Generous disposition

Something I have appreciated about tech is that I generally encounter a lot of people with a generous way about them. They share of their time, they share of their knowledge, they share code, they share connections and relationships, ideas and argue about who should be treating the other to lunch.

There have been multiple things at play to make that be a thing. A recent factor was the relatively easy money floating around in tech. Easy to get dev jobs (if experienced), easy to get good salaries, easy to negotiate for interesting work. People in good situations have more options to be generous.

Another factor is probably the open source culture. Sharing is almost the default among developers. Technical curiosity and interest tends to overrule concerns about IP, know-how and trade secrets. Devs just want to build things and the only recognition that really matters is among peers. Generosity rules the day.

I've tried to model this in how I do things with Underjord, my community presence and as an employer. Assume possibilities, be proactively generous, be reasonably optimistic.

I want people I've never heard of that reach out to me to at least get a chance to make an impression, the door is open, I'll exchange some emails or even put something on the calendar for a conversation. It'll only scale so far but I try.

When doing things with up-and-coming developers, students and community spaces I try to spend company cash to the benefit of the people. The books will note that I'm doing marketing and it is certainly that but it is mostly about showing an alternative to stinginess as a business strategy. We're healthy. We do well. I'd rather spend on keeping morale high and our public perception friendly than pinch those particular pennies.

I'm optimistic and a little bit pushy. I try to jab, needle and encourage people into trying to do the things they are thinking to do, maybe, someday. No-no, now, tomorrow perhaps?

There is a contraction in the tech market. I think it becomes very important not to become fearful as part of that. Or situations might tighten, comfort gets lost. Lots of people lose jobs and that decidedly sucks. Generosity isn't very much about money though and if we let shareholder, VC and big corp fears shift us on the ground of tech into fearfulness. Then we risk losing a rich cultural streak of openness, sharing and proactive generative activity.

The situation can suck. Doesn't mean everything has to suck.

What are some generosities that have been granted to you that you appreciated? Feel free to email or federate at me via [email protected] or as @[email protected].

Thanks for attentioning. I appreciate a reader like yourself.

Side projects are a problem

You can never quite know what makes someone light up. And it is a challenge to find the exact thing that will make a developer in your team and organisation suddenly take an extraordinary interest. If you can hit that note though, a lot of things become more fun and easier. I'll hazard referencing a military think. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

Pressure to perform at high velocity is generally a source of chronic stress. Whatever high means. Chronic stress is the main source of burnout. Acute stress is easier to handle. Someone got hurt, you have a difficult choice, you messed something up. Once handled, assuming you are not chronically shamed for it, it will pass.

Passion, excitement and fun is a much more sustainable way of achieving velocity. To enable people to find the things that excite them requires time and space to flail around, to fail around and to generally not succeed.

The way I learn most of my professional skills is that I build stuff in my spare time. As an employee sometimes it would spill into work time as well. I'm no saint. To this day most of my Elixir skill comes from a mix of learning new things, in experimentation and exploration based on my interests, and of repetition in client work. I take something I learned on my own and I do it over and over again, building LiveViews and GenServers being typical examples. I've done a lot of those now. 

For many people it is not sustainable or even in their interests to do all their exploring and learning in their own spare time. This is why the expectation of side projects is a problem. You need a model of how you work where there is space to both explore to learn and exploit that knowledge to execute.

We've been fighting some Grafana dashboards and alerting recently. Mostly figured it out. And after, suddenly one of my team members went off investigating a weird blip in request times. It was not an important blip, a 700ms average on a non-critical environment. But I rolled with it. And as we went I got the response "this is sooo cooool!". I had no idea they'd be excited about it. I spent some time with them and had them dig into it and root-cause it. Because that's what the boards are for. That's how we want to use them. It was not the most important thing on the table at that moment, for them or me. I certainly learned something about what makes them tick though. They would not be standing up Grafana and Prometheus in their spare time. They got better things to do.

Similarly, I often feel bored by the less exciting parts of the development process. Sometimes I only have really complex and annoying issues to work on because I filter better understood work to others, part of the role. When I feel less motivated I sometimes go wandering off and fix something that, perish the thought, is not even in the sprint. A long-standing papercut, or a regression in something I liked, or improve the dev tooling process. Things that make me happy and motivated. Because in a happy and motivated mode those annoying complex issues become more tractable.

A lot of companies say they want passionate people. Passion, excitement and drive tends to come from a balance of satisfying challenges, some sense of importance in the work and in doing the work, a sense of accomplishment. Getting to feel that you can do a thing that you weren't entirely certain was in your grasp. And your grasp will grow. Excitement really helps. Sometimes you find excitement in the domain, sometimes in a technical nuance and sometimes somewhere completely different.

Passion is not everything, it just helps. And it is really hard to be excited under pressure. Continuous pressure is the death of fun.

As per usual you can reach me by email or fediverse [email protected] or as @[email protected].

Thank you for reading. I appreciate you spending your attention here.

How hard(ware) could it be?

I have never done a bunch of C, C++ or otherwise close to the metal programming. In spite of listening to metal for years! I swear every time I need to change something in a Makefile to make some compiler happy. I'm not comfortable with any of it.

My first code contribution to the Elixir community was a way to drive an eInk screen.

This was not a genius move. I think I can explain the path and in that way enable others to do the exact same thing and suddenly feel like a new world of possibilities has opened.

I had an eInk display (the Inky) and I wanted to use it with Nerves. The official libraries are in Python. That would mean I'd have to include Python in Nerves and make some kind of Port thing to talk across. It wouldn't be very nice. So I looked at the code. Python was what I did before Elixir. And then I started to port the code. There was nothing uniquely low-level about the Inky Python library. It does do a bunch of binary commands and stuff but it was all GPIO, SPI and I2C which were things that Elixir Circuits provides for you. So the things I saw in Python had direct matches in Elixir.

Right now I'm experimenting with repeating that for a different class of device. The process is the same. I'm poking the Elgato Streamdeck Plus. Programmable buttons, knobs and a touchscreen. Someone has already implemented it fully in Python, Node.js and probably others. The only low-level concern is that I need the libusb hidapi bindings. Thankfully someone built a HID library, as a NIF in C using the libusb hidapi stuff, for Elixir which works fine on my Linux box so far. Not so fine on my Mac. Later problem.

This means I can mostly port code from Python to Elixir. This means reading a fair bit of code and writing a decent bunch of it. But it doesn't mean a whole lot of invention. It is fairly straightforward. It has a bounded scope already as the library I'm porting usually matches the capabilities of the device.

Essentially it is similar to talking to a really bad JSON API but replace JSON with arbitrary binary commands and that's basically it. Inky was more complex than a raw USB HID device in terms of how I had to treat the device it seems.

What I'm saying is, if you know a language well enough to write code in it and you know another language well enough to read it, you can port between them. And if you can port code and have enough budget to get the hardware you can probably do this first step into hardware programming.

I've gotten a lot less nervous about working with binary from this type of work. Further reinforced from building the ID3 library for the Changelog. Lots of binary construction and matching there.

I think hardware is uniquely juicy in that it seems dangerous or hard. This is a good place to start I feel. The same applies to implementing libraries for new and old protocols (I may be trying to convince a fledgling alchemist to improve the IMAP offerings in Elixir land right now). Implementing a library for hardware or a protocol expands the capabilities of the community permanently.

Why not give it a shot? Do you think you can do it?

If you need to argue with me or need ideas for what library to do, reach out at [email protected] or as @[email protected].

Thank you for reading. I appreciate you spending your attention here.

Fortune favors the bold

There is a saying, arguably by a Roman philosopher that goes "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity". In my world of tech people there is also the term "luck surface area" floating around which relates. Doing some things increases your chances of other things happening for you. Putting things out into the world opens the door to the world handing you things back.

I touched on this recently that whatever you do to promote yourself or try to prompt activity in the world tends to produce a result about 6 months later. This goes hand in hand with putting in consistent work to see consistent results and that it is best to plant a tree ten years ago (and if you didn't, the best time is right now). This is the preparation part.

You do not control the opportunity part. For that to be valuable it needs to come from other people, the surrounding world. At an individual or group level. The needs and desires of people with some level of resources produce opportunity.

I have just in the last week had two quick exchanges over DMs with people I've collaborated with for a bit in which we landed on some work I might do with them which would have been an absurd dream ask a few years back. It is paid work for building libraries/software that will be open source. And it all makes potential sense for all parties. Some of those parties are likely reading this. Yeah, I know, we haven't pinned down the details. I'm pretty transparent.

This is the type of work I could see myself do until retirement. Variety of small projects, open source, public interest, languages and ecosystems I care about. Showing people how to get things done with technologies I find interesting.

What preparation lead up to this? One is doing things like the ID3 library I did with Changelog. That relates both directly in terms of people, connections and networking, as well as indirectly, showing I can be brought in to do a library implementation. My online presence, being someone who does things visibly and publishes things about what I do is almost a guaranteed part of the calculation for these prospective clients. I'm happier the more public things can be.

Another aspect is just being around. Being part of the open source world and actively engaging with people about the things that make you enthusiastic or even skeptical. No-one ever reaches out to you if they never see you speak up.

Whether any of this comes to pass as actual projects is still up in the air but I was surprised and delighted to realize that I've worked myself into a position where it isn't an outlandish thing. Where these are conversations I have and the most pressing constraint is my time. Knowing the type of work I want to do and engaging with people in the spaces I want to work in seems to be working for me. I hope you can make some aspects of my experience work for you too.

What work would you want to be doing? How could you set yourself up for it? Feel free to share your thoughts at [email protected] or as @[email protected].

Thanks for reading, I really appreciate your time and attention.

We decided some things are required

What do you think when you see that a service announces that the system will be down for maintenance on X date? Maybe you scoff about their dated approach and obvious technical incompetence. Maybe you are just happy they told you. Maybe you wonder about what major technical migration they are doing that they couldn't do without disrupting service.

There is an assumption today that an app doesn't need to be down unless catastrophy strikes. Some degree of High Availability is expected. This is probably the biggest reason that people have such a strong preference for paying their way into a managed database service. Most of the complexity of HA lies in the database and most databases becomes much more complex the moment you want them to be resilient to hardware failures without downtime.

Let's back up. We bring in complexity by default for many things in tech and often with good reason. Source control, version control. This is generally a great thing. I worked a lot of PHP before I got comfortable with git and it was simpler. It was not better. The edges were sharp. You might lose entire days or weeks of work to some bad copying and pasting. Collaboration was pure pain. It is a solution that introduces complexity but enables immense gains.

I've often been critical of Kubernetes/k8s as an emerging default. This is because I don't think most small-to-medium operations, and many large ones, necessarily reap those immense gains for the additional complexity introduced in the system.

What else? Not manually deploying. Complicated systems, artifacts, scripts and infrastructure. The gains? Significant. And also easier to avoid problems that disrupt uptime. Beyond reducing stress and mistakes during deployments it also serves to make things like High Availability more achieveable.

But is High Availability a good default? I think it has a large complexity trade-off. Especially at the database. For about 5-6 years I was in charge of the tech for a SaaS product. It ran a Postgres database. We ran it on a single VPS with nightly backups. I think the only interventions we ever had to do was bumping the max connections and bumping the RAM on the instance at some point. It did not go down. It performed well if our queries were reasonable.

Postgres is a mighty fine database. The moment you try to make it more highly available you introduce some uncomfortable complexities. The simplest case is probably replicating the database to have a hot spare available if the first one falls over. It increases availability but from what I've seen it makes the overall database more sensitive. Now it can be negatively affected by network weather and failing to ship it's replication log as it should. The hot spare becoming unresponsive can negatively affect your main node.

There are defaults that should be standard practices. There are aspiring and existing defaults that have significant complexity trade-offs.

What are the costs and consequences if your database is down? If it is only down very rarely and it saves you a ton of maintenance, monitoring and tuning?

If we step back another step. Is this applicable to your application server? Those are far easier to have multiple of and then load balance between them. It is not without complexity either though.

High Availability is not bad. Of course not. But some recent spelunking in Postgres-options puts me square in considering whether HA is needed and what the tradeoffs are.

What is your standard for how an app should be set up. What guarantees do you think belong in the default these days? Holler at [email protected] or as @[email protected].

Thanks for reading, I really appreciate your time and attention.

Expect crickets, be ready for the flood

I am not actually talking about catastrophe here. Not locusts or flooding. Rather the inherent lag whenever you poke the universe.

I do a lot of things on the Internet. One of the confusing and bewildering things that happen when you do is that people reach out. They reach out about something you did 4 months ago. A year ago. I feel like I'm a different person after 2 months and here they are, prompted to action, by something so ancient. It is a reminder that publishing has a long tail. Blog posts, podcasts and even videos will reach people way down the line. The biggest impact is usually disconnected in time from you hitting the "publish" button.

Maybe we can harvest some wisdom from that. Most things you put out into the world will have a very mild response. If any. In terms of marketing a business you can rarely produce results right now, in this moment. You reap the rewards of your effort from six months ago. There is a delay and a threshold to overcome. Your first event, your first writings, your first video, your first anything. It will launch to crickets. If you keep rolling you have a chance to build up momentum and people will have a chance to see you, decide to pay attention and get onboard.

An idea is not worth much. It is how much wood you put behind that arrow. It is how willing you are to drive continuous effort. That's what people respond to. Consistency of ideas, cohesion of plan, will to execute.

If you only break your silence and reach out to the universe when your need is dire you will often find it cold. Especially if you feel desperation. Reach out to the world when you don't need it. Offer what you can. And with a bit of luck you will find yourself inundated with opportunity down the road.

Do you keep your head down and work away at things? Do you build connections and relationships to the parts of the world you want to be in? I appreciate your perspectives at [email protected] or as @[email protected].

Thanks for reading, I really appreciate your time and attention.

In spite of my best efforts?

There are things that I find difficult to do but am highly motivated to overcome. Technical challenges, being a good boss, being a good consultant in many different facets. I fail, I strive, I grow, I overcome. There are other things I find fundamentally hard to do and where motivation doesn't come nearly so easily. These come back. Over and over again.

I was hit with a recurrence of this just recently. My wife and I have very different ways of socializing, hanging out, spending time. She prefers a low-intensity, sit-and-chat, whatever comes up. She needs space to express her needs and desires. I benefit immensely from spending this type of time as well and enjoy it when we do. I am terrible at making it happen. I always have been. If there is one big impedance mismatch in the relationship, it is probably this.

My default operating mode tends to be that my brain goes full bore on ideas, projects, doing, doing, doing. This is probably a habit from long periods of pressures to produce under stress and likely has just worked deep grooves into my brain. I don't feel stressed. I think I generally don't appear stressed. I just do things, as if my life depended on it. I don't mind this for myself. I mind when it gets in the way of others.

From my professional perspective I'm apparently "crushing it" right now. I am connecting with great, fun, competent people. I'm invited to share what I'm passionate about. People ask me to teach, entertain and build. I'm gainfully employed in my own business which supports my family and six other people. I'm proud of what I do. I get to leverage my skills to a high degree every day. I get to seek out challenges and try interesting things on them.

I'm currently on a 40 hour work week and have zero commute. With two children that are quite young (9 months and almost 3 years respectively) all the time I'm at home tends to be absorbed by them and their logistics. It is difficult to find time for us to spend that time. And it competes with my desire to sit down and turn my brain off for a bit before sleeping.

I am not asking about marriage advice from you, dear reader. We are working on it. I'm doing what I always do which is share a bit more than is typically wise about how my life operates in the hope that it is resonant and helpful to someone. It tends to be, or so you all tell me.

It has been a reminder for me that success in one end of life doesn't balance out deficits in other ends. You can't average them out. No amount of conference talks will make my loved ones feel more attended to. We lose the parts of your life that we let fall for too long. We will end up with less life. I think one wants to be intentional about what surface-area of life to cut. Shitty family? Okay, maybe cut that. Hobby not serving you anymore? Okay, maybe cut that. If you can avoid letting them deteriorate, that's better.

And there is no life hack. It is about priorities. Where you spend time and effort. Putting in serious work, at work, is easy-town for me. Me sitting quietly and drink a cup of tea with a loved one is apparently quite difficult. That's embarassing to admit. I don't think I'm alone in finding that challenging though.

Are you suffering a fool like me in your relationships or perhaps you share my difficulties? Feel free to email or fediverse via [email protected] or as @[email protected].

Thank you for reading. I appreciate you spending your attention here.

The Alchemist Guild for the Elixir CTO is now active

Everyone who has paid for membership has been invited. Everyone who has expressed interest has been responded to. And useful discussion is already occurring among the dozen people that have joined so far.

If you are a technical leader (CTO, VP, Eng M. or similarly tasked) you are very welcome to read more at guild.elixiri.st. I want to create a space for useful exchange of ideas and a place of community for people in these tricky roles that intersect business, technology and most of all, people. 

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In other news. I hope to pick back up on posting job opportunities soon and I'll be figuring out video production again in February. So more things to come that are not specific to tech bosses :)

I'm easily inspired, sometimes

In some cases I run into ideas that are compelling in two opposing directions at once. And if you try to move in two opposite directions you will stand still while struggling hard.

This is when the "Both" GIF fails.

One example is deployment and production environments. I'm fascinated by fully automated, everything-runs-itself, full-on abstraction, cattle-ranching cloud deployments. It takes automation and abstraction to an extreme. A systems approach. I also really think we find more efficiency and that most workloads are served better with a couple of dedicated machines with none of the cloud service overhead both in terms of waste, cost and lock-in. There is no both here. There are some odd hybrids, like Equinix Metal offering dedicated machines through API or running a PaaS like Dokku on your own.

Another is computers. How minimal could I get? Can I do a completely passively cooled system that's still plenty powerful or should I even scale down to a power-sipping ARM machine? Efficiency has appeal. Minimalism has another appeal. They can sometimes be combined. On the other end is just raw power. If I'm going to use a desktop shouldn't I make sure it is all it can be in terms of performance? Can I run a server at home? If you try to do both you are not being efficient, so you lose again.

A third one is business. I have a deep affection for thoroughly worked, hand-crafted, deeply designed software that someone has really sweated and the organic growth and small-scale business that can be achieved that way. At the same time the fast solution has a lot of appeal. It does make sense to do an MVP and throw it out there, see what works, iterate on that. Scrappy, crappy and lean. It can get deeper later. If you really want to go hard I guess VC has it's fascinations but I don't personally want that. Again, not convinced you can pick both paths and get somewhere.

Honestly I consider much of my job to be exploring so I rarely have to pick a direction. If you go hard in either direction you are specializing, building expertise and eventually doing your own research. Not necessarily what I want. This is my excuse for trying both, quite often. Exploring.

The Pareto Principle makes me think that going full on in any direction might not be the wise thing. 20% towards any extreme might give you 80% of the results it can offer. And for my client projects and most of my efforts I tend to pick a direction to lean which provides some clarity of purpose and then the rest boils down to a pragmatic mix of what makes sense for the solution and the people.

What extremes fascinate you and are their opposites also compelling? Holler at [email protected] or as @[email protected].

Thanks for reading, I really appreciate your time and attention.