When I worked at Ford as a shiny new graduate in the early noughties, they told me "don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions". They also said, never phrase anything as a "problem" but as an "opportunity". The cynical senior who worked on our team told me it was because Ford had been sued too … Read more
I know I owe you a blog post1, and today I actually have the time, energy and inclination to write it. It's not often those three factors coincide.
I have already done the Great Reveal about the job I am doing now that I'm no longer at JetBrains.
The question I wanted to answer (if only to remind myself later in life!) is why?
Right. It's about time I started looking for my next job/gig/source-of-income. I'll be honest, 9 months of sabbatical has not been as restful as I had hoped, but apparently writing two books and taking on the ownership of a restaurant are not restful activities. Who knew?
Anyway this blog post is because it's too hard to explain in 140 characters (OK fine 280, but I'm old school) what I'm looking for. There are three main paths I'm exploring:
I'm inspired to write this post because Someone Is Wrong On The Internet. Of course a more accurate statement would be "I disagree with some aspects of what someone on the internet said, even though they have an entirely valid point of view". But that's less catchy.
Mandatory initial exclamation about how little I have blogged here lately. Over a year without updates, oh dear! But a) I have been blogging quite a lot for the IntelliJ IDEA and Upsource blogs, and b) I had another baby, which kept me quite busy.
So on that topic (more or less) I get a lot of questions about my job: what’s involved in the job, what’s it like working for JetBrains, what does a Developer Advocate do, what’s it like working remotely etc etc. Given I also rather generously1 recently offered to answer people’s questions about my job, I thought the most scalable way was to write-once-read-many, i.e. write it in a single blog post for everyone to read.
So I came to the blog to update my upcoming events (at least something stays up to date) only to find it’s been nearly a year since I last blogged! This is terrible! It’s not that I haven’t written anything in a year, it’s that a lot of my writing energy goes into stuff for … Read more
So, I get asked a lot about how I got into technical advocacy / evangelism1, so it seems like the most cost-effective way to answer this question is to write a post about it. Warning: it's a long one!
Just over two years ago, I embarked upon a journey as a developer / evangelist for a company who was then called 10gen (who got fed up of saying "the MongoDB people", and transformed into MongoDB Inc). My goals for this role were: to learn what it was like working for a company that produced … Read more
Since I have a tendency to bang on every now and again about how we, as developers, could do better in managing our careers (for example, by creating CVs that don’t suck, and by staying ahead of the curve), Dave Thomas asked me to speak for a mere 50 minutes on the subject at GOTO … Read more
December disappeared in a rush of vacation and a fleeting tour of Australia. It's hard to believe that it's the eve of Christmas Eve already, it's almost impossible to feel Christmassy when you're getting sunburnt on a boat and seeing people in swim-suits wearing santa hats. A mid-winter festival (complete with trees and fake snow) just feels very odd in summer.