DaedTech

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Apr
4

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DaedTech Digest: The Closest I Get to Business Travel These Days

Category: Digests |

I didn’t do a digest post last week.  And I can’t offer any kind of logistical or overworked excuse.

Amanda and I just decided we wanted to go out for a date night, so we tried a local brewery, played some old school video games, and had dinner out.  By the time we came home, it was almost midnight, and I went to bed instead of writing a digest post.  C’est la vie.

Farewell, Charleston, and Thanks for All the Fish!

That being said, there have been logistics this past week.  Oh, yes, there have been logistics.

We packed up last Friday, loaded the car Saturday morning, and then headed out.  Well, first we went to the beach for a while, and then we headed out.

Our next stop?  Here in Atlanta, where I’m typing this week’s digest.

But we’re not in Atlanta for a month.  We said goodbye to Charleston, and our next slow travel destination is actually a place called Ramrod Key, near Key West.

We Do Short Stops Sometimes, and It’s Always Weird

No, Atlanta is just a stop over because I wanted to see the Cubs play while they’re here in Atlanta.  So we figured we’d stay for a week, instead of doing a protracted, mid-week relocation with a baseball game or two in the mix.

What’s it like when we do something like this?  A week or less during slow travel life?

Well, frankly, it’s weird.  It’s kind of like a business trip.

We arrived last Saturday night, unpacked, and took it easy.  On Sunday, we did the tourist thing, meandering around downtown Atlanta and sightseeing.  But, since then, I’ve spent all of my time in our AirBNB and running miscellaneous errands nearby, without really doing anything interesting.  (We are heading to the Cubs game shortly, though, and we will go a-touristing again this weekend before departing for the Keys).

And that very much reminds me of business travel over the years.  You go somewhere and snatch sightseeing while you can.  But mostly, you work, and hope you won’t be too tired for the odd trip to the local zoo or nightlife area.

So that’s condensed slow travel.  When you go somewhere and live for 1-4 months, you experience the place while working, living like a local.  But when you cram it down to 8 days, you experience it like a visiting regional manager.

And, on that note, please enjoy this view of Charleston from Ft. Sumter.  Seeing Charleston at a distance seems uniquely appropriate for a “Goodbye Charleston” post.

Picks

  • One of the things that a dinosaur (and content marketer) like me finds most annoying about Instagram is the lack of support for uploading from desktop.  Luckily, Gramblr exists as a free tool to help you trick Instagram.  Erik 1, Instagram 0.
  • Fellow Freelancers Show panelist Jonathan Stark is offering a 10 day challenge to get you in the habit of systemizing things in your life.  If that sounds interesting at all, I’d definitely sign up, becuase I employ this same technique, and it’s immensely helpful for making my own businesses more efficient.
  • If you’re a craft beer fan and find yourself in Atlanta, definitely give this place a try: the Torched Hop.  Not only do they have a ton of really delicious beer, but the food looks good (we just stopped for a quick flight and didn’t actually try it) and the ambiance is wonderful.

The Digest

As always, have yourselves a great weekend, folks.

Apr
2

By

Software Career Anti-Patterns: Career Development by Coincidence

Category: From Developer to Consultant | 5 Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a hot take.  And, to be fair, this is probably a lukewarm take, at best.  I’m taking a slightly aged tweet, and I’m going to react to it in a slightly oblique way.

Here’s the tweet.

I do have opinions on this tweet, and I’ll get to those momentarily.  But, as I go through this post, I’m actually going to relate it more to a different facet of the programming world.  Specifically, I think this has an tangential-but-important tie-in with how we tend to fetishize skill in the tech world, in spite of it being not that important in the scheme of things.

But let’s put a pin in that.

Conference Speaking is a Content Marketing Activity

If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you might have seen me write about this exact topic.  I titled the post, “Conference Speaking Isn’t Good for Your Career Until You Make it Good,” and that title serves nicely as a spoiler for the content.

My premise is somewhat softer than Brianne’s, in that I neither discount speaking outright, nor do I make an ad hominem implication that youth and naivete govern speakers’ decision-making.  My take is less that conference speaking is pointless and more that people tend to do it quite inefficiently.

In a professional context, conference speaking is a marketing activity and, more specifically, a content marketing activity.  You deliver value for free (in most cases) with the idea that investing your time and effort this way will pay off later.  Other activities, including ones that Brianne mention also fall into this bucket.

  • Writing blog posts
  • Building FOSS utilities
  • Starting a Youtube channel
  • Building a social media following

And Conference Speaking is Uniquely Prone to Content Marketing Inefficiency

Now, as someone who spent years creating content inefficiently, I have plenty of perspective here.  I wrote a blog like a journal, instead of an asset, and it led to all kinds of opportunities and new careers.  So, I did it, and it worked, albeit less efficiently than it could have.

So against this backdrop, I’ll offer my own spin on Brianne’s comments, which I think make sense.  When you miss the point with blog posts, software, social media, videos, etc, you can always rework that content into more efficient forms.  You can’t do that with speaking, which is ephemeral.

In other words, while all forms of content marketing activities are prone to these inefficiencies, conference speaking makes it uniquely hard to course correct later.

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Mar
27

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Reader Question Round Up: Micromanagers, Finding Work, and Entry Level Gigs

Category: You Asked For It |

I’m now officially getting back into the content groove, I think.  Last week I wrote at length about the subject of pair programming.  And this week, I’m doing another reader question round-up.

I’m opting for the video format again for a couple of reasons.  First, because I’m frankly having fun with it.  And, second, because I think it works well for questions that I’d struggle to write a full length post about.

I know, I know.  That seems hard to believe.

But, seriously, things like “how do I find an entry level Java development job” don’t really inspire me to bang out 2,000 words.  And so they wind up just sitting in the backlog, gathering dust. I figure I might feel like writing about them later.

So I think this is a good compromise and a good way to do some topics justice.

This Week on the Round-Up

Now, without much further ado, I offer you a frame of the round-up.  If you’re interested, the topics I cover in this video are as follows.

  1. What do I do, as a consultant, when a line manager tries to micromanage me?
  2. Name some better ways to find work as a freelancer than just blasting out “hey, I’m free” to your network.
  3. How do you get a job as an entry level Java developer after getting your degree?
  4. How do you use Javascript for something that’s going to have to last a long time?

Give it a watch below, if you’re so inclined.  I included a couple of movie clips in this one for variety.  So kudos to anyone who gets the references.

Mar
21

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DaedTech Digest: Living Our Life at the Isle of Palms Beach

Category: Digests | 6 Comments

The Charleston metro area is great, as I briefly described a couple of weeks ago.  And, since then, we’ve seen even more of the city, treating ourselves to some additional excursions and adventures in the city proper.

But today, I’d like to talk about where we’re actually staying, and what life there is like.

We’re in a town called Isle of Palms.  Not surprisingly, it exists on an island — a barrier island, to be exact.  And Isle of Palms is maybe a 15 minute drive from Charleston proper, and 2 towns over.

If you live in or around a major city, you might map this to a bustling suburb, but that’s really not the case.  Charleston is actually quite a small city, and these beach outlying areas really do not feel like suburbs.  They feel like, well, beach destinations.

So it’s like we’re staying in the kind of house you might have gone to with your family as a kid for a beach week during spring or summer vacation.

Living at the Beach

As I mentioned last week, we’re setting aside some time where we’re not going full tourist and not working.  We want to relax.  And, where better than the beach?

So our life here has settled into a nice, sustainable cadence.  We’re working as we normally work, whether at home base or vagabonding, but we’re enjoying more success in not over-doing it.  This, combined with not booking our free time with wall-to-wall excursions, has given us some enormously enjoyable downtime.

And we’re making the most of it.  This has included:

  • (At the risk of living a cliche) a lot of long walks on the beach in pursuit of impressive streaks of 10,000 step days.
  • Taking chairs down to the beach and reading.
  • Having a beer or two at a few different breezy establishments along the coast, while we look out at the ocean.
  • (For me only) jogging along the coast every day.

Now, before you think that we’re living the life described in that Beach Boys song that lists every Caribbean destination in existence, understand that it’s actually not super warm here.  Daytime highs have ranged from the mid-50s to the mid-70s.  So a lot of these beach excursions involve shoes, jeans, and a hoodie.

Also, understand that it is apparently “sand gnat” season here.  These things put mosquitoes to shame.  If I’m not careful to put on bug spray for night beach visits, my forearms wind up covered in itchy welts.

So, it’s not tropical vaction.  But it is warm-ish, peaceful, beautiful, quiet, and surprisingly private, for a beach destination at spring break.  We’re packing up to head to Atlanta in about a week.  But our time here at the scenic Isle of Palms beach has been restorative.

Picks

  • Here’s a fun thing that happened to me: a mention from Tim Ferris regarding an article I wrote some time back.  It’s in reference to an article from his blog about learning to write code.
  • I’ve been poking around and learning about dev.to, which I’m starting to like.  It’s a nice contributor-driven content community, but without the horrible people that such a thing usually attracts if it gets big enough.  In other words, it appears that the community actually enforces human decency.
  • Finally, here’s a local spot if you’re ever in Isle of Palms, called the Windjammer.  I mentioned having a beer or two and watching the surf, and there’s no better place to do it.  They have tall chairs facing out of their back patio for exactly that purpose, and they even have a sand volleyball court on their ground floor.

The Digest

  • Hey, look — I wrote stuff this week!  Not only did I get back to publishing stuff on the DaedTech blog, but I wrote a post for our entry level programmer site, sharing my opinion on what it takes to be a good software engineer.
  • We also published another episode of the Freelancers Show this week, where Jonathan Stark and I discussed the idea of generating leverage with your business by creating systems and standard operation procedures.
  • And I uploaded a new Youtube video for Hit Subscribe.  If you want to learn to tell how hard it is to rank for a given search keyword, check it out!

And, as always, have yourselves a great weekend.

Mar
19

By

Should You Take a 100% Pair Programming Job?

Category: You Asked For It | 8 Comments

Pair programming.  Understanding of this topic may vary among the readership.

Some of you might have the vague notion that it means two programmers working together… or something.  Others of you might have a more solid grasp of particulars and a vocabulary that includes terms like “driver-navigator” and “expert-novice.”  And, a few may even understand the full origin story of pair programming as a core plank of the eXtreme Programming (XP) approach.

Hey, Look, a Pair Programming Reader Question

I’ll soon return to that origin story.  But first, let’s look at why I’m talking about this at all.  I’m actually gearing up to answer a reader question:

I was interviewed by a company that [does] full pair programming.  I hate the idea of spending all my day with somebody looking at me writing code.  What do you think about it?

So to clarify a little here, we’re talking about a company that subscribes, full stop, to the XP rule that “all production code is pair programmed.”  For all intents and purposes, this means that dev teams pair program 100% of the time as a rule.

Should you take a job at such a company?

It’s honestly hard for me to say for any given person since my advice would be so very tailored to your individual personality and preferences.  So rather than immediately give a thumbs up or down, I thought maybe I’d explore the topic of pair programming more broadly.

Since my publication of Developer Hegemony and subsequent departure from a traveling consulting/training life, I’ve made this blog increasingly one about software developer empowerment.  Today, I’d like to look at the subject of that pair programming through that relatively uncommon lens.

I want to examine not whether pair programming is a Good Thing (TM), but whether it’s a good thing for you, as a software developer.

Read More

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