Vacation is pretty great. Just right now I've over-exerted my poor back by swinging a child around and digging in the yard. So I'm in some pain and the wrong kind of discomfort. It is also awfully warm.

More livestream today 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

My post Trust in Software, an All Time Low visited the Hacker News front page which is always a bit exciting.

Beam Radio published Episode 14 about the use of Elixir at Spotify and about advocating for Elixir. I wasn't on it which meant I listened to it. Great conversation.

I may also have ordered a PineTime. Oops.

Connected systems are more fun

I've never considered myself good at networking, the social kind. I've just done my thing and been keen to run with any opportunity I see and resonate with. After a while I've started to be to busy with these opportunities that there are things I can't do but want to help people get done. So I tell the asker about Bethany who can do that thing. Cool, that may or may not pan out. When I see it pan out, that's fantastic. I think I'm actually developing a decent skill at this networking though.

I've ended up doing this more and more. I'm often frustrated by my limited bandwidth in taking on new things and one way to mitigate that is to provide people I like with competent people to work with or in reverse, provide interesting/useful work to the competent people I like.

I've found cold pitches about projects and ideas to be very unreliable and cold connections often don't pan out. So I guess as I've run my business I've been more proactive about this, keeping a lot more connections warm. Not intentionally but not just by dumb luck either. Spending time being interested in other's people's business and activities has led to me being able to connect people to new work, find unexpected projects, rope additional people into the projects. Fun stuff.

One thing I tend to do which has typically been very appreciated is just make the introduction over email when connecting people. Not "here is their e-mail address" but rather drive the connection and make sure both parties are aware of each other, know why they are talking and prompt some kind of next step.

____________________________________

Hey

Bethany, this is Elias, they're a great copy-writer that I worked with on the MediumSizedCorp thing. Would work with them again in a heartbeat. I think they'd be a great fit for the thing you asked me about.

Elias, this is Bethany. She's good people and works at EliteCompany XD. We've been in touch about a few really interesting things they want to do. Right now they could really need some help with some copy that I think would be exactly your thing.

So Elias, could you set up something where you guys can talk? No need to include me.

____________________________________

And that's roughly the format I use. I try to keep it brief. I give both parties as a strong a representation as I can do honestly and in whatever way I think would speak to the other person. I absolutely don't oversell my relationship to people but sometimes describing your positive view of someone's skillset really takes them by surprise. Which is fun. If I can set two people up to be enthusiastically talking to each other rather than skeptically probing I think that improves the process all around.

Note the prompt at the end, those vary depending on what I know needs to be done and how comfortable I feel suggesting a next step.

Feedback on this has been great, outcomes have been good.

The more interesting part of networking is of course where to meet people and how to get closer. Making introductions is a cool part of that. This all touches on something I wrote recently on the importance of people. If you want to increase your leverage in the world, how big the rocks you can move are, you need to know more people. Go where the people are, talk to them, be curious about their endeavors and it is almost guaranteed to be interesting. And whenever someone asks you, or you see a job posting that seems neat, consult your internal index of interesting people and see if it could benefit anyone.

People have done this for me. My first professional Elixir contract came due to someone going "hey, this company does Elixir in your area, saw their job ad". My first development work ever came due to a freelance project manager who'd lost his web dev and went "You do some programming right? Could you set up a WordPress?". He knew how to do this. And I probably learned the foundation for it from him.

Facilitate, proxy, connect folks. Don't take a cut unless you are putting in real work. The courtesy and kindness tends to pay off as you go. Just make things happen.

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