If you entered the Underjord giveaway, check your inbox and spam folder, the winners have been let know. Unless your email address starts with an "m" or an "r" you unfortunately don't need to check your email, you were not a lucky winner.

Planning a livestream today at 15.00 CEST where we should be improving a GenServer that controls my camera lights. Looking forward to the stream and to fixing some of my dumber choices :)

I also published a tease about my current plans for the future of sponsoring the Underjord content work and funding the mission. Of course I will share a bit more to my great newsletter readership. So if your company is looking to hire Elixir developers and believe what I do could help you in that, have whoever is the technical leader reach out to me and they will get the full details.

Essentially it boils down to collaborating with companies that are trying to hire. They sponsor my public work and get to be associated with my content in the community, essentially they get a fractional content marketer. They get no creative control, I'll do what I do. I will let y'all know about these companies that support me and are looking for Elixir developers. I hear from people wanting to make moves in Elixir every week and this would give me much better insight into some companies to suggest. I'll also help talk to candidates and give feedback on the hiring/interviewing process.

I'm pretty excited about this as it does feel like it aligns incentives quite well. Most companies don't have a lot of time to pour into talking to developers but they desperately need to hire them. I can help bridge that. While doing consulting I encounter companies you've never heard of that do Elixir. While doing this public stuff I encounter strong developers that have no idea where to start in finding Elixir companies. I love bridging that.

Questions are quite welcome, connecting me with people who need this is appreciated. As per usual it is lars@underjord.io for reaching me.

Grasping Opportunity

Opportunity is not a single thing. It is not a static thing. The way I see it creativity and opportunity have a lot in common. Or the way I approach them have a lot in common.

I've come to view it as a process of just gathering as much input as possible both in the realm you want but also more broadly. Then there is building skill in many different tools and techniques. And then you need to practice putting these things together. I couldn't say when I started doing this. I might have always done it so I'll be the worst at transmitting the how of that.

I think it starts with a few things. So I was widely web-skilled when I got my first chance at paid dev work but I wasn't deeply skilled in particularly anything. I could do pretty decent graphic work with a rather limited creative palette. I could do pretty good custom PHP or set up and modify a WordPress/Joomla/Drupal. But I couldn't have built a REST API in any particularly good way. I had also done tons of writing, on my own, for myself and blogging.

At the moment that opportunity arose, I had all the parts I needed for doing that work. It wasn't a super high bar but it was beyond accidental abilities. I'd been learning web for a pretty long time.

That work taught me a lot about working with people on technical problems, forging a direction for a small team and such. So when the chance to be the technical founder of a startup web/mobile agency came I took that opportunity.

That was a pressure cooker both for my people skills, my productivity and workflow skillset as well as pressing me to explore many technical things. After that I took a job that was a more typical small team developer work. The job taught me a ton of things around scaling web applications, building bad microservices, automating infrastructure management and just a lot of technical skills. I also got a strange crash-course in Event Sourcing.

It was also during that job, mostly on my own time, I explored Raspberry Pis on the side. Where I heard of Elixir. Where I played with shadertoy and procedural generation. Screwed around with some Unity and Unreal. Tried to grasp basic music. Did some simple electronics. Got pretty into making. Watched a lot of behind-the-scenes small-time creator content. Tried streaming and learned OBS Studio. Played with graphics and overlays.

Leaving that job I did more music experimentation. Still something I'm terrible at but would love to learn better. I played more with hardware. I went deeper on Elixir. Woodworking. Baking. Growing vegetables. All the hipster.

Inputs, inputs, inputs. And all these inputs fed into setting up my company, creating a presence, showing some of what I do. And as I talk to prospective clients I look for what parts of what I have they actually need. Most clients don't have a very advanced need. They just need someone who does Elixir and knows how to make the servers go brrrrr.

Opportunity really happens when there is a clear gap.

I see the Elixir developer community, I'm part of it, I get it. I also know that most developers don't like marketing themselves, negotiating and most are so busy building things they don't really track their surroundings.

I see companies using Elixir. Developers are not usually their customers. So they market to their customers and they are entirely unknown to the Elixir world. They really need people, might have a great company, great impact, but they hardly know where to start building a reputation with developers.

That's an opportunity. And the only reason I know how big it is and see the shape of it is because I talk to the developers, I talk to the companies and I know what it takes to reach both of these groups. That makes it clear how they are not reaching each other. What it takes is a mish-mash of skills and inclinations that bridge that messy human problem-space. Much like knowing many technical topics lets you see a bigger picture when solving technical problems.

I hope that all made some sense. I'm not sure the thought is fully formed. Let me know at lars@underjord.io or on Twitter where I'm @lawik.

Thanks for your time, I appreciate you reading this.

- Lars Wikman