Just when you thought I’d run out of steam, like some kind of content brown dwarf, I’ve found new life. Seriously, it’s weird to look at the blog and see that it’s been a month since I’ve posted content.
Oh well. C’est la vie. I’ve got content for you today.
I just recently published another video (framed below) on my Youtube channel where, wow, I’m actually pushing 500 subscribers. And I am, once again, answering reader questions:
How does caring about problem domain relate to ethical concerns about employers?
What is the new big boss’s real agenda for a “culture building” event?
New job offer after only 4 months at current employer and a counter-offer. Should I accept the counter-offer?
How important is code quality for the “efficiencer”?
(If you want to ask me a question for answering in a video or blog post, you can do so here).
As for the blog itself, the sparse content is more of an aberration than a trend. I’m not shooting with do-or-die intention for a weekly cadence, but that is loosely my goal. And I’ve decided to stop treating content creation as a kind of work, and opt to carve out a little time on Saturdays for it instead, treating it as a hobby.
So, no promises on cadence, but rest assured that if you’ve been coming here for content over the years, I have no intention of stopping the train.
Thought you were getting some dev-specific content this week? Ha — ya got fooled!
Last Sunday, at 10:30 AM CST (10:30 PM in Thailand), Amanda and I left our hotel room to head to the airport. We had been up since about 9:00 PM CST on Saturday. From there, we took a six hour flight to Dubai, followed by a 15 hour flight to O’Hare, landing at about 3:00 PM on Monday. We both barely slept on those flights.
And then, we picked up our car and drove 3 and a half hours through Chicago rush hour traffic to our house here in Michigan. We finally went to bed at about 9:00 PM Central time on Monday night.
So, the totals, for those keeping score at home:
36 hours of getting to the airport, flying, layovers, customs, riding, and driving with almost no sleep.
(Nearly) 48 total hours of wakefulness.
Was it worth it?
Absolutely, positively yes. And I’m going to talk all about Thailand and our experience.
But did I have enough energy this week to fight through the jet lag, catch up with Hit Subscribe, and still write a piece of dev content for the blog? Nah.
After my hiatus, I’m back with my fourth consecutive week of content. This time, it’s another reader question round-up, video edition.
I’m going to continue with the theme from last time, which is to use round-up posts to do picks and the digests that I’d been doing historically. I’d also like to encourage anyone to ask me questions because, as I’ve mentioned a few times now, I’m going to let your questions drive the majority of my content going forward.
They can be questions about anything you’d like, really. But my main focus is going to be on topics related to software careers and helping you understand the business of automation.
You can fire questions at me in the comments on the blog, Twitter, comments on Youtube, or really wherever you want. Though, if anyone’s interested in proposing sort of a more effective or efficient way for me to get questions, I’m interested to hear it.
Picks
If you’ve never had occasion to check it out, I’d give the Tropical MBA podcast a listen. The name gives a different impression of it than what it really is, with a kind of “too good to be true vibe.” It’s actually a lot of practical advice for digital entrepreneurs, with a bit of a location-independent flavoring.
My wife and I have been watching this series of Youtube videos called “Pitch Meeting.” If you like snarky humor pointing out plot holes, you’ll like these.
We spent the weekend in Cincinnati, and one of the things we did there was pop in for a little casual axe throwing. Yes, there’s a place called Urban Axes where you learn to throw axes at targets and then have a lot of fun doing that for an hour or two. They have locations in various US cities, and it’s a LOT of fun, so check it out if there’s one near you.
The Digest
Here’s a live blog that I did a while back for Sonatype’s Nexus User Conference.
I’m going to keep the momentum going from last week and answer another slow travel question. This time, it’s a little more philosophical.
When will you stop living the slow travel life?
In a sense, I don’t have a good answer to this question. I honestly don’t know.
It’s kind of like someone asking me, “when will you stop reading sci-fi books” or “when will you stop attending baseball games?” In both cases, as with slow travel, the answer is “I don’t have any specific plans to stop, but who knows what life holds?”
That said, I could see a few scenarios that call for an end. So, while I can’t answer “when,” exactly, I might be able to answer “how/why.”
Shuffling Off This Mortal Coil
Let’s get the obvious and the grim out of the way. At some point, life comes to an end. And when that happens, depending on your belief system, slow travel will either get awesome, horrifying, or simply cease to exist. In any of those cases, I believe it’s fair to say that our current approach will come to an end.
But age and infirmity might beat the grim reaper to the punch as well. It’s hard to imagine exploring unknown countries or wrangling cats in our Jeep when we’re pushing 90.
Getting Tired of Moving Around
I could also see a much less dramatic end to the slow travel. We might simply get tired of all of the effort and logistics, deciding that the fun of novelty no loner outweighs, well, the exhausting nature of novelty.
We’re pretty used to slow traveling and have adapted to it. But, even accounting for that, things can become a grind. Stuff you take for granted, like mail, having a normal social life, and more can add up.
Amanda is probably a little more restless than I am, but I can imagine a world where the draw of kicking back in my own office or bedroom starts to look nicer than kicking back in someone else’s. I haven’t lost my taste for it yet, by a long shot, but I could imagine it.
Finance/Career
Amanda and I can currently both work from anywhere. And we take full advantage of that. We also have no plans to mess with that in the slighest.
But, it’s hard to forecast what you might do in 5 years or 10. 10 years ago, I was a software engineer, and 5 years ago, I was a CIO. If you’d asked either of those younger Eriks, “do you think in 5 or 10 years you’ll be running a marketing business from Ramrod Key, wearing sandals and a bathing suit,” I’d have responded by looking over my shoulder for the person you were actually talking to.
So if my life has already taken such unexpected turns, I certainly won’t rule out some more.
If I were going to wander back into the salaried world, I’d really only consider a high leadership position — somewhere in the C suite. And there aren’t a whole ton of salaried C suite positions that call for working from remote keys in your bathing suit.
So getting out of slow travel life for the sake of career remains a possibility.
Family
The last reason I’ll list is in some senses the most unpredictable and also the most personal. I can imagine all sorts of family reasons not to be in a constant state of transit.
It might be exciting family sorts of things, like additions to the family. Or, on the flip side, it might be concerns such as elder care or helping in some other way.
I won’t go into such a personal concern any further, but suffice it to say that family is important and factors heavily into plans throughout most people’s lives.
But, until we do decide to call it, whenever that may be, we’ll keep doing our best to keep things weird.
Picks
As some of you may have noticed, I’ve been recording a lot of Youtube videos lately. As part of this, I got my hands on a flexible tripod: the SquidGrip. It’s been a big help in recording video with my phone.
Here’s a podcast that I enjoy: The Business of Authority. It’s a podcast aimed at independent/solo consultant types, but oriented specifically around how to build authority, becoming a thought leader, influencer, expert, etc.
Finally, there’s no link, but a nice feature for Facebook consumption is muting people temporarily. If Uncle Steve is getting a little too into politics lately, or you’re buried in picture of a baby belonging to someone you barely know, you can just snooze that a month and hope the situation improves, all without the social ramifications of de-friending someone.
The Digest
Here’s another live blog post I did for the Nexus User Conference. TD Bank talked about its experience with DevOps, and I chronicled the talk.
Here’s a Facebook Live we did, talking about what it’s like to run/own a remote business. Check out the Sriracha shirt in that one too, matching the Youtube vide. I recorded a lot of video that day!
Another week, another slow travel question. This one is pretty straightforward.
How does all of the slow travel affect your diet compared to leading a normal life?
First of all, let me say that you’ll probably get a slightly different answer to this question if you ask Amanda than if you ask me, even though we share a lifestyle.
The reason is that she puts a lot more effort into considering food from a number of angles, from more concern with macro nutrients to being a person prone to “hangriness.” I, on the other hand, can forget to eat all day without really noticing hunger, and then wash down a giant steak with red wine and tortes or something.
I pay attention to calorie intake, but for the most part food isn’t a huge priority in my decision making about anything. In a sense, I kind of grow where I’m planted.
It’s important to understand this in order to understand how travel, in general, affects my diet. If I had to sum up the effect briefly, I’d say “not the best.”
I gained weight some years back when i went into 100% travel management consulting. It’s hard not to. You go from leading a normal life to eating all of your meals expensed, at places like Outback Steakhouse.
I eventually managed to shed some of those pounds, but then we left that life in favor of slow traveling. Not all of the pounds returned, but some of them did.
When we slow travel, we do stock our AirBNB with groceries, the way anyone might. But there are three healthy eating hitches with that:
We’ll disproportionately stock up on local “can’t miss” things, and those usually aren’t healthy. “What’s a King Cake? Welp, when in New Orleans, do as the New Orleanans do.”
When our time in an AirBNB is winding down, we don’t want to throw out a bunch of food, so the last week or so starts to involve a LOT of dining out.
Even when we’re not winding down, there’s natural pressure to try all of the local restaurants and carry out places.
So, in the end, slow travel is sort of like a junior version of traveling consulting life when it comes to (poor) diet decisions. You have an option other than dining out every night, but there’s a lot of pressure to go sample local stuff so you don’t miss out, like this shot from my birthday, where Amanda found us a gourmet gelato place in Atlanta. They made you gelato flowers, which, as you might imagine is hard for an experience collector to pass up.
Picks
With all of the Youtube videos I’ve been doing these days, I’ve looked for ways to add interesting features to the videos. This includes little movie clips under fair use. And I’ve found this service, Streamable, that’s free and lets you grab and download little snippets of Youtube videos.
I’m going to throw some love to Leanpub. It’s a platform for self-publishing books in a lean fashion, letting you get beta readers and feedback as you write the book. They also handle all of the eBook formatting concerns and do some marketing/promotion for you. It’s great for self-publishers.
The Digest
We did a Facebook Live a few weeks ago that covered basic SEO topics. What is SEO, what does it stand for, why does it matter — that kind of thing.
