EN 41: Reflecting on 2023

2023 is almost over. Time to reflect about the year and look to the future. Before I start, the newsletter will be on hiatus for the holidays, and it’ll come back on the 19th of January.

I started the newsletter in March, 9 months ago, in the middle of my break from January to September. The idea was to write in public with a “low effort” approach, giving updates on my journey, sharing some of the things I consumed over the week—articles, tweets, or videos—or writing in a very stream of thought style.

The idea of a “low effort” newsletter was a continuation of my efforts to write regularly on my blog, which was originally going to be for more technical or longer essays. The reality is that it didn’t work out for whatever reason, I couldn’t make it stick. Pivoting to a weekly low effort approach was the way to make sure that I could keep writing frequently, regularly and consistently. What makes a difference for me is that, with the newsletter, I know there are people that subscribed that “expect” to get an email every week, which puts pressure on me to actually deliver something.

It’s better to start small and imperfectly than shoot for the moon and never start. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Since March, I’ve published 41 articles, almost once a week every week. These are my favourite posts so far, in no specific order:

• The pursuit of humane workplaces.

• There is always something to do

• Innovate where needed

• Thinking in the era of frameworks

• The rough world of interviewing

• The hiring fun and the state of the industry

• Meta skills

• A story about the ideal world

• When was the last time you talked to a user?

• Deploying on Fridays, is it crazy?

Out of all the essays, The Pursuit Of Humane Workplaces is the one I’m the most proud of and passionate about. Originally written for the blog, it was the hardest to write and to complete. It took me a long time to finish and more time to reflect about what I wanted to say. For a while, I had a “writer’s block” and didn’t know in which direction to take it. I feel I could’ve written more about the topic, but decided to stop and release it.

Is there an essay you specially liked or a topic you’d like me to write more about?

A possibility that contributed to me starting the newsletter was the idea that I could potentially monetise it in the future. That’s not going to happen any time soon for several reasons. I don’t think the essays are good enough in terms of quality, and in my mind, I get a feeling they don’t provide enough value to readers. There are also three crucial aspects: there’s not enough mass of people, there’s no clear user or specific topic/niche, and I’m not dedicating significant effort or time.

I’m not focused on monetising the newsletter, and I’m happy just by writing consistently and sharing ideas with a small group of people.

If there’s something I wanted to do with the newsletter from the start, taking inspiration from Kent Beck’s mission of “helping geeks feel safe in the world”, was to plant the seed that a different world is possible: a world of humane and safe workplaces, where we create valuable and quality products, take pride in our work and do so collaboratively, in an ethical way, as equals, learning, improving and doing things consciously and purposefully. Part of the mission is to show a holistic view of product and software development, not only from an engineering perspective.

What are the plans for the newsletter in 2024? Nothing fancy, I would like to stick to the habit of writing almost every day, and to create more “in-depth” essays from time to time.

In terms of learning in 2023, it’s been a mixed bag.

From a technical perspective, I read The Nature of Software Development by Ron Jeffries and finally finished Microservices Patterns this week, after months of reading it and learning the material. It’s not that the book’s so dense that it takes months to read, it’s that I have not been consistent enough with my learning habit since I started working again, not even reading anything for large stretches of time. In any case, finishing the book felt great, not only because it’s an excellent book and I learned a lot, but also because of the feeling of actually making progress. The next book will probably be Designing Data-Intensive Applications.

Looking into 2024, my main technical learning goals are roughly these:

• Keep learning about architecture, distributed systems and cloud technologies.

• Learn a new programming language, most likely Rust, or improve my level of Elixir.

• Keep improving my craftsmanship.

I already have a few potential books for each section:

• Architecture: Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Understanding Distributed Systems, Cloud-Native Patterns, Fundamentals of Software Architecture.

• Rust: Zero To Production In Rust, Hands-on Rust, Rust in Action.

• Elixir: Elixir in Action, Designing Elixir Systems with OTP.

• Craftsmanship: Understanding the Four Rules of Simple Design, Practical Object-Oriented Design, BDD in Action, Five Lines of Code, Refactoring, Grokking Simplicity.

Inside the craftsmanship section, I would love to include some “for fun” books: Crafting Interpreters, Mazes for Programmers, Understanding Computation.

There are many more technical things I’d like to learn, for example, I would like to get better at CSS with CSS for JavaScript Developers or accessibility with Practical Accessibility, or cloud/operations stuff (e.g. AWS). Moreover, I’d like to build some projects. Time’s the only constraint.

Beyond the technical learning this year, the long break from January to August was a great learning experience. I didn’t end up creating a business or finding some revenue streams that would’ve allowed me to have more freedom, but gained insights, about myself, what I enjoy, what I would like for the future, and specially, what I don’t want.

I was naive in terms of finding a revenue stream, and didn’t take it seriously enough, with tenacity, desperation, and urgency. At the same time, after a long and disappointing professional year, taking a break to just be was much needed.

A few things I learned from my long break and in 2022:

• I enjoy and deeply care about creating great teams and environments and looking at systems and improving them.

• I don’t do my best work in a feature factory, being a cog in the machine, with no influence or ownership, and with little information.

• Working alone, ticket by ticket, with no real sense of collaboration is not for me, I wither.

• Being able to see the whole picture is essential, ideally not only seeing it but working collaboratively on the whole thing and having an impact.

• I want to experience a situation where I can have more impact or formal leadership to be able to change the system.

• One of the things constantly on my mind is that I would love to create a company on my own, from the start, on my own terms.

• Another thing on my mind is to find a way to create extra revenue streams to gain more freedom (mainly the freedom to say no and work on what I want).

• Six months of savings is a lot, but if you don’t work, don’t have any income and don’t have urgency, time flies and, before you know it, you only have a month of savings left, you’re stressed and your options are severely reduced.

• Having time to focus on what you want and just be without needing to work is a feeling so rarely experienced but so worth it. I wonder what life would be if I could be in that situation more often or forever. It’s not even about not working, it’s about freedom and doing what you want.

• Health—mental and physical—supersedes everything.

If I think broadly about where I want my career to go, I see a few options.

The first one is to eventually become a founder and create a company or build small niche products by myself.

The second option is to keep working as a developer, maximising getting dense experience and growing. I rather have 5 years full of challenges, opportunities and different responsibilities than 5 years doing the same thing, you learn and grow exponentially more with the former. Tangentially, I see developers working on building and designing scalable systems or on challenging things like Sourcegraph or Zed, and the developer in me thinks “I wish I could be doing something like that”. This is where learning Rust would be useful.

The third option is to give the management path a go for a bit, following the engineer/manager pendulum. Having the opportunity to formally lead and manage the work, would be incredibly valuable.

With that, this is the end of today’s and this year’s newsletter, thank you for reading weekly and providing feedback. Have a great holiday break and see you in January!

Interesting links

• ‘Product vs Design vs Tech’: A Partnership, not a Battlefield

• The Real Opportunities for Empowering People through Behavioral Science

• Work Produce People - The Far Reaching Effects of Organisational Design