### 1. How am I still a developer? 🤔 --- - Without knowing a thing. Back in college, I just partied hard, but I really didn't want to make a career out of something I hated. Yet, I wanted to become a developer. I could never forget the thrill I felt when learning C programming. The rush of hitting F5 and seeing it run successfully. I thought, 'This must be why God enjoyed creation.' **So, I just decided to go for it.😤** And just like that, as of 2026, I've become a developer in my 10th year. In terms of experience, I'm at an age where I'd be a manager anywhere I go, and some incredible friends are already team leads. hahaha ~~What have I even done...~~ - But as I said before, I was a guy who knew nothing, and what's more serious is that I'm someone with a lot of ambition but not quite like a `hardcore developer`. So how could I possibly become a great developer? I've always disliked (=was bad at) coding tests, grumbling my way through life saying, 'Why do we have to take these tests for the sake of tests? In the real world, it's enough to know how to search, implement, and verify when needed.'😗 - In a way, the development of AI seems to be proving my point. The ability to give AI proper commands and actually check/verify the code is diminishing the significance of the ability to quickly write code to solve problems under a time limit ⌛️. - Of course, I truly admit that smart people who are good at solving coding tests quickly usually have a higher probability of being good at solving problems quickly.👌 Especially when I saw friends solving problems by hand-coding, I did think, 'Ah, these are the kinds of people who go to Google and Meta...' - Still, I came this far by thinking, **'If there are things those kinds of people can do, then there are also things that people like me can do.'** and slowly enjoying the coding I wanted to do, the development I wanted to pursue. To me, coding and programming are simply **`something fun`**. A cool tool that lets me build what I want to build. Nothing more, nothing less. That's why diving too deep is painful, and I only willingly jumped in and learned a technology or piece of knowledge when I judged it was necessary to build a good service.
### 2. How did I become a shallow and broad developer? 🤓 --- - Even if I lacked skills, I knocked on the doors of places that needed a hand. So at my first and second companies, which were startups, I did both backend and frontend, just doing whatever the company needed. I learned the spirit of finding a way to solve problems, by any means necessary (or rather, until it worked). - Then, in 2016, Lee Sedol played Go against AlphaGo. It was like, 'What is that?' AI looked cool, so I started reading AI papers and was into AI for a while. ML and AI were so much fun that I transitioned my career to an AI developer, and the third place I went to was JB (formerly Jungbu City Gas). - There, in a wasteland with no GPUs, I had the experience of doing everything from manual data collection, augmentation, AI training, to implementation in a mobile app. It was a grateful place where I could have precious experiences and grow to my heart's content. Then, with my marriage, I decided to leave JB, which was in Cheonan-Asan at the time, to end my weekend-couple life and moved to Seoul for a new job. - The large corporation that thankfully accepted me, my 4th company, was LG Electronics. They valued my `experience of building something from the ground up`. Using that experience, I had the opportunity to do everything from service planning to even going on business trips to overseas LG stores to install and apply my AI solutions. It was a place I'm thankful for. - However, since I was working in a team that utilized AI within the marketing division, not a development organization, I felt that the ideal employee they wanted at the time was someone who was good at managing subcontractors, reporting, and sometimes, handling a lot of paperwork, rather than just developing. I actually spent a lot of time on such tasks. So, I yearned for a more developer-like environment, a place with a proper development organization, and changed jobs again. The place I went to was Kookmin Bank's Financial AI Center. - There, I met many smart people... I was often embarrassed by my lack of skills but also learned a lot. Around that time, the organization needed Full Stack development, and thanks to the sin (?) of having at least dipped my toes in frontend/backend during my startup days, I ended up doing it. haha. I was definitely hired as an AI modeler, but I ended up mainly doing Full Stack development. Honestly, for me, it was a case of 'Jokes on them, I liked it!' so I just went with it. This was because, as the era of pre-trained models being released one after another began around 2020, I already had this thought: > 'Isn't the game now about who can build a service faster and better using well-made AI? >
How could I possibly create better AI than Google or OpenAI?' Anyway, through this process, > 👉 My shallow and broad resume, from never digging one well, was complete..!🤗✨ - Writing it all out and thinking about it, I'm just grateful that I can make a living through development with a background like this..
### 3. Let's start keeping a record now ✍️ --- - It's certain that I, born in 1990, was born in an interesting era. We are the ones who played with ddakji and marbles and shot BB guns at the playground in a completely analog age, then went through the perfect digital era of 2G phones (SKY, Chocolate Phone, Horizontal Instinct, etc.) and Cyworld, experienced the entire evolution of smartphones, and have now reached the singularity of the AI era.👾 We're a truly mind-boggling generation. All that's left is to live with robots. - And throughout my career, I've never had a 'mentor' or a direct senior. Let alone a mentor, the projects I worked on—though I never once wanted them to be this way—were always things I had to learn and build on my own to solve problems. Maybe that's why, before I could feel the fun of being deeply immersed in one field, I would switch fields without hesitation whenever a more interesting technology or something that seemed better in the flow of the times appeared. - Looking back at what I've written above, **to put it negatively, it's definitely a messed-up career path.** hahaha. Because I never dug one well. Even though I never intended it, as mentioned above, I mostly worked in a way where I was **`solely responsible for getting things done, no matter what`** rather than through collaboration (feat. overtime + all-nighters). So when I first joined a proper development organization at Kookmin Bank, I remember feeling very intimidated, embarrassed, and studying alone while asking questions.🥲 - But looking back, I've come to have a multifaceted perspective that allows me to understand **`how a single service is made`** in various ways, and even to do the planning myself. **Perhaps, befitting a 90s kid from a mind-boggling generation, I've experienced the various elements that constitute 'service development' across a broad spectrum.** I think. Thanks to that, it seems to be a great help in building services more quickly in this era. - That's why development is still fun for me. There's so much more to learn, like n8n, LangChain, LangGraph, and AI Agents. I'm excited to see what kind of awesome services will emerge when I combine them with my tech stack. So, **I'll probably live happily as a developer who can't be first-class, and that's okay**. - That's why the logo for this blog is P.P. for Peter's Place, but it's also modeled after the PP logo for recyclable materials. There were times when I felt I was wandering, but it also represents my life, where in the end, everything comes full circle and all my experiences become helpful to me.

- I'm also thankful to AI. For a `shallow and broad developer` like me, the scattered knowledge and experiences I picked up here and there from various jobs have become the nourishment that allows me to give more precise instructions when communicating with AI. Thanks to living in such a great era, I was able to create a proper personal homepage and portfolio site like this in an unimaginably short amount of time compared to just 2 or 3 years ago. I'm sincerely grateful.🙇‍♂️ - The reason I left that great Financial AI Center at Kookmin Bank on my own two feet and started Peter's Place like this is because of the thought, > 'When I introduce myself, if I take away my company name, how can I describe myself? What am I 'really' capable of?' and to confront my shortcomings, my own reality, in a more raw way. - Now, I want to discard excuses like 'I was too busy with work to do it' and absurd delusions like 'I work for a big company, so I must be doing okay, right?'. With this nice place of my own (Peter's Place), I want to build a habit of recording my raw self, reflect, and continue to grow. - Whether it's about new technologies I'm learning or other trivial thoughts, as I live, I realize more and more with age that humans are creatures of forgetting, and so many things are regrettably washed away if not recorded. I want to better share and distribute the things I've organized. I don't know how many people will read these posts, but if they become helpful even once to someone, including my future self, wouldn't that be meaningful?😎

Starting Peter's Place

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