Goatmire Elixir has 7 tickets left at time of writing. I think we'll sell out. If anyone is putting off getting a ticket until the last minute they are in trouble. I'm glad we've sold the tickets. I am mildly fretting about all the things we are wrapping up. But it should all come together nicely. If you already have your ticket, make sure you show up in style.

There are 136 ticket holders for NervesConf EU. According to what people are telling me, this is bound to be the biggest NervesConf ever. I could not be happier.

Oh and I wrote a blog post about running a ton of virtual Nerves devices. I think you might enjoy it. It is a high-level technical romp. And there is more to come. We did 3000 this morning ;)

Cross the streams

When I got into web dev professionally my most valued skill was the mash of PHP, SQL, HTML, CSS and JS that I used to make web things. It was not a unique skill but developers were in demand and that demand kept increasing.

This was about 15 years ago? The demand was essentially fairly high until 2-3 years ago when the trendline turned. This is where you find out what of your skills are actually the most valuable.

My experience so far is that I rarely get tapped just for development work. It is always the knowledge and skill of programming AND some other aspect.

Some people want an "expert" or "authority". Verification, validation, advice or review. What makes someone an expert is some weird mix of clout, peer recognition, network, publishing and taste. There are people that consume what I put out and trust the opinions and ideas they see in that and want me to apply the mindset to what they are up to. This one is weird and takes time and effort to build up.

Another is marketing. This throws my practiced skills in reaching my ecosystem in with my technical skills in the service of the client. Networking, publishing, creating interesting things to read, watch and listen to. The code skills are a pre-requisite to be able to make the content. Whether devrel type stuff or recruitment this is a skillset distinct from just creating software.

I've had discussion about helping other people do events now that I am getting some practice with that and because it builds on a multi-line cross-section of my skills and my built-up network. That makes it a weird and valuable thing I can do.

Much of this stems from writing for me. I already had habits around writing for a long time when I started getting paid to program. I'm very practiced in the medium. And over time the cross-section of those skills have been incredibly valuable to me.

I have also seen other people I work with have this type of situation. I've helped writers I know in the ecosystem do guest spots in devrel engagements. The reason I know I can do that is because they already know how to write and publish things. My good friend Tomie is a beast in project management due to more than 10 years of doing that thing and when they picked up programming they became a very unique combination of someone who can do technical work but can also take that bigger perspective. Their current job is very lucky to have them. Elin who I've worked with for years had Ops-type skills when she started learning programming. This is a more common combination but just immediately made her value to clients higher.

The programming skill is powerful. When it combines with things you enjoy doing that others find genuinely difficult or exhausting, then that is a massive multiplier on the value. What skill or interest that you have would you imagine combining with your technical skills to great effect?

Thanks for reading. I appreciate it.