The Alchemist Guild for the Elixir CTO is now active

Everyone who has paid for membership has been invited. Everyone who has expressed interest has been responded to. And useful discussion is already occurring among the dozen people that have joined so far.

If you are a technical leader (CTO, VP, Eng M. or similarly tasked) you are very welcome to read more at guild.elixiri.st. I want to create a space for useful exchange of ideas and a place of community for people in these tricky roles that intersect business, technology and most of all, people.

In other news. I hope to pick back up on posting job opportunities soon and I'll be figuring out video production again in February. So more things to come that are not specific to tech bosses :)

I'm easily inspired, sometimes

In some cases I run into ideas that are compelling in two opposing directions at once. And if you try to move in two opposite directions you will stand still while struggling hard.

This is when the "Both" GIF fails.

One example is deployment and production environments. I'm fascinated by fully automated, everything-runs-itself, full-on abstraction, cattle-ranching cloud deployments. It takes automation and abstraction to an extreme. A systems approach. I also really think we find more efficiency and that most workloads are served better with a couple of dedicated machines with none of the cloud service overhead both in terms of waste, cost and lock-in. There is no both here. There are some odd hybrids, like Equinix Metal offering dedicated machines through API or running a PaaS like Dokku on your own.

Another is computers. How minimal could I get? Can I do a completely passively cooled system that's still plenty powerful or should I even scale down to a power-sipping ARM machine? Efficiency has appeal. Minimalism has another appeal. They can sometimes be combined. On the other end is just raw power. If I'm going to use a desktop shouldn't I make sure it is all it can be in terms of performance? Can I run a server at home? If you try to do both you are not being efficient, so you lose again.

A third one is business. I have a deep affection for thoroughly worked, hand-crafted, deeply designed software that someone has really sweated and the organic growth and small-scale business that can be achieved that way. At the same time the fast solution has a lot of appeal. It does make sense to do an MVP and throw it out there, see what works, iterate on that. Scrappy, crappy and lean. It can get deeper later. If you really want to go hard I guess VC has it's fascinations but I don't personally want that. Again, not convinced you can pick both paths and get somewhere.

Honestly I consider much of my job to be exploring so I rarely have to pick a direction. If you go hard in either direction you are specializing, building expertise and eventually doing your own research. Not necessarily what I want. This is my excuse for trying both, quite often. Exploring.

The Pareto Principle makes me think that going full on in any direction might not be the wise thing. 20% towards any extreme might give you 80% of the results it can offer. And for my client projects and most of my efforts I tend to pick a direction to lean which provides some clarity of purpose and then the rest boils down to a pragmatic mix of what makes sense for the solution and the people.

What extremes fascinate you and are their opposites also compelling? Holler at lars@underjord.io or as @lawik@fosstodon.org.

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