I've known about the Dunning-Kruger effect for years, thanks to Hacker News and its penchant for surfacing the names of Things. It never occurred to me before just now that my steady decline in productivity here on this blog, or rather the extreme productivity I enjoyed in posting to this blog in its first year, were the result of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I had so much to say! I had no idea what I was talking about!

It's a damn shame, because it really did help me to let that stuff out of my head, as I'm sure it would help me now. It's just that now that I know so, so much more about the technology business I'm so much more acutely aware of all that I don't know about the technology business.

I'ma try and get over that though, because just letting the thoughts out of my head is a very soothing process, and I have no illusions that anyone is actually reading this thing anymore. Ciao.

#life

Basically nothing you probably haven't learned already, but let me detail my latest take on web conference call nirvana:

An iPhone with a mini tripod, search “iPhone tripod” on Amazon, and a pair of AirPods. This lets you set up your meet anywhere – the yard is my personal favorite since about a month ago when spring began – and carry on doing whatever you're doing without having to balance your phone on whatever is around.

#life

Just because I'm losing Doesn't mean I'm lost

I don't know really how to get into this one, but I was talking with someone earlier today about The Struggle. The Struggle is all I've been working against for the last 10 years since I started this blog. I don't want to say that The Struggle is over, but if it's the mountain I've been climbing I think I'm basically at the top of it now. I need to find another mountain to climb now.

I started this blog a lifetime ago, and I feel like an almost completely different person than I was back then but I've been working on the same thing this whole time – feed my family and find a gig that makes me feel empowered to do what I'm good at and that gives me room to grow.

So now I'm here, my family is fed and I have a job with some upside and some growing responsibility. It's a fun job, I like my coworkers, and there's growth there if I can figure out how to [continue to] grow it.

That's the trick now. Now that the daily/weekly/yearly job of grinding it out against The Struggle has gotten me to where I was trying to be that whole time, I have to refocus on something larger.

#life

Problemspace

I haven't posted anything in over a year. I'm almost rusted shut, yet I lately feel the need to commit to creating a new row in the database that backs this blog.

Solutionspace

Just start writing.

I've been at this gig for over 3 years now, and I've learned a decent deal about the “real world”, the one that I wanted to exist in toward the end of my last career. I scored that tech job, I got bumped up to mgmt about 8 months ago. I actually really enjoy it and I'd kind of like to journal some of the things I've learned along the way here.

Anyway, if you knew me in my 20s and you're reading this – thank you. I'm going to just start writing.

#life

Well hey, I haven't written anything here in 2018, that's wild.

So here's what I'm doing – I'm removing the GA tracker from this blog. I don't check my stats anymore and I suspect what audience there is to this blog probably has ad blocking enabled. Hell, I have ad blocking enabled. Seems kind of hypocritical to have an ad blocker installed so that the eye of tech-Sauron can't follow me as easily around the internet, and yet to have GA tracking on my own blog. So I'm getting rid of it.

#life

So much to say, so much to say..

Some day I'll write a memoir, but that day is not this day my friends. The most outwardly memorable thing I've done so far this summer is fly out to Oregon to the String Summit to cover for Mike Devol of Greensky. Mike had a baby a few days before, and back in the winter he called me up to see if I might be interested in covering for him on some summer festival shows. Duh, yes.

So I had several months to prepare, but not prepare so much that I got actually excited about the gig because it quite likely might not happen. It was a strange mental exercise.

I can't even begin to recount the whole weekend here, though it was definitely worth thinking back on. Friday morning I got to judge the band contest and though they didn't win, this band deserved to win..

Something about the line “then I'll have my family band, make play the tunes that they don't really understand” hit the waterworks button and it got stuck. I was seriously sobbing for about 30 minutes or so, fortunately I'd bought aviators on the way to the airport.

The whole experience was just so intensely cathartic for me, it's not possible to express my thanks to those guys for letting me do it.

#life #music

I just switched this blog over to a Silex application for a few weeks, but I never got around to adding in the functionality to add new tickets, and add new tags, and link the two together, and all that other stuff that a framework like Laravel just gives you.

So we're back.

#life

I was just remembering this post from back in the early days of this blog. Social media was being used to shine a bright light on oppression and old, repressive regimes were falling.

Fast forward to now, the end of 2016. Social media is being used to organize vastly more repressive regimes, and the ease with which anyone can now spread convincing lies makes it almost impossible to tell what's true anymore.

Traditional journalism has never been more important than it is now.

#life

I work with a guy. He's incredibly smart. He's the seniormost developer here, and if you need to learn something new and get something large done, he's the guy to do it. We basically dropped him off in the AWS jungle and told him to learn Hadoop and the entire Hadoop ecosystem for a data warehouse project and he did it.

I work with another guy. He's also incredibly smart. But he asks me for the answer before attempting to find it on his own more often than not. He's got a point when he says “it's a lot faster for me to just ask you rather than spend time trying to find it on my own”, because he's here to do a job after all. I get that. But the best analogy I can come up with is a spin on the old adage -

You can give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. You can teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.

There's a third kind of person, though – the person who goes out and finds out about fishing on their own and then teaches themselves how to fish. This person will be your boss, and will always be employed.

#generaldevelopment #life

How I very deliberately ended up in tech

This journey is fairly well documented on this blog, but I'll distill it down to a post, since I've answered this question a few times lately.

Early years

I started playing guitar and bass as a teenager, and upon arriving at college had to declare a major. I chose music since that's the only thing I could see devoting the majority of my time toward studying, and picked the Recording and Production track in the Music Industries Studies dept at Appalachian State University. Only later did I realize that my affinity for recording and production was due as much to my love for computers as my sterling ears.

After college I joined a band and spent 7 years on the road, traveling mostly all of North America, but occasionally the world too. I did not have a desire to spend my life on the road playing music, however. I always pictured moving from a music performance career into a music business career as the industry hadn't completely imploded yet. It was actually at the same party described in this post that I had the vision of where I wanted to be later in life, and it was in “the business”.

The road

So years went by and I had more or less learned everything I cared to know about the music business when I had another epiphany. This post chronicles that one, and it was about technology. It was on a long car ride that I discovered, truly discovered, the economy that was about to come. “Oh! This is going to be a thing!” I thought to myself that first day of the iPhone App Store. “A thing that if I learned it, I could continue to be my own boss, continue having a creative rewarding career, and probably even make enough money to feed my kids!”

So I went for it. I bought myself a Mac laptop in July of 2008 with the goal of teaching myself iPhone app programming. I had no idea what I was doing or even how to learn.

After the road

I got truly sick of my previous career in early 2009 and spent the rest of that year planning my exit. After quitting at the end of 2009 I had nothing but time on my hands to spend about 100 hours a week banging this stuff into my brain.

I had a contact that threw me some work and out of that came the first Drupal site I ever built. In 2010. 2010 was a rough year by every metric, but we got through it and by 2011 I had a new music gig and a full funnel of contract work. Life was looking up.

Child #3 and beyond

Life got turned upside down again with the arrival of son #3 in 2012. At this point I had no time to fill the contract funnel anymore and decided to take the dreaded “straight job”. I'd only intended to stay for about 6 months until the waves calmed down at home, but as it turned out I really like working with people, and the people at the job were really cool for the most part.

I've been here since, almost 4 years now. I've moved from mostly front end developer to mostly Chief Architect of this entire joint, since almost everything interests me on some level and my boss and I have a really symbiotic working relationship. I also (in my opinion) excel at seeing the big picture of the system and figuring out how to get it done.

#life