I am back in the office with the fancy wallpaper!

I'm thrilled to be back and more hands-on. Of course taking three months mostly away from work has been good. Thankfully I really like doing this stuff so I'm very glad to be back and get to pour hours into things I'm genuinely excited about. Also, much less cleanup compared to the baby ;)

I'm looking to talk to companies that want to hire in Elixir. If you are in this situation you can schedule a call here or just respond to this email.

I'm currently helping West Arete whom I've mentioned in the past. They are currently looking for a Ruby dev but we expect them to need more Elixir devs again in a bit. They are also looking for a DevOps engineer if the right one shows up. Read the linked description for more details on what kind of company they are. I find them a delight to work with.

I hope to finish recording a half-recorded video today so hopefully publishing will be picking back up shortly.

100

This is the hundredth issue of this newsletter.

I'm quite pleased with that.

In mentoring and other contexts an enormous number of developers say "I should start a blog" or similarly, a newsletter. Then they typically have plenty of ideas about things to start writing. That first idea is almost always a sprawling work of great complexity and detail. A really grand creation. When that is the case it has never happened.

I don't think you can or should start big. The way that has consistently worked for me is to start by starting and then continue by continuing and before you know it you are respectably doing the thing.

Easy to say. What does it entail?

Scope to reality. If you are comfortable with writing and can swing two hours to write in a week you can probably write an opinion piece or explain a concept but not do a step-by-step tutorial. Tutorials have a lot of prep and detail work typically. If you are less comfortable with writing, it might be easier to do a tutorial but it will still require a bunch of time. Can you do four hours across two weeks? Scope ruthlessly.

Preparation, practice and buffers. Don't is my hunch. Do the minimal thing to get a way to publish something, whatever fits your skill best. I wrote a stupid simple site generation thing in Python (concatenating headers + a HTML post) because I was on vacation. But don't try to perfect the setup. Don't try to practice writing before really writing. The publishing is the practice. Don't try to buffer unless you are a very fastidious and productive person who can pull that kind of magic off. Just start by writing a thing, one pass of editing and publishing it. At least that got me going.

Suck at first. The first iterations of this newsletter were likely bad. If they had good parts it was likely because this wasn't my first time writing. I've been writing a lot throughout my life. You have to do the thing poorly before you can do it better and hopefully one day do it well.

Systematize and plan. "You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems." I should probably read Atomic Habits finally. Essentially this newsletter started as something I was aspiring to do monthly and it was wildly inconsistent. At some point, probably listening to Jonathan Stark talk about daily publishing I switched it to weekly which I figured I could swing. I have not missed one since. There's a slot on my friday calendar for this and I spend it writing this. Sometimes I have the idea beforehand, otherwise I find it as I sit down. But I expect I've done more than 70 of these without missing a week. I'm proud of that. It feels good. But there is no tortured artistry or exceptional talent to that. It's a commitment to consistency and it becomes a powerful practice.

Every project I do that includes other people has much more of a problem with this type of consistency. Typically because the responsibilities get murky, there are more moving parts, more life-stuff that needs to line up. I love what we've done with BEAM Radio, really like doing Regular Programming and I really enjoy the YouTube stuff.

BEAM Radio hadn't planned a summer hiatus, we just all screwed it up. Regular Programming has been lapsing because we couldn't find time for my wife to do editing for a while and now we have a gap in recording for the summer. Both of these will pick up. I don't like that they have these lapses in consistency and have some thoughts about fixing it. I just want to be clear, more people is almost always harder. It also brings a different type of potential for what it can be.

On the video side it is just much, much more fault-prone and demanding than text or audio. I've reserved about 4 hours/week for recording. Often I need to slot in extra time to get something that didn't work out. I've lost recordings due to camera or lighting screw-ups on my part that were just not recoverable. My editor has been quite reliable but there is coordination and collaboration there that must happen.

Text and writing is a very good place to get your legs under you and can also pay off very well. It is also one of the most powerful non-technical skills to build up as a developer. Doing it on your own is distinctly easy-mode and as such likely the place to start. If you are doing it with others and it feels easy and super consistent, take a look at who is making that consistency happen. It never comes without effort.

I hope that was helpful. Here's to a hundred more. If you enjoy this newsletter, let me know at lars@underjord.io or on Twitter where I'm @lawik.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I appreciate it.

- Lars Wikman