Transformation of the Week
David Stampfli

Transcript

Lusk: Hey David, congratulations on being this week’s transformation of the week. Tell everyone out there a little bit more about your background.

David: Thanks, Chris. Really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you and tell everybody a little bit about myself and the experience for me. So I’ve been in tech for about 30 years now. I’m actually probably one of the older people to have gone through. I after I got out of college and went into the Navy, and then I went into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Then I had a friend of mine who was doing software development. So I started a long time ago doing, FoxPro for windows development, which is not even around anymore, and probably very few people that watch this will even know what that is. And I moved into Visual Basic in C, C plus plus, Pascal and got into doing client server development, web development, cloud development, Kubernetes and then, you know, roll the clock forward and here I am at the latest sort of app development wave, which is this AI stuff.

Lusk: So you’ve got quite a bit of experience and a pretty diverse background. What got you interested in Gen AI specifically?

David: Really interesting question. I sort of fell into it almost accidentally. I was working on a large contract renewal for a huge health care company. And then I finished that up. I’m like, these guys were great to work with. Great engineering talent. I’d like to continue on in some capacity working with them. There was another project that was ongoing. And it had just finished a POC and there were some significant capability gaps, including gen AI and sort of the LLM piece and incorporating LLM into it.

So I said, hey, let me take a shot at being the solution architect for this. And I worked on it for about a year, going from, kind of a blank sheet of paper to full production. I had another smaller team that did a lot of the advanced RAG pieces, but I was super interested in what they did over there from an app dev standpoint.

I’m like, this is clearly the next wave of application development so I felt it would be great for me to upskill myself to understand how those technologies work and how I could use them on my customer engagements.

Lusk: So you graduated from our AI Engineering Bootcamp a little bit less than a month ago. Have you been able to put anything that you’ve learned into practice, whether it’s professionally or personally?

David: It was actually amazing how quickly I was able to use the knowledge. So, I work as a pre-sales engineer, customer engineer as the official title. Literally the day after I got certified, I was in a conversation with a customer and we were talking about agentic applications, and I drew upon the knowledge that I had learned in the bootcamp, talking about, you know, things like LangGraph.

And it was immediately valuable to have an intelligent conversation with the customer and establish credibility. Because that’s a big, big part of the dynamic in the exchange is they have to believe that you can help solve their problem, and that means that you have the appropriate subject matter expertise to do that, so right away.

And then since then, not only that opportunity, since then, it comes up a lot, agentic. And those conversations are huge. And I’m looking to do some additional training now in that area, but also just around enterprise RAG. Learning, all of the advanced techniques for retrieval. That stuff has come in handy on multiple other customer engagements. So not just the customer I was working with, but other customers that are doing the same type of thing.

Everybody wants to get into this space. Everybody wants to realize business value from these types of applications. The problem is they’re not sure how to do it right, because everybody’s learning. And also there’s some things that are very different, about how you build these types of applications. So the knowledge has been really, really useful for me in my current role.

Lusk: We were talking off camera about how challenging it can be to upskill, to sharpen your skills. What words of wisdom do you have for people that are out there watching this right now, who are considering a move into Gen AI?

David: Yeah, that that’s a great question. And I feel very qualified to answer this question because of my age and my experience. And I’ve gone through a whole bunch of reboots in my career because it’s necessary if you’re going to stay at the top. I taught myself how to program, learn desktop development, client server development, web development, cloud development, Kubernetes, and the underlying Linux technologies. Because I really just found it super interesting. And then now the latest trend of courses is AI.

So personally I find this stuff really, really interesting. So that was a big motivator for me. Professionally, that’s where the world is going. No ifs, ands, or buts about it, that’s the direction it’s going. If you want to be relevant in three years, or four years, or five years, you have to learn the technologies. There’s no better place to do it.

And I’ve taken multiple courses, by the way, both internally at my company and externally, in the bootcamp. Invest the time. It’s only ten weeks. You’ll come out with a very different perspective on just AI stuff in general, and a different skill set that will make you far more valuable to your current employer and any future employers. So yeah, you just gotta get started doing it.

That’s the hardest part. Just pull the trigger. The way that the course is structured to stay engaged. They have great support for every session and it’s going to be a lot of hard work. But at the results at the end are well worth it.

Lusk: David, that’s great advice. Thank you so much for being here and, again, congratulations on winning this week’s Transformation Of The Week.

David: Thanks, Chris. I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. And, good luck to the future cohorts. Again. It was a very worthwhile experience for me.