The Incredible Discomfort

I am so comfortable in Elixir. In the community. Particularly at events. I generally have stuff to do, I almost constantly see faces I know and occasionally I'm also known which gives me the luxury of not always needing to figure out what is next because people roll up and say hi. For someone who craves an interactive experience this rocks.

At the Open Source Summit I was just at I am a face in the crowd. Absolutely "nobody" but less pessimistically I am everybody. I can talk up a storm but frankly the interest is only so-so from others and every conversation starts at zero. My thing is niche, they might have heard of it but they've never used it. They have their thing. Maybe they do container security and we don't really have super interesting common ground beyond using Linux. 

An event like this really underlines how massive the world of software is. And this is just the open source end. I don't envy the people trying to make sense of it from scratch today. I've seen a lot of it come about and I find it a bit much.

You can also let this be encouraging. There are massive projects used in incredibly important places that you've never heard of. There are industry-spanning initiatives funded by hyper-scaler to meet compliance demands. There are small projects that blow up and small projects that stay small. Some are valuable. Some are fun. There are markets within markets within markets if you want to do business.

It kind of sucks to step into a world where most people have no idea about the cool thing I care about. Where I can just give the vaguest overview of the fantastic things it offers and how much they might enjoy it. But if my goal is adoption, and to a large extent it is, it also means that there are a practically inifinite number of people to try and reach. Which means there is a lot of success left to be had.

Going to a way larger context is frustrating when you want things to be concrete, highly relevant and hope for aligned ideas but it shows something about how these things work at the scale of many humans. I recommend it. Doing things from scratch, getting to know some new people with different priorities and having conversations that are not directly immediately useful is beneficial and widening your field of view is occasionally refreshing.

What larger circumstances do you run into where you feel a little lost?

You can reach me on the Fediverse where I'm @lawik@fosstodon.org or by responding to this email to lars@underjord.io.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate it.