Coming up:

• Code BEAM Stockholm Lite (12th of May), will I see you there?
• I bailed on giving a talk for ElixirConf Africa. I'm a bit stretched thin. It would have been lovely but I just didn't see how I could do it well at this moment.
• Plenty of thoughts about videos. Nothing in the pipeline which is frustrating but I'll find a way to balance this thing yet.

One note over and over again is just noise

Very recently I've connected with the local tech scene here in the lovely coastal city of Varberg. There is some interesting drive and people are looking to make more of the city as a place for tech, pretty interesting stuff. I've been to a coworking networking dealio and then also the kind of kick-off for starting to build a tech cluster. This crosses industries, verticals, mixes public and private sector. Developers, entrepreneurs, educators, politicians. It runs the gamut.

I have already established myself as a very specific person. Someone introduced me to someone else "the Elixir guy". And I do talk about Elixir to almost all of these people. Generally because they ask about it. And I try not to be dull and repetitive. I'll get into why, shortly.

Arch. Nix. Rust. Not having a TV. Eating vegan. Apparently even editing video in Davinci Resolve (just heard of this one)? What is the common thread? How do you know if someone does the thing? They will tell you. This is very often about enthusiasm and trying to share the good news with everyone. It is also often about searching for validation of your choices, trying to find others to build a bit of tribe with. It is not inherently bad or wrong. However. It is very often done so poorly that it becomes annoying.

Adapt to your audience, your conversational partner and the context you are in. At ElixirConf you can go deep without needing to check if they know about Elixir and its connection with Erlang and why it is neat. At a networking meetup for tech entrepreneurs you can expect some familiarity with development topics but when I got asked about Elixir I had to establish some baseline understanding.

"Okay, what kind of technical level do you want here? Not dev deep? Product level. Alright, gotcha. Have you heard of Ruby on Rails? Cool. So that was the startup darling but it had some challenges [..] and we have this kind of old, 80s, innovation from Sweden, actually, it came out of Ericsson [..] fundamentally it lets you build better SaaS products faster and with less work while incurring less technical debt. [..] survey says developers love it. Developers actually go out of their way to work with it." 

Talking to politicians or people with very limited tech exposure or where the nuances of the tech is mostly irrelevant to them I try to boil that away even more. "It is a very lean and product focused way of building. Where the local .Net school will train the people who will work at a big insurance company, in a public sector institution or a bank this is more about the people building the next tech startup. It is focused, opinionated, sticks out and gets results with very little ceremony." I'm talking, I'm listening, I am looking for the angles and overlaps. Elixir is not the only hammer in the world. It is a good hammer and I'm looking to help people make sense of where it fits.

Let's see if I can't make an unusually large Elixir blip on the swedish map here. That'd be fun.

The bigger picture that I want to share is that meeting enthusiastic people who want to do things is really fun. Fitting their enthusiasm and goals to yours is not always possible, but collaborating and being interested in their whole deal is key to figuring out when it is possible. That's how you find out if there is something there. Always be open to walking away with a smile. Not everything needs to happen or happen with you. Playing a multitude of notes about why your thing is rad gives you more surface area to fit with other ideas.

What ideas have you found hard to convey to people? Are there things that have worked particularly well to inspire action? I enjoy getting your input via email or federated at me through lars@underjord.io or as @lawik@fosstodon.org.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate that about you.