Been reading the Harry Potter books for a few years with the family at night, and in the middle gets introduced this thing of Dumbledore's called the “Pensieve”, which is like a bowl into which Dumbledore can put his memories so he doesn't have to keep them all in his head.

I just realized I've been doing this, sort of, for the last year or so. I'm full on manager now, all I do is phones calls for the first half of any given day. I started taking notes with pen and paper sometime last year. Lately it's a lot of thoughts I don't want to forget, or questions I want to ask but don't want to interrupt the speaker.

It started out as organized, action items to follow up on or something that made me feel more organized. Now I just think the physical act of writing things down with a pen is really helpful, with a bonus that I have a few things that make sense to me later when look back on it.

#life

I'm working through some thoughts in my head about social media, as I've been doing since founding this blog well over a decade ago. Back then I thought it was going to be a savior of democracy in oppressed societies around the world, and we see how that's turned out.

Lately it's an issue closer to home. My kids are creators. At some point years back they got inspired by Captain Underpants and started making their own comic books. We have bookshelves full of 8 inch sketch pads from AC Moore (RIP) and our middle son especially made visual art and story telling his thing. It's amazing to see how far he and they have come, especially with the story telling part.

In recent years, they've taken to making movies with iMovie and other tools like it with an iPad. They've started making animated movie shorts as well. None of this is the stuff they want to post on YouTube, but I know it's coming.

My middle son went and signed himself up a YouTube account. He's been posting content lately, mostly gameplay stuff from Minecraft. His brothers, of course, want their own YouTube accounts and so far I've said “no” without really understanding the why. Michelle hit on it the other day when she said to one of them “I don't want anyone telling you what you're worth” and I think that's it.

Especially when you're young, other people's opinions matter a lot. Social media is a wide open gate to put yourself out there and be judged in the form of likes and subscribes, and no matter what they think they will or won't care about, the human brain is wired to want to fit in with a community. The part that really bothers me WRT the boys is that the stuff that gets likes and subscribes is often the lowest common denominator and I don't want them molding their creativity around that. We've seen how that plays out.

#life

I am on my way to San Diego for the first Platformer meetup thing that I've been to since the Beforetimes, at least the first that's not just my team. On my way to San Diego I stopped by Austin for the FinOpsX conference, an amazing little thing put on by ... maybe the Linux Foundation through some other community community, idk.

Anyway, it was really amazing. Open source is just so much fun, I'm really glad that I found it all those years ago. This conference was smallish, like 400 people, but had all the open source vibes that the Drupal scene had back in the day, or the Python scene had the only time I dipped my toes in a few years back.

I'm really rather enjoying my gig these days after a long dark winter of feeling pretty hollowed out. Been doing some work and am feeling much healthier now. One of the lovely things about going to a conference or just getting outside your bubble in general is learning a little about how other companies operate.

See, here inside the bubble at Platform it seems sometimes like everything is going to take so long, and it's so difficult coordinating all these people and their worklives. Sometimes it's hard to see the bigger picture. One of my main takeaways is that we actually have our act together in many, many ways at Platform and one of the way in which I am most proud is in our data setup where pretty much everything we need is in a place where you can find it. Most companies don't even have this much.

I am about to fully inherit the FinOps function here when one of my people moves on to a new gig in a few weeks, and I'm mostly pretty excited about the opportunity to remake a little part of the world here that seems to cause a couple people some stress.

So yeah, somehow data and finance are the things that are interesting to me now.

#life #finops

This blog...

This blog is interesting to myself because like I said in a recent-ish post – it really maps out a 12 year master Dunning Kruger cycle in technology, with baby Dunning Kruger journeys into different topic areas along the way. Early in this blog I had so much to say. Later in this blog I am aware of how much I don't know. The post frequency maps almost exactly with this chart that I recently took a look at again:

#life

I don't know, this just came to me. For several months now I've been trying to make some changes to old behaviors. One of them is a lack of communicating, of building up a thing or a plan in my head without talking it over with the people whom it affects.

I've summarized this as something like

When I have a good idea – when I see the path – I assume everyone sees it too.

So I've been making more of an effort to communicate everything in the last few months, whether it's the Big Idea that I have at work or the difficult conversation that I don't want to have with this coworker.

It just popped in my head a second ago that part of the reason that people don't see The Path is that it's not their path. They have their own paths they're moving down. It's my job to explain my path to them as soon and as often as possible, especially if I need their help getting down it.

#life

I caught this thought train last night and hopped off before writing it down. It has to do with the visible trappings of success. First the obvious bits.

True success isn't something that someone gives you. It's not something that you get. It's not a thing. It's a feeling. I am currently riding the wave of it for maybe the first time ever. I am doing my best work. This post, written over a decade ago – I'm finally there. It may not last, and I'm ok with that. I'm grateful for it now.

Thing is, for a long time up to sometime in the last handful of months I thought about the visible trappings of success – title, how many people report to me – they took up mental space. I think because I've always kind of had self-confidence issues and those things function as kind of a buoy or channel marker for me to know that yes, in fact, I'm headed in the right direction according to societal norms. They boosted my confidence in a fleeting but still meaningful way, because eventually the flywheel is spinning on its own and I realize I'm not thinking about any of that shit anymore. I mean, I need more reports because I need more brains and hands to execute on the job now, and not because I care how many reports I have.

This is one of those thoughts that's buried under a lot of muck and I don't really understand it much more clearly than I've attempted to lay out here. It's sort of like when a coworker recently asked me “did I just make a mistake by turning down the unexpected opportunity to have more folks reporting to me?” and my first reaction was something like “don't optimize the wrong metric” but that's a bit overly simplistic.

Whatever you need to help you feel successful is helpful to get you to the place of being successful, as long as you don't confuse it with success itself. It's like career therapy for middle aged white guys.

#life

Started here at this company about 5 years ago, a smallish technology startup (30 or so ppl) HQ'd in Paris founded by some really smart people that I wanted to work with.

I didn't view myself as having the engineering skillset to go out for the engineering team, so when I saw a post for a Solutions Architect that fit my resume perfectly I applied. It was a move out of the “back of the house” programming toward the front of house, talking with customers, working with the Sales team to bring in new customers. This was all I knew at the time about the role.

Turns out I loved it. I loved talking to customers and solving problems and making sure that they knew exactly how to be successful when they got started here. I love looking at the big picture and solving problems.

The company at that time didn't have much of a career ladder for that position and it got a bit boring after 2 years, so I asked for a role leading a small team whose manager had just been promoted. I was asking her to let me have her old role, basically. She said “yes” and we worked together fabulously for another 2 years, and built the team from 3 people up to 15 people and made all kinds of fun strategic moves that mostly worked out.

Last summer I started getting itchy again as the team had solidified to a point where I didn't feel that good at what the role needed now, so I decided to ask to start a new team based around data, broadly. It was my POV that the next turn of the wheel here at Platform.sh would be enabled by data, and folks higher up had the same thought at the same time so they said “yes” when I asked if I could build this team.

This was really interesting, because I'd taken over a small team and built it but this was a blank canvas. Luckily, it was a blank canvas that I'd bee staring at for years by that point, so I had a pretty clear picture of what belonged on it. The work then was getting the plan out of my head and into a format that others could read it, disagree with it, and eventually settle on what we're now doing.

It has been a long, 11 year road since I quit that band to start a tech career but here I am now. I'm a technical leader at a medium sized technology company (now 250 or so ppl), working on the for real technical problems and I think I'm pretty decent at it. I still need to work on organizing the pictures in my head into words that others can understand, and making sure that other know where those thoughts are, but I'm learning something new every single day.

thank you for reading <3

#life

This is one of the aspects I didn't consider. A bit of background:

I'll have been here at Platform.sh for 5 years this July, which is crazy because it's now the longest I've ever held a single job in my life. Last summer I was poised to propose that we start a new team here around Data and Analytics right as someone else, much higher up then I, proposed that we start the exact same team. I raised my hand to start this team.

Prior to this I was leading a team of 15 in charge of onboarding and the post-sales $stuff, account management or Customer Success if you want. It was a young-ish but maturing team in terms of processes and to be honest I feel like I'm better earlier when the magma isn't really cooled and the direction isn't set. I enjoy solving problems. Once a set of problems gets “solved” it turns into processes that need to be implemented and refined. This is the natural lifecycle of a business or a department, but I take less joy in those later operational refinements than I do the initial creative period where you're trying to figure it all out.

So I raised my hand to do it again, this time with my dream project – our Data and Analytics story.

It's also the natural lifecycle of a business that, if you're lucky, you get to a certain point where things are still going up and to the right, but you've gotten there largely on feel so far, and your investors are starting to ask questions about things like The Margin. Or the COGS. Or your customers show up in more and more places so it's tougher to keep track of all of them and make sure they're staying happy.

In short, you are much further from where you started and the navigation of the vehicle starts to become much more important, because all the landmarks you once knew have faded from view. This is where precise measurements about the direction and velocity of the vehicle start to take over from, or at least assist, your instincts. Having already identified about 500 questions I wanted to be able to answer with data (broadly) I still can't believe my luck, that I've wound up here.

It is not without its downsides, however...

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One thing that I didn't take into consideration was the rather extreme sense of isolation that I feel in this new role. The team really has two missions, though from the outside they look like one. To borrow my own analogy, it's like catering a large event. The groceries have to be procured before they can be prepped and cooked and served to all the diners, but all the diner sees is the dish in front of the plate.

So, getting the data into The Warehouse is 1 job. Cleaning, prepping, cooking, and serving the data to the clientele is the second job. To do them sequentially would take a very long time, so while the procurement side has largely been handled thanks to my new data engineer teammate and Fivetran, it's a very lonely and rather stressful job to handle everything after that. I don't really have anyone to talk to about any of this part of the job and it's ... it sucks, frankly.

I'm not sure how this could've been different except if I'd considered that I was moving from an established team of 15 to a new team of 1, and that there would be little to no collaboration, which is a thing I really enjoy and thrive on. I'm feeling the burn for sure.

#business #life

I never would've dreamed when I was 24 and hitting the road full time with a band that I would ultimately find career happiness not playing music but actually with a full time job working w a bunch of people I almost never see in person.

#life

[This was partially inspired by this excellent article that I read Saturday morning.]

I manage two teams. One of them has been through a lot of changes in the last 12 months, basically taking a rather sharp turn in responsibilities and day to day work. This was always the plan because I believed that there was no better team to take over this particular process than ours, but when it came down to actually implement the changes clearly it was not what some members of the team had signed up for.

One day recently one of our strongest team members told me she wanted to move to another team.

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I know for a fact that there are managers in this world who would take this poorly. Best case scenario they wonder how the team member is going to be replaced and how it's going to affect the team members that remain. Certain other managers would worry about how this is going to reflect on them as a manager if one of their team members wants to move to another team.

The absolute worst response you could get from a manager is “no, I like you where you are” because this openly tells the team member that there's nowhere for them to grow in your organization. They would be better off finding a new job if they want something new, because there's nothing for them here but more of the same.

Then there's the manager that says “hell yeah, how can I help?”. I'm very glad and very lucky to be in this camp and to be able to contribute to others growing their careers, even if it's through nothing more than encouragement.

Be a booster. Be a leader, not an anchor.

#business #life #personal