I'm on vacation. I still do some of my favorite work stuff such as this newsletter , occasional publishing and the livestreams over on the YouTube channel. Today at 15.00 CEST I'll be continuing to build a photo site product thing. Might make it a longer stream today since I don't have any other commitments.

Movement in the Underjord

A small batch of videos was indeed posted on the site. I spent some time setting up some scripts and cleared my backlog:

• Video Companion - Teaching Elixir - Pipe Operator
• Systems Design and Architecture livestream
• Deploying with k3s and ArgoCD

Regular Programming episode 6 has been released. We talk about tooling.

Also finished mounting a swing for the kid. She's thrilled.

There is no way to keep up, except people

Programming and software development started as a fairly solitary activity for me. I occasionally had people to share it with but most of the time I spent on it was me and an idea versus the uncaring syntax. The people building my tools and the projects I used felt as distant as gods to me. The idea of professional developers, conferences and certifications was something I considered might some day be part of what I did but I was far from certain.

In jobs since I've had colleagues which is a heck of a cool thing. But each person tends to have their own interests, focus and areas of expertise. With tech being so wide your overlap of interest with any given colleague may be quite limited. You find some common ground and the rest you keep an eye on on your own.

I've had great colleagues and at times a strong overlap, a feeling of belonging and shared interest and effort. But just as often I've felt like what I do only overlaps a shred with others. It has typically only been when I've engaged with a more niche community that I've truly felt like I have a collegial environment where we are doing roughly the same thing.

I think the first nice community for me was a hacking community (wargames.unix.se/dievo, if anyone from the old days reads this, feel free to reach out).

The second was probably almost getting involved in the Drupal community, which is freakishly large and dedicated for such a weird piece of software. Really quite cool. I was moving on from that tech just as I was starting to establish a few connections into that world though.

 Then nothing until I started engaging with the Elixir community. And that's the first time in ages I feel like I've set down roots and actually have strongly overlapping peers. People I turn to with specific questions. I hassle Alex about observability. I don't hesitate to post on the Ecto mailing list if I'm deep in a weird idea around the CMS. I have continuous discussion with folks on Twitter.

There is no tech community. There are many much more specific tech communities. They also overlap in interesting ways. I wouldn't consider Hacker News a community but it does serve as a news-aggregation for a number of tech communities. I find it useful for keeping track of a wide and varied set of interests.

But the way I follow Elixir/Erlang/BEAM is mostly Twitter, newsletters and some Slack. After a while the participants become familiar if the niche is the right size. After a while reaching out about things seems more natural. Whether that's a DM to ask about something, posting an issue on some project or throwing a PR to solve something you encountered.

The programmer/developer/software engineering profession really lacks uniformity. There are cultural blocks you can hang out in and fit with. But there's no cohesion. You can meet another dev and have literally nothing in common beyond semicolons at some point screwing you over. There's no common code of conduct, there's no dress code, there's no shared trade magazines we all read. And the field is sprawling in more directions faster than anyone can track.

I don't think anyone should tunnel their vision on just the one thing. Keep eyes open and pay attention to what's going on. What I would advise though is to be on the lookout for community. There is so much to gain from actively engaging in a community. I once read that William Gibson, the author, considered Twitter collegial. That stuck with me. And it starts to make sense. Authors are often similarly solitary. They meet at occasional conferences and such and a decent way of bridging that is Twitter. Other Elixir devs that actively engage with the community are in many ways more my colleagues than some of the people I've been employed along with that I only shared an employer with.

I don't mind being on my own. But I don't want to be alone. I really enjoy knowing that there are people I can nerd deep enough with and that get what the heck I'm doing. I think that's a tricky thing to find sometimes in tech and I think communities are the way to address that.

Do you have communities you value?
As always, you can reach me at lars@underjord.io or Twitter where I'm @lawik.

Thank you for reading, I appreciate your attention.

- Lars Wikman