DaedTech

Stories about Software

By

Reader Question Round-Up: Niches, Being Consultative, and Career Plays

Wow, what a week in world politics, huh?  Well, let me tell you, if you’re looking to hear absolutely nothing more on that topic, then you’re in the right place, my friend.

The only partisanship here is over the music in my videos.  In previous editions of the reader question round-up videos, such as this one, I I featured background music throughout the video.  This week, I left that out, except in the intro and closing.

Early on when I was making videos, a few people suggested incorporating music.  More recently, people have suggested, well, unincorporating it.

Now, I honestly don’t care one way or the other.  I suppose it’s slightly less work to omit the music, but that really, honestly doesn’t matter much.  So I’m turning it over to mob rule and asking you all to weigh in.

If you have any opinion whatsoever on the music in the videos, please head over to this one and leave a comment on it voting yay or nay.

Do you have a question you’d like to see me answer?  Head to the “ask me” page and fire away!

Read More

By

Reader Question Round-Up Video, Consulting Edition

About a year ago, I wrote a couple of posts.  One was about becoming a management consulting, and the other more about becoming a consultant in general.

Well, going back like an archaeologist through old reader questions, I see that these two posts prompted a bunch of questions.  So, in today’s video, I tackled four such inquiries.  Always interesting fodder for me, personally, so thanks for asking.

By the way, if you have questions, please ask them.  I’m letting this drive a lot of content for the blog these days.  And, I’ve also settled on a more canonical way of asking people to submit them: a simple “ask” page.

So if you’d like to hear my take on something, head on over and submit a question.

This Week’s Picks

  • I spent some time visiting family over the weekend, and stayed in a hotel in my childhood hometown.  Specifically, it was a Courtyard Marriott, and it was a stand-out in terms of the service, even among the countless Marriotts I’ve occupied over the last 6 years.  If you’re ever in the vicinity-ish of O’Hare and run across this place in your search, it’s a gem.
  • Last Thursday, I did something that I now wish I’d done years ago.  I un-synced all email from my phone.  I can still get the emails on the device if I want them, but I have to actively pull them from the server, instead of having this pushed at me.  I can’t tell you how great this is, both for avoiding distractions and for minimizing my hour-to-hour cognitive burden.

This Week’s Content Digest

The Round-Up Video

By

Reader Question Round-Up: Upwork, Scaling, and Taking a Big Margin

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

The Reader Question Round-Up

By

Reader Question Round-Up: Approaching Execs, Micromanagers, and Scaling without Job Interviews

I’ve fallen off a bit with creating video content.  But don’t worry; I recently remedied that.

We left the Florida Keys, stopped in Raleigh for 10 days or so, and finally landed back in Michigan.  But, upon returning, it wasn’t as simple as setting up the ol’ boom mic and tripod and letting ‘er rip.  We returned to a house in a state of flux.

You see, before leaving for the winter, we’d sold our former primary residence and basically just dumped a lot of that stuff here and in storage.  So it was like returning to a house that was in the middle of a move.

But, fast forward a few weeks and I’m relatively settled.  The office looks office-y, and the aforementioned boom mic and tripod are ready to go.  So I’ll get back on the horse with video content.

This Week’s Round-Up

To start that trend, I tackle another four reader questions.  Those are as follows:

  1. 1:20 How to approach executives if you’re “scruffy and nerdy looking?”
  2. 5:43 How did we scale up Hit Subscribe without doing job interviews?
  3. 11:50 Is my manager a micromanager?
  4. 17:39 Can I keep my 401K after leaving the company?

This episode featured several topics that sent me into mild rant mode about organizational scale, realpolitik, and job interviews.  If you like that sort of thing, then you’ll like this video.  If not, well, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

One thing I’ve really come to understand over the last few years of professionally brokering content is that if the only reaction to your content is positive, it means you don’t have much reach.  The content game is about finding the audience that resonates with your message and not sweating the rest.  So, let’s do that.

And, before I link the video, let me offer the usual note about more reader questions.  As you can see, I’m actually committed to turning all of them around these days, so please feel free to hit me with more.  Comment below, comment on the Youtube video, DM me, email me — whatever.  I’ll get ’em in the backlog and get ’em answered.

 

By

Reader Question Round-Up: TDD, Yagni, Expert Beginners and Efficiencers

I was just scrolling through the front page of DaedTech and realizing it’s been a really long time since I posted non-digest content.  I’d pardon you if you thought I’d given up software-related content altogether.

Don’t worry, though.  I haven’t.

What has actually happened in my life is this, over the last four weeks (including this one):

  1. Vacation
  2. DaedTech consulting (on top of Hit Subscribe)
  3. DaedTech consulting (on top of Hit Subscribe)
  4. Hit Subscribe client onsite visit

So basically, a vacation followed by an all-too-familiar situation where I work a full time job and then another part time job.  In that situation, I made a few conscious sacrifices, one of which was non-essential content production.

I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.

Easing Back in with a Round-Up Video

I am actually in the middle of that 4th week, so I’m not out of the woods just yet.  But I did get that content itch, so I figured I’d split the difference and do another video answering reader questions.  I hope to return with some normal, ranty blog posts before you know it.

Truth be told, I’m actually having a lot of fun with the Youtube videos and getting a lot more efficient at creating them.  And I’m plowing through my backlog at a workmanlike rate, with the oldest unanswered questions now less than a year old.

At this rate, I might get caught up at some point.

Anyway, here’s the question roster, including time-stamps.

  1. 1:02 How to Reconcile YAGNI and TDD?
  2. 5:27 How to Get Expert Beginners Learning Again?
  3. 8:52 Resources for Thinking Like a Programmer?
  4. 12:22 What Has Changed to Make the Efficiencer Path Easier to Follow?

And, below is a frame of the video.

By the way, four of these video round-ups in, you can probably see that I’m reasonably committed.  So, if you have a question you’d like to see me answer, either in video or post format, fire it my way: email, tweets, DMs, Slack messages, blog comments or Youtube comments.  Your choice — happy to log them in any format.