2019 Goals: What am I Working On?
2019 was a great year, learned a lot. Unfortunately, The Dev Manager and StartUp Tribe are no longer active.
It’s about halfway through 2019 and I think it’s time to reflect a little bit on my professional goals.
In late 2018, I went to work for myself again. Luckily, I’ve been able to pair up with a colleague to tackle some of the more tough areas of working on your own. We’ve decided to work on some things ourselves and combine our forces on others.
The Dev Manager
I’ve been very passionate about building out great teams, mentoring jr developers and leading process improvement. I did this a lot as an engineering manager. I really wanted to learn more, to improve, but I couldn’t find training. As the years went on, I developed my own set of skills and learned things the hard way.
I’m now building out training for Dev/Engineering managers myself. This starts out with a dev manager crash course.
I’m also available for one-on-one engineering manager coaching.
More Better Faster
My company name is More Better Faster LLC. It comes from a phrase I’d utter to my teams when I’d manage them. I am trying to embody this philosophy as I do Laravel/PHP, Vue/React/JS programming and consulting.
Right now, my net is pretty wide. I’m targeting businesses and development teams. But, in the same way that I like to help mentor dev managers, I think my way of working will focus on development teams in the future.
Someone once called me the “developer’s developer” - which is where I think More Better Faster will laser focus in on in the next few months: augmenting teams, and taking things to the next level.
StartUp Tribe
Part of a new business venture is validating that the idea is good. Your friends and family, and yourself, will encourage you to do it. They love you, so why are they going to disagree?
StartUp Tribe is an idea I have that I’m validating. Before I build it, I’d like to make sure there is a market.
Running a startup is hard: long days, late nights, and lots of ups and downs. Who can you share it with? How do you stay on task? With StartUp Tribe, you get accountability, encouragement and support from your tribe. Up to 10 tribe members will participate with strategy sessions, remind you to keep going, and give you positive vibes. In return, they stay connected to the inner details of your start up that they really care about.
ChickenFacts.io
While this started as a proof of concept which I wrote about here, it has really grown on me.
You could say I became really eggcited about the idea. Really, developing this has been poultry in motion. I’ve wanted to build a nice project to give back, but talk is cheep. With a lot of hendurance, I will continue to build out this site. Features? I’ll just wing it.
Sorry about that.
No Compromises
Joel has a long career of building out great projects and supporting many clients. Together, we’re working on morphing the business into something different. Instead of just being implementation specialists, we want to help clients in different ways.
Because of our unique set of experiences, we can advise clients on the best solutions. Not all clients know what they want, or what they think they need is not the best course of action. With the ability to communicate to technical resources and speak ‘businessese’, we are positioned uniquely to keep an eye on the business’ interests while informing the technical resources properly. Projects go sideways for a bunch of reasons, but usually both sides are to blame partially. We’ll aim to reduce the chance that a project goes off the rails; that’s not good for anyone.
End notes
It’s hard to balance all of these things. Plus, I always want to keep working on my open source and updating this blog right?
I’ve decided that I really want to focus on working with Joel on No Compromises, and focusing in on my own project work to augment teams. The next highest priority is The Dev Manager. Everything else after that is just extra. That includes blogging. I’ve published an entry nearly every week for months at a time, but I think I need to take a break. I need to focus on these other things.
Finally, I’m looking forward to looking at this entry in another 5 years. See what happened, see if I still find the same things important. What succeeded? What failed? I have this sinking suspicion that after all of this hard work, the one thing that will take off is chickenfacts.io. That just seems like the way things go. :)