I am currently deep in work with my current client and I have a couple of fun mentorship engagements going for professionals just getting into the field. We get access to the house we've bought this week and my life is in boxes for the move. Thankfully I haven't had to pack the keyboard so things are working out.

I don't really have any bandwidth for taking on in-depth clients right now but if you have an interest in what I do and lining something up for the summer, somewhere around August, feel free to get in touch. I can definitely have a conversation.

Podcast recommendation: Creative Class

https://creativeclass.co/podcast/

This podcast focuses on freelancers but I think a lot of it is good and useful thinking for many different types of work. It is run by Paul Jarvis who's current claim to fame is writing the very sustainability-oriented freelance bible Company of One and Kaleigh Moore who is a freelance writer as well.

Their podcast is very human. I listen to some podcasts that are all business, some that are all focused on the craft and I find Creative Class dares to be more vulnerable than most. It considers the human side and looks at sustainable practices to protect person from being devoured in the freelancing. I've found it helpful, I hope you do too.

What have I been up to?

A bunch of you might have joined this list recently since I made blip on the Hacker News again with my writing on Lumen. I'll provide a sampling of things I've been up to:

Lumen - Elixir & Erlang in the browser
The Lumen project is a very interesting and ambitious approach to bringing Elixir and Erlang to the browser as a JavaScript complement or replacement.

Why am I still excited about Elixir?
A follow up to Why am I interested in Elixir? which was a blog post that went into what I was excited about in this ecosystem.

I was on a podcast
Me and Emilio Nyaray were invited to Elixir Mix to talk about the work on Inky. I thought it came together nicely. And I may actually have another podcast appearance lined up in the future.

Ecto & Multi-tenancy - Dynamic Repos (and prefixes)
This was a series in 3 parts of tech-heavy blog posts dealing with some corners of Ecto where I found examples to be few and far between. It is complete.

What do I mean by sustainability in tech?

I don't mean environmental, carbon footprint and power consumption. That's way up the pyramid of needs. I think we can start much further down.

• Can your code base be maintained in the long term, is it built to last?
• Can your systems be maintained by the team you have or are the proportions of work and staff out of whack?
• Does it sustain itself financially or will it slowly be drained of resources?
• Does it run in a reliable way, minimizing the drain on the well-being of the people maintaining it?
• Does working on your systems feel like good and satisfying craftsmanship or is there a general sense of cut corners, disorder and accruing debt?
• Is there slack in your system, can the people working on your system actually spend time thinking or is the work packed thick?

These questions aren't always easily answered. Why? Because in most organizations I've seen there are very few people who have the time and luxury to step back and look at things to form a bigger picture. So many team efforts are stuck in tactical-level day-to-day engagements and never rise to the level of strategy or even just looking at the systems driving their days.

When someone's day is filled they risk not spending an hour thinking about how to do their work better.

This is how you end up with developers who do not have time to automate time-consuming tasks. That's when they don't feel that they have time to write tests that would save them days of time down the road. It is the death of deep though, accurate focus and considered actions.

If you are putting out a fire you are not considering potential innovations, improvements or identifying broader problems and planning solutions for them. I've also seen agile methodology used to strangle the space for thinking by simply having high-priority tasks and a constant sense of pressure on an entire team.

I am not saying, go slow. I am saying that if you want to avoid burning out employees or team members, if you want people to enjoy their work, stay around and care enough to do it well, find a sustainable pace. I recommend reading the book Accelerate as it goes into what actually works when establishing a sustainable process. Spoiler: the companies that are performing the best develop fast, have the most efficient workflows and less tendency towards burnout, higher job satisfaction and a faster route to fixing technical problems.

It is not about going slow. It is about finding the space to do the right thing.

I am constantly turning this topic over in my head, I'd love your thoughts and I expect I'll end up blogging about this over time.

Thank you for reading, I appreciate your attention

- Lars Wikman