Researching for videos is a wild process. The amount of rabbit holes and yak shaves that go into them are.. surprising. Progress continues. Hope to record next week, which would be on  track. Two weeks out would also work. This monthly plan might be working.

Fortune favors the bold

There is a saying, arguably by a Roman philosopher that goes "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity". In my world of tech people there is also the term "luck surface area" floating around which relates. Doing some things increases your chances of other things happening for you. Putting things out into the world opens the door to the world handing you things back.

I touched on this recently that whatever you do to promote yourself or try to prompt activity in the world tends to produce a result about 6 months later. This goes hand in hand with putting in consistent work to see consistent results and that it is best to plant a tree ten years ago (and if you didn't, the best time is right now). This is the preparation part.

You do not control the opportunity part. For that to be valuable it needs to come from other people, the surrounding world. At an individual or group level. The needs and desires of people with some level of resources produce opportunity.

I have just in the last week had two quick exchanges over DMs with people I've collaborated with for a bit in which we landed on some work I might do with them which would have been an absurd dream ask a few years back. It is paid work for building libraries/software that will be open source. And it all makes potential sense for all parties. Some of those parties are likely reading this. Yeah, I know, we haven't pinned down the details. I'm pretty transparent.

This is the type of work I could see myself do until retirement. Variety of small projects, open source, public interest, languages and ecosystems I care about. Showing people how to get things done with technologies I find interesting.

What preparation lead up to this? One is doing things like the ID3 library I did with Changelog. That relates both directly in terms of people, connections and networking, as well as indirectly, showing I can be brought in to do a library implementation. My online presence, being someone who does things visibly and publishes things about what I do is almost a guaranteed part of the calculation for these prospective clients. I'm happier the more public things can be.

Another aspect is just being around. Being part of the open source world and actively engaging with people about the things that make you enthusiastic or even skeptical. No-one ever reaches out to you if they never see you speak up.

Whether any of this comes to pass as actual projects is still up in the air but I was surprised and delighted to realize that I've worked myself into a position where it isn't an outlandish thing. Where these are conversations I have and the most pressing constraint is my time. Knowing the type of work I want to do and engaging with people in the spaces I want to work in seems to be working for me. I hope you can make some aspects of my experience work for you too.

What work would you want to be doing? How could you set yourself up for it? Feel free to share your thoughts at lars@underjord.io or as @lawik@fosstodon.org.

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