I'll be livestreaming again today. Figure I'll continue building on the livestreaming solution that I eventually want to transition to. That is, my own thing.

A delayed episode 16 of Regular Programming is also out. We talk about our history with programming languages. Cozy episode I think.

Have I mentioned that I published a blog post that is an interview with a techie at one of my clients? He used Elixir to lay the foundation for a startup that have recently raised $50 million. So that's certainly a journey. If you are curious about that company as a matter of career moves, reach out to me at lars@underjord.io and we can talk. They are looking for intermediate/senior Elixirists and also more recently Elixir devs wanting to go into a Team Lead role.

Intention, Intensity and Small Scale

I've been banging on the drum of small teams, focused software, not letting orchestration and organizational or software bloat strangle out your creativity, your intent and your productivity.

I find small scale to be simpler and overall better. But it isn't a cure-all even though I sometimes feel like it is from my perspective. Large orgs and their large systems provide me useful things every day, things that a small, sharp and focused team couldn't deliver. This can be physical constraints, like a postal service or just shear scope of the endeavour like integrating with all the world's banks. Those are challenges where much of the problem-solving is how to orchestrate a ton of people to do a thing.

Those can be interesting and meaningful problems. But they are so big-picture, success has such lagging indicators and the movement has such inertia that I honestly don't think I have the patience for it.

And you can do a lot with a small team, small org, small community. And you can do so much more directly. But if I dismiss all large orgs I essentially dismiss much of human endeavour. Which seems a bit overly eager.

So what are the challenges of small scale?

It tends to force intentionality. You have limited budget, limited hands to apply to the work, you have limited time-horizons and it tends to feel urgent. I rather like it as a forced focusing function. It fits what my brain needs to get things done.

It tends to include very little margin or slack. Every effort is felt and noticeable. So every unfruitful diversion is also felt. Every moment of rest tends to need to be a choice. If you want to build in space to think and explore you usually have to make that a very intentional choice. Kicking back a bit because you are having a bad week can feel like a betrayal of everyone around you.

It can feel like you are constantly close to the line. You often don't have the dampeners of scale. Many clients, many contributors, many income streams and many people that know how to do what you all do.

Another example of smaller scale vs larger is in programming languages and their communities. In the Elixir ecosystem it is pretty possible to have an overall view of who is involved, what projects are most active, what progress is being made. I love that. The smaller scale is what lets me feel like it is a community and not just a mass of people on the Internet. It has also let my writing and publishing be noticeable in a way I doubt it would be in Javascript.

The flip side is that there are not so many people out there that you can achieve certain economies of scale. I ended up on some popular JS person's Twitter today. Over 200K followers. If he sells a t-shirt/course/book I bet he makes a living. I'm not convinced we have that scale in the Elixir community. The scale which would allow us to fund independent content creators off of the enthusiast patronage or merch.

I want to be clear, this is not bitterness or anything. I'm just looking at the numbers I see and thinking out loud. I don't see pure Elixir-focused or wider BEAM-focused publishing being self-sustained anytime soon. Thankfully I see a fair number of companies in Elixir that are willing to consider supporting cool things and put some money where their mouths are when it comes to supporting the community. I've had some of those conversations. But of course company money has impact on what gets made.

So there are great upsides to being in a smaller ecosystem. Sanity for one thing. It isn't as noisy. There can be some measure of clarity. You can see individual people. The downsides are that you can't mirror what is being done in the huge scale communities. With some experience it is not particularly hard to work and live off of Elixir. I make a great living, consulting, writing code.

I've also have always wanted to do independent creative projects for a living. I'm not owed that but it is one of my goals. And I'll keep trying to find ways of making that happen. Whether that is by finding a wider audience or by finding more impactful support in our smaller ecosystem, who knows. I bet I'll keep it small scale on my side regardless.

Let's make something punchy out of this.

Recognize the scale you are operating at. Use its upsides, mitigate the downsides.

Something like that.

If you want you can reach me via lars@underjord.io or on Twitter where I'm @lawik.

Thanks for reading, I appreciate you taking the time.

- Lars Wikman