Abandoning large swathes of opportunity

I am piece by piece focusing Underjord on Nerves. Meaning I am drilling down on Embedded Linux with the BEAM and Elixir on top of it. This is not a massive market. And that's the point.

Currently I have clients that are not Nerves-based and my contractors with them will be in no hurry to move elsewhere. But my personal focus and our direction involves more circuit boards, more datasheets and more Linux.

In this market? How will you survive? Are times not hard enough?

The clarity is very helpful. I run a very small consultancy. Me and 3 other devs that I contract out to clients. We don't need a large market. We benefit more from speaking a clear message. I won't necessarily turn down an interesting non-Nerves project. But I might. This also gives me clarity for my community work. I like to hop between ideas, projects and frameworks but Nerves is a very satisfying constraint and I'm very excited for what I've pitched to Code BEAM Berlin in October.

During my trip to Chattanooga I spoke a fair bit to Josh Price of Alembic. They are very much "the Ash consultancy" in my eyes but I assume they do all sorts of Elixir and Phoenix work. Probably a decent bit without Ash. He has a lot more people than me to keep on contract and that is a lot of work. I think Ash is a very good positioning move on their part because it gives them something they are head and shoulders above everyone else on. And anyone who knows the space will reckon they also know how to Elixir, in general. For me, I don't want to scale a consultancy.

It is very hard to stick out as specifically capable at Elixir and Phoenix. The more generic and general your pitch the less it sticks out. Who does Elixir best? DockYard, Erlang Solutions, SmartLogic? What are their unique value propositions? I'm pretty fond of all of them in various ways but I have no idea how to separate their offerings.

My conception of Underjord has always been small, boutique, sharp and pointy with a bit of attitude. Positioning towards the things I enjoy doing and that my team has been learning with great gusto is a way to keep things interesting and to carve out a space. Potentially even grow a space. Who would you go to for Nerves development today? The only company I know that is focused on Nerves currently is Redwire Labs, Alex McLain's company, and I have only good experiences with Alex. We are in active collaboration.

We are currently working with two clients on Nerves projects and both building out our knowledge of Nerves work, I'm going way closer to the hardware than ever before and we are also getting to contribute more to the community. Nerves is a community I love, software I enjoy supremely.

There will be more to share on this. For now you can follow my travails with Secure Boot on Raspberry Pi CM4 on the Elixir Forum and some initial poking around with ARM TrustZone.

Are you doing anything to specialize or niche down in your work life or business? You can reach me on the Fediverse where I'm @lawik@fosstodon.org or by responding to this email to lars@underjord.io.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate it.