Did you know kids are good at screaming? We’ve had a lovely day at the beach but now everyone is tired and thankfully, finally, falling asleep. Except me. I finally get to write. Hope your summer is lovely as well.

This is what I have in mind

I am constantly iterating on ideas of what my business is and how I want to do it. I have some personal motivations in play that have stayed roughly consistent:

• I want to do fun and creative things of my choosing.
• I am motivated by working in public and want to do a lot of that.
• I enjoy helping others and want that to be a part of what I do.

I’ve gone from straight freelance hired hands into mixed advisory, some mentorship and on into now having some employees where we do consulting/agency work and also having had some luck with helping companies recruit. I’ve also been paid to make a few videos and some writing over the last few years.

I’ve done some open source work but nothing that is near sponsorable or could have a paid option. I think the Elixir ecosystem, my preferred one, is too small still to sustain those kinds of projects typically. Oban is getting there it seems but overall it is quite hard.

What it turns out I’m pretty good at is to connect with developers in my published work. It helps that I’m very much a developer myself and I write what I like and fortunately it seems to resonate.

I’m also quite good at talking to company leadership and establishing a good trust with decision makers. I didn’t recognize this was a skill until I started to wonder why I kept having side-channel discussions about bigger picture things with most CTO-level people I’ve worked with.

There has been a number of times when I’ve seen an aspiring inexperienced developer or unhappy intermediate dev itch for options, whether they know or not and then I’ve known there is interest in hiring with a company I know. I tend to then make sure to connect them.

Similarly I saw a number of good people that I was not convinced the world would give good opportunities to. And I had a client ask for more gas on a project. So I solved that. Now I have a team that I really adore.

The ingredients is having connections with developers of a variety of experience levels, connections with companies with a variety of needs and a desire to solve problems. Fundamentally the companies typically need developers for their own business success while developers have a wider variety of reasons. I care most about getting developers into better positions than they were.

This is what lead to the recruiting efforts.

I’m aware that there is a balance to be struck. My readership and their attention is a trust I’m holding. If I become too dull, pitch too hard or seem non-genuine that all stops. Because of this I want to be transparent.

I plan on trying to expand the recruiting efforts around Elixir devs because there seems to be a genuine business case there. I’ve had about 3 out of 10 candidates I’ve let through get signed and I think they’ll be very good fits for the roles. The company reps have been happy, the developers excited, I’m thrilled and paid.

The way this works at a sustainable human scale but ”scaled up” is the same way it works now. I put out things that are interesting to developers and stay engaged with the community. That’s what I want to do anyway and have been doing so far. Ideally this grows the total audience and keeps new people coming in. I also publish some learning material, tutorials, streams, etc, and ideally this brings both new people into Elixir and help people move forward in Elixir. I want to advocate for the ecosystem. This all builds audience, ideally for the good of the community.

And it really does put me in touch with developers out there. I trade email messages with people who respond to this newsletter every week. I exchange DMs in other venues. And I like it. I typically enjoy talking to my peers.

I want to work with a decent variety of companies. This is one of the balancing acts. I would strip out some types of companies immediately that I have no interest in working with, for example betting and blockchain. Just not interested and don’t want their money. Most others I would entertain speaking to. I want to talk to a set of decision makers about the company big picture and then talk to some devs in the company. If I still think they seem reasonable after this I’m happy to work with them. In that case I write my description of the company. It will typically highlight what I think is best about them but maybe more importantly underline who I think their roles would work well for.

Finding companies is a mixed bag. I’ve had good luck with past clients and I’ve had at least one from this newsletter readership. I have some plans for reaching out to companies that I know are hiring. We’ll see how that shakes out.

Ideally I’d like good geographic coverage, some good global remote companies, etc. And I want a mix of company styles. Some devs want a fast-paced startup and some want a stable thing for the long haul. Some want a focus on teamwork and collaboration, some want to mostly do their own async thing. It really varies.

Ideally I want a good variety of roles as well. Entry-level, intermediate, senior, CTO. I see all experience levels in my readership. Particularly I don’t charge a fee for successfully recruiting entry level roles because I want to encourage those postings.

And if a company turns out to do a bad job of the recruiting process I want my candidates to get me that feedback so I can hit companies over the head with it and fire them if they don’t improve.

I’m working on some kind of big value statement. But essentially I want to enable developers to go after satisfaction, happiness and achieve their goals in their work. I want to help people not settle with misery and frustration. I genuinely enjoy doing my day-to-day work and I want others to as well.

It is my thinking that there is a positive fly-wheel I can establish in doing my public work for the community, which builds an audience. Then providing opportunities for that audience which funds spending more time on my public efforts which enables the recruiting.

The outcomes I hope for are: The community grows and keeps leveling up. I get paid for my time doing public work. Companies get connected with highly engaged and suitable developers. More developers spend their time doing satisfying work that they want to do.

I already have the luxury of saying no to companies. I have client work income. No single company is a big enough factor for me to compromise myself and if it becomes more of my income it would be a larger number of companies which would also mean no single company has a massive influence on what I do.

I hope this was an interesting and useful dive into my thinking. I look forward to execute on more of this as I go back to really work in August. If you have significant feedback I’d love to hear it before then.

Let me know your thoughts at lars@underjord.io or on Twitter where I'm @lawik.

I appreciate you. Thanks for your time.

- Lars Wikman