I just realized the other day that it’s been a very long time since I’ve made any type of post on here. I am still alive and still working in software, but a lot has happened.Canada caught fire, there were riots, insurrection trials, the start of WWIII, and much more.

In the tech sector, however ChatGPT is probably the biggest thing right now, and after using it to help me over the past few days on various projects I can definately see why. When it first came out, I really just used it to answer simple questions, but this thing is extremely powerful. I have been able to use it to greatly accelerate my productivity. Granted it’s not perfect and some stuff it spits out can land you in hot water if you’re not careful but for developers that can understand what it’s doing, its a great asset.

Example

Just to show an example, on one of my side projects I’m heavily using Twilio, and for this post I asked it to perform a quick task for me. The prompt I gave it was:

In c#, write a program that will buy a number through twilio and then listen for a SMS message, then delete the number

And here is the full code it spat out:

using System;
using System.Linq;
using Twilio;
using Twilio.Rest.Api.V2010.Account;
using Twilio.Types;

class Program
{
    static void Main()
    {
        const string accountSid = "YOUR_ACCOUNT_SID";
        const string authToken = "YOUR_AUTH_TOKEN";

        TwilioClient.Init(accountSid, authToken);

        var availableNumbers = AvailablePhoneNumberResource.Read("US", voiceEnabled: null, smsEnabled: true);

        if (availableNumbers != null && availableNumbers.Any())
        {
            var phoneNumber = availableNumbers.First().PhoneNumber;

            var incomingPhoneNumber = IncomingPhoneNumberResource.Create(
                phoneNumber: new PhoneNumber(phoneNumber),
                voiceUrl: new Uri("http://your-voice-url.com"), // Optional: Specify a voice URL if needed
                smsUrl: new Uri("http://your-sms-url.com") // Optional: Specify an SMS URL if needed
            );

            Console.WriteLine($"Phone number {incomingPhoneNumber.PhoneNumber} purchased successfully.");

            var incomingMessages = MessageResource.Read(
                from: new PhoneNumber("PHONE_NUMBER_TO_LISTEN"), // Replace with the phone number you want to listen to
                to: new PhoneNumber("YOUR_TWILIO_PHONE_NUMBER") // Replace with your Twilio phone number
            );

            foreach (var message in incomingMessages)
            {
                Console.WriteLine($"Received SMS: From: {message.From}, Body: {message.Body}");
            }

            IncomingPhoneNumberResource.Delete(pathSid: incomingPhoneNumber.Sid);

            Console.WriteLine("Phone number deleted successfully.");
        }
        else
        {
            Console.WriteLine("No available phone numbers found.");
        }
    }
}

Obviously judging by the above, this isn’t exactly what I wanted and it wouldn’t even work correctly “out of the box” but it gives a very good starting point.

Overall, there really isn’t a point to this post other than to make one, since it’s been almost 2 years since my last one. But I will say, if you work in code and aren’t using ChatGPT to help you yet…start.