DaedTech Smorgasbord: Reader-Questions, A Digest and Brief Notes from the Road

I haven’t done a digest post in a while, so let’s do that.  But first, I’ll digress a little bit with a more abbreviated version of “notes from the road” than the last one.

Notes from the Road

We are currently back at our home in Michigan.

It’s a nice place to be, particularly in the summer.  And it’s good to get home, dump the boats in the lake, and enjoy the outdoors.

But, it was nice to get away for a while, especially to the non-coastal west.  Out there, things were more wide-open, more normal-feeling when doing outdoors activities, and less virus/lockdown-focused.

Between the last notes from the road post and now, we spent a month in a town called Hailey, Idaho, and then a little more than a week in Bismarck, ND, before drifting back here over a long weekend.

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A Digest and Notes from the Road: Spearfish, SD

Hey, it’s been a while since I did a slow travel digest.  I think that’s because, until this spring, we did more fast travel than slow.  We spent time in Dubai, Thailand, the Bay Area, and midwest locations over the fall and winter months.  But those trips were 1-3 weeks in nature, rather than months-long.

But hey, we’re back at it.

So I’ll talk about my experience in Spearfish, South Dakota, where we spent a month.  If you’re just in it for the video content and picks, though, you can skip to the bottom.

Spearfish: The Black Hills Experience

Amanda and I tend to move around a lot.  But early March saw us in Michigan at our house, so when the world battened the hatches, we battened down along with it.  After all, our normal lifestyle is already fairly distanced from everyone, so in a lot of ways, minus the lack of mobility, nothing much changed for us.

But after two months of that, we grew pretty restless and decided to head somewhere more open/remote and less touched by the whole COVID situation.  The “somewhere” we picked was South Dakota because of a combination of the appeal of the Black Hills and its relatively laissez faire approach to lockdown restrictions.

And, man was it good to hit the road after two months of being stationary.

Cats on the road.

We headed to Spearfish, South Dakota, which was about 16 hours driving from our lake house.  Spearfish sits in the Black Hills of South Dakota and is maybe an hour and a half from Mt. Rushmore and very close to motorcycle Mecca, Sturgis.  It’s a town with probably around 10,000 people and was a fun mix of the rural and the surprisingly cosmopolitan.

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Reader Question Round-Up: Remote Work, Solution Architects, and the Death of Developer Hegemony

My apologies, readers, for missing a week. Last week I I was on the road in Kansas City and Des Moines, for a pleasant mix of work and recreation. All good life experience, but the work did pile up and push somethings, like blog posts, down my priority stack.

However, I did have another reader question video queued up and needing only an edit, so I got that ready in time for this week. So I’m bringing that to you today, below. In it, I answer the following questions:

1. 1:02 How to become a solution architect?
2. 8:50 I’m worried about struggling socially with remote work.
3. 14:55 Book recommendations for consultants?
4. 21:15 Is the “Developer Hegemony dream” dead?

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Reader Question Round-Up: Value of Consulting, Salesforce, Career Advice

I’ve been doing a pretty good job so far in 2020 when it comes to weekly content. And so here I am, today, keeping that dream alive.

I recorded a video last week and set it to auto-publish this morning. So I’m going to do a digest post for it.

This is going to be pretty bare bones, though. Amanda and I are traveling this week and are in the Bay area.  I’ve been meeting with clients for the last couple of days, and now we’re settled into the Oakland City Center Marriott for DeveloperWeek, which I’ll be attending to see talks and meet people.

If you’re interested in the goings-on there at all, I plan to do an experiment in live-blogging the experience and some of the talks. So stay tuned here for more detail, or you can see what I’m doing on Twitter.

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Reader Question Round-Up: Getting into Management, the Value of Consulting, and More

Ever since I started treating content creation as a hobby, I’ve been getting things out pretty consistently. Mostly, this has just meant doing stuff on weekends, for fun, rather than when I’m tired at midnight on a school night and feel obligated.

I suppose this means that my content production could vary seasonally or by the whims of my interest in other things. But for now, I’m just gonna roll with it.

For now, this means another video on the YouTube channel.  And another video on that channel means another digest post here.

However, if you like written content, do not despair!  I actually have a 4K word blog post ready to publish, and will probably push that whale out into the world next week.

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