The Underjord.io site has been updated with a new visual. More to come :)

As per usual you can reach out to me if you work with Elixir (or want to) and:

• Need help hiring Elixir devs
• Need flexible reinforcements as contractors
• Need help with reviewing your code base so far
• Need an advisor to work through technical plans with
• Need help establishing an ongoing relationship with the community

I've recently had good success pointing people to quality training for their existing Elixir teams which is part of the advisory function and something I'd love to do more of.

The Unreasonable Magic of Peers

I started Underjord as a soloist style company and about half the time I still operate much like a solo consultant. The other half I'm a tech lead which is much more of a team thing.

I'm quite used to a degree of loneliness as a lead, a decision maker and supposed expert. People would defer to my opinion as I was the one with most experience on the team and such.

Any and every time I've found a peer with a similar mindset that is either the same experience level or slightly ahead it has been glorious. Lightning in a bottle. Sparkles all the way down. I always have a pent up need to exchange ideas, learn and share. It is unreasonably exciting to me and incredibly useful.

Sometimes the line is quite thin between a peer and a mentor. Sometimes it can shift because you target a new set of skills or techniques and the tables are suddenly turned. An old mentor of mine, the man that introduced me to PHP, MySQL, jQuery and Linux, once a few years back asked him if I could teach him Elixir. It didn't come to pass for practical reasons but he is not less experienced than I in general. We know different things.

Having peers is powerful and if you go off to do the solo thing don't assume that you don't need or should have peers. I've found peers in the Elixir community, I've found peers in wider tech communities, I've found other soloist peers as I've worked with clients. Importantly I haven't let them pass me by. I keep them in my DMs, in Discords and Slacks. I keep up with them to varying degrees. I have a more lively world of peers now than I've ever had. One reason I have more of them is unfortunately that online connections are often not as high bandwidth and we're all busy. It takes more peers to get the whole torrent done. All in all I have it pretty good.

My team does an amazing thing, entirely on their own accord. They strike up a video call and work together on separate things. This means they have access to their peers at very short notice, they can share and pair. They try to solve things together before they escalate to me. This is smart. It is easier to learn from someone of similar experience than it is to get it from someone that has a hard time remembering what it is to be at that experience level. Sanne Kalkman covered this well at Code BEAM I thought. I'm very impressed with how they've organized themselves without me. I never have to ask "did you check with someone else about this?" as a sort of defense of my time. They have.

And in evaluations and conversations with the team about how things are going the absolute standout aspect is that they get to work together. I hired a clump of folks with existing chemistry and low experience and they are shaping up to be formidable. I can take some credit for their technical instruction but hiring people that are already good at collaborating and organizing has incredibly advantages. They clearly already know the value of peers. Better than I do.

I see it time and time again with seniors and tech leads at small companies and CTO level folks at larger that there is this desire for peers that is often unfulfilled. When we are heads down in technical work it is hard to also establish and nurture professional relationships. But they help so much. Not just in keeping up with trends, learning technical things and having some company. You get somewhere to help make sense of your work, your responsibilities, technical leadership and all that entails.

If your only time to connect with developers that care about the same things you do is during conferences. There should be space for you to improve that situation. If you have no effective peers that spark that excitement of exchange and learning where you work, consider where you would find some.

The answer is other people again. Inconveniently.

Do you have peers? Share your thoughts by replying or to lars@underjord.io or on Twitter via @lawik.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate it. Have a great day.