A note on notes

Since a grand total of one or two people said they'be curious to follow my sprawling notes as I get up to things and make notes I have started using Obsidian to try to capture them in a single place. There is a script that will publish whatever is currently in there to this git repository. Hope it helps someone. Plenty of potential for improvements and I haven't transitioned a bunch of my pending things yet. Work in progress.

✨ Launching Alchemist Guild for the Elixir CTO ✨

Everyone who has signed up to be notified has been notified. I've cleared my threshold for number of members I think we need to get started (10) and I have a bunch of applications to look through which should raise that number further. I'm thrilled.

If you or a CTO in your life is peerless, as in unfortunately has no real peers, in their role, send them to guild.elixiri.st and they can join a group of like-minded Elixir CTOs, VPs of Eng, Directors of Tech or whatever the title can be for a person responsible for the intersection of business, people and technology.

For everyone who applied, I will reach out to you either with the next step or questions. For everyone who is waiting for things to get started. I'm hoping for early next week ✨

Apply some effort, see if it moves

Feedback is an interesting thing. Sometimes you get it because you asked, sometimes you get it regardless and sometimes you don't get enough of it. I generally don't look for what some people think of a as feedback in my creative efforts.

The way I tackle projects is usually to start trying the thing and seeing how the world reacts. If I want to measure interest I tend to share the idea in a space that has the right people. That's a way to get feedback on the idea, sure. Usually I don't care about ideas to build out or improve the idea though. I care about whether it resonates, if it gets a "Hell yeah!" from the people it would be for.

With the Elixir CTO project I was actually particularly diligent and sat down and interviewed 12 people in the target group. Some of the feedback on the idea was certainly good and will inform my thinking in practical ways. Overall though, capturing the sense of what those people want, how they react to my thinking, if I seem to have found the right words. That's what I needed.

Occasionally I will receive feedback on one of my more creative projects like "I would like you to do it this way" and I very often bristle at it. I don't like being told what to do. Then I swallow my pride and evaluate it a little bit. Sometimes it is useful, sometimes it makes it very clear that the person wants something I don't care about making.

Someone gave feedback about the dark theme of the emails or website, don't remember which, causing trouble with their visual impairment. That lead to me implementing light/dark modes for the site and switching this to a light theme which I hope email clients can turn dark on demand. It was a suggestion for an improvement. Initially I felt it threatened my ability to style how I like, with a bit of digesting I took it on as a challenge. Accessibility should generally win out over my pride and it did.

Feedback on what topics to cover or things that weren't liked is occasionally useful. I sometimes adapt based on those but I already usually have a strong idea about where I want to take things.

What I really look for is resonance, not feedback. Did the thing I made resonate with the people I hoped it would. Did they take from it roughly what I was trying to put out into the world. Are we communicating successfully and enjoying the process?

Some feedback is incredibly valuable and must be listened to because it is precious. Particularly when you hear from people that work for you or under you in some power dynamic. If they offer you some signal, turn up the gain and do what you can to learn from it, do things with it and encourage that to happen again. I think that is a critical part in not becoming an a-hole.

On the more creative side feedback, criticisms and dissections can be useful and I try to take them in as such. Often though I find they tell me what people fear, not what they hope for. I don't want to take on other people's fears if I can avoid it. I care a lot more about hopes, dreams and desires.

How are you with feedback? You can as per usual feedback me via lars@underjord.io or as @lawik@fosstodon.org.

Thanks for reading, I really appreciate your time and attention.