessions. Since we were also using the product ourselves, we were essentially both the builders and the end users.

After a full day of discussions, we collectively came up with a list of features for the first MVP. The BA took brief notes, and later, together with the developers, prepared JIRA cards for all those features. We then expanded on the requirements to flesh out the use case details and added acceptance criteria. In that company, we (developers) worked closely with the product owner and BA throughout the entire requirements process.

You’ve been working for years. You know your systems inside out. You’ve solved real problems, handled pressure, and delivered results.

But now you open a job description… and it feels like you’re reading a different language.

New frameworks. New tools. New expectations.

And the thought creeps in: “Have I fallen behind?”

Here’s the truth most people won’t tell you: Your old tech stack isn’t your biggest problem. Your approach to upskilling is.

If you are feeling overwhelmed by the rapid pace of technological advancements, especially in the field of AI, know that you are not alone. The AI landscape is evolving at an unbelievable speed, with new ideas and tools emerging every day. This can be both exciting and daunting, as it challenges our understanding of what’s possible and forces us to adapt quickly.

You may encounter conflicting narratives: a CEO claims that in 9 months a 90% percentage of code will be written by AI, YouTubers who became AI Experts overnight tell you that “AI will take over the world by 2030”. And then suddenly, you come across a Tweet or a LinkedIn post saying AI is not yet good enough for the real world projects.

ChatGPT and other Generative AI tools took the world by a storm. People are using these AI tools for various purposes such as to explore a topic, to seek answers to their questions or to get help in coding, etc. ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are very popular AI tools that are available for free with some usage limitations.

I came across NotebookLM from my social media feed, and it looks interesting.

With NotebookLM, you can upload documents, videos, web URLs and let the AI agents talk about the uploaded material. That sounds intriguing.

Recently I wrote an article about software complexity and shared my viewpoint. Many people appreciated it and some people didn’t. That is fine to have different opinions.

In this article, we will explore the following:

• Introduction to Embedding Models.
• Loading data using DocumentReaders.
• Storing embeddings in VectorStores.
• Implementing RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), a.k.a. Prompt Stuffing.

Let’s get started.

In this article, we will explore the following:

• Introduction to Spring AI.
• Interacting with Open AI using Spring AI.
• Using PromptTemplates.
• Using OutputConverters.

Let’s get started.

In this article, we will explore the following:

• Understand the need for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
• Understand EmbeddingModel, EmbeddingStore, DocumentLoaders, EmbeddingStoreIngestor.
• Working with different EmbeddingModels and EmbeddingStores.
• Ingesting data into EmbeddingStore.
• Querying LLMs with data from EmbeddingStore.

Let’s get started.

In this article, we will explore the following:

• Using LangChain4j AiServices to interact with LLMs.
• How to ask questions and map responses to different formats?
• Summarizing the given text in different formats.
• Analyzing the sentiment of the given text.

Let’s get started.

In this article, we will explore the following:

• How to use LangChain4j ChatMemory and ConversationalChain to implement conversation style interaction?
• How to ask questions using PromptTemplate?

In the previous article, we have seen how to interact with OpenAI using Java and LangChain4j.

Let’s get started.