Bennett Dungan // Software Engineer

Insights and Ramblings

Is AI "Art" Really Art?

A few months ago people were making funny, strange and meme-y pictures using an app called DALL E which, for a lack of a better description, is an "AI" art program. I used it quite a bit making some fun little images but none were anything that I would consider "art" since I took 5 seconds to plug in a phrase and the images were pretty rudimentary looking...

The Dots Go Backwards

I started reading Dave Grohl's new book, The Storyteller, a few days ago. I've always connected a ton with Dave after watching interviews and having Foo Fighter tunes ingrained into my head from an early age. In one of the first few chapters he talked about how he came to love music and his journey on becoming a musician. He believes that there's this unexplainable force...

I Think Therefore I Am Not

What has been most helpful and fascinating to me as of late is exploring how I can disassociate from these attributes and think of myself as an outside observer just having different experiences. It takes the burden of trying to live up to a certain standard that only comes from these labels. It’s not easy, trying to look at yourself as someone who isn’t anything...

Speak Clearly

For the majority of my life I've been a much better communicator through written mediums vs verbal interactions. Just being able to think about my responses for a moment makes my thoughts come through 100 times clearer than a lot of my in-person interactions.

Legacy without Ego

I’ve been thinking a lot more about what I’d like to leave behind for future generations. Big opening statement I know, but it’s been something that’s occupied more and more of my thoughts as I get older. I just turned 30, which obviously still puts me with plenty of time left in life to accomplish things but I am looking at it with a sense of urgency, whether that is bad or good...

Analysis: My First Year as a Developer

I officially hit my year anniversary as a web application developer back in September. It’s one of those years that felt like it flew by but also dragged on seemingly forever. The amount of things I’ve learned this year already out-paces my 2 other jobs in sales and marketing combined. Most jobs I’ve had...

Heyo, Welcome to My New Site!

I just finished rebuilding this site with 11ty and hosting it on Netlify's starter tier. This means, besides domain renewals, the cost to run this is now totally $0.

Build a REST API with Node, Express & MongoDB!

In this project we will be creating a way for people to subscribe, update, retrieve and delete data on Youtube accounts. We’ll do this by coding a REST API that lets users interact with our Youtube database by defining what info our database will accept and how it goes about manipulating that data depending on what a user would like to do.

Starting a Youtube Coding Series

After writing up my last tutorial, I started toying with the idea that creating a Youtube tutorial might be a bit quicker and easier way to approach coding tutorials.

Minimalism: A New Pursuit

I've never been one to acquire an abundance of things. I still drive the first car I've ever owned, a 1999 Toyota Camry. I've only had 4 phones total...

Learning Code While Working a Full Time Job

This is about my journey of learning how to code while also maintaining a full-time job. Spoiler, its hard as hell and the burn-out is super easy...

Building My First App: The Process

A ton of beginners believe that they need to learn an immense amount of code before they can ever build anything useful. I've felt like that before, hell I still get that feeling of extreme self-doubt...