The late episode of Regular Programming is now out and we're looking at rebuilding the buffer :) Currently bottle-necked on editing which is a matter of finding an evening where I can tackle the kid solo so my wife can sit down in peace and edit. Shouldn't be too hard but that has been my thinking through the entire holidays.

I also had Niklas, a great video editor I've been working with, edit down one of my livestreams as an experiment that you can find here. I think it definitely became tighter, still on the long side because it contained a ton of stuff. Let me know if you find it useful and want more like it. It is the one about Nerves, eInk and OLED, small displays.

Also, winding back up on the plan for helping companies find Elixir developers. So if you think your company should engage me in attracting developers, have them  reach out at lars@underjord.io or on Twitter DMs. There's still a chance to get in early before I've dialed in the pricing :D

And the livestream is coming back, so that's today at 13.30 CEST over here.

Building a Professional

I hope we can put the image of the anti-social genius hacker behind us.

It's a cool trope for a movie and it is really cool that there can be space for people with a variety of brains in our industry. It is even a bit impressive that there's almost a reverse stigma. Unfortunately you can be actively anti-social and still not be great at what you do. You can be asocial and still be caring and kind, you can be social and be an asshole. Neither really says anything in particular about your technical skills.

We are all different and we all contain multitudes. I think there are common threads that work well for a professional career and there are bundles of threads that weave into good solid cord. Your weave may vary from others but you probably shouldn't be single-threaded.

As someone who likes to dabble in many different things my threads aren't the strongest, some are strong, some are weaker but I have a ton of them. I'm not the best at many things but I handily beat a lot of developers at marketing, sales and business. I'm unafraid of designing with shapes and colors. I enjoy dressing up and changing my presentation for a variety of occasions.

You don't need to be invested in everything but as a professional, every skill you actively bring to the table tends to make an impact at some point. If you are good at socializing. Or you are solution-oriented under high pressure. Or maybe you are good at tackling uncomfortable social situations. Maybe you just have a nice smooth voice or a laid back way about you that people appreciate.

If your colleagues have ever said particular things you do are good. Examine those. I got positive feedback on communication way back. I've also been told I'm a developer you can bring to a customer. There's a stereotype expectation for what developer is and I think that stereotype is what we get when we are phoning it in. When we just wrangle our code, put no effort into doing our best as a professional, that's when we end up being that asocial keyboard + screen person.

Every single person on the team I work with today have some particular skills that I value beyond whatever their coding skills are. Some are clearer than others, some leverage them better than others. They all have them.

I think there are ways to grow where you attempt some progress in all aspects and there are ways to grow where you progress in the aspects that set you apart. The first one is sort of stepping your game up and just trying to be more switched on, keeping your shit together and paying attention to what you are doing. I think that is a good effort to put in and it tends to line up with the whole productivity genre, systems and habits.

Growing the things that set you apart is to me more about conscious effort in particular directions. Pushing yourself to not settle at what you can easily achieve and seeing if you can get even better results by moving a few steps further.

We shouldn't spend all our life and energy on being a better worker. However, when you want to improve professionally, this is what I would think about and work on.

I've been considering trying to capture my experiences with trying to be a more capable professional as a developer in some form. Maybe as a course. Maybe initially through this newsletter.

Things like showing up reliably, remembering your commitments, managing your time, presenting yourself the way you want to be seen, building technical skill, setting boundaries, taking ownership, negotiating gracefully. I'm not an expert in any of it. But I practice all of it to some extent and maybe you do too.

If this interests you, please 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