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As I’ve been looking for my next role, I’ve wrestled with the question of going back to being an individual contributor (i.e. a developer) or to continue on the track of technical leadership I was pursuing the last few years.

A friend recommended I read “The Motive” by Patrick Lencioni to help guide my thoughts on the question. Written as a fable, “The Motive” tells the story of two CEOs in the same industry and the advice one offers to the other.

One CEO (Shay) is worried about his job and the ability of his company to continue to grow. The other CEO (Liam) is leading a successful company in a nearby market and starts to mentor Shay about what it means to be a leader.

As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Shay has been motivated by the title, salary, and perks of being a leader, but has fundamentally failed to lead his organization by doing the hard things leaders need to do.

It hardly seems the right time to write about tech topics when seditionists stormed the Capitol building to interfere with our democratic processes.

So instead, I can only express my thoughts today:

Listen to one another. Be empathetic. Be kind. It's okay to have a difference of opinion, but it should not stop us from treating each other with dignity.

In her 2019 dotCSS presentation, Sarah Dayan makes the case for creating Utility-First CSS.

Utility-first CSS focuses on creating classes that describe how something should be rendered in the browser, rather than creating a class to represent the component being rendered and attaching all of the CSS code required to the class for that component.

For those already familiar with this strategy, it is how Tailwind CSS was designed. I haven't had the opportunity to use Tailwind, and frankly it was low on my list to learn for some reasons I'll outline below.

First, a comparison of the traditional "component" way and the "utility" way:

One of those things I miss from the pre-digital era is the concert ticket stub. There was something about getting the pristine ticket in the mail or at the box office and anticipating the fun that will be had each time you walked past the tickets stuck to you fridge with a magnet. Then after the concert, you'd pull the ticket from your pocket, creased and bent and add it to the collection of stubs.

Sadly, with online ticket purchases you no longer get the ticket printed on card stock. Printing the ticket stub on your printer just isn't the same. It's a lost art form.

Now it seems the ski lift ticket is going the same way as the concert ticket. Instead of a tine over which you fold your ticket, ski resorts are now issuing RFID cards. The cards are used to pass through an electronic gate after getting scanned.

It's a technology in search of a problem.

For many years I took a tip from Chris Brogan and set "3 Words" as a direction for yearly goals. It was a great way to set up a vision for the year.

But then life happened - between work and a teenager playing high school and travel lacrosse - and I dropped setting goals altogether as being a parent was the top priority. No regrets.

This year I thought I would steal a single phrase from James Clear instead of three words:

What can you do with 5 good minutes?

5 good minutes of:

-pushups is a solid workout
-sprints will leave you winded
-writing can deliver 1 good page
-reading can finish an insightful article
-meditation can reset your mood

You don’t need more time—just a little focused action.

— James Clear (@JamesClear) November 21, 2019

The worst development situation I ever stepped into was an IT department where the five year old production code was completely documented. Literally NO documentation.

Our team of three all joined within two months of each other after the entire previous IT department left the company. We had to document the system via debugging production bugs and tracing through code manually because there were no unit or integration tests to work with.

It reminds me of a tweet from Leon Bambrick:

Newbie: Ok great, can you shoot me a link to the documentation?
Oldie: Errr... we have more of a... rich oral tradition.

— Leon Bambrick (@secretGeek) May 3, 2017

Or happy Friday if you’re not into celebrating Christmas.

As a Christian, I celebrate Christmas to honor the birth of my savior, Christ Jesus. But I also love Christmas because it’s a time for fellowship, thankfulness, and family.

I hope your holiday season is filled with joy despite all that has happened this year. Be blessed.

(No post tomorrow, talk with you Monday).

Technical debt, in its original definition by Ward Cunningham, is the gap between the software that developers built based on an incomplete understanding of the problem. The time making updates to correct the misunderstanding is the technical debt.

In the Manager's Path, Camille Fournier recommends teams:

“...dedicate 20% of your time in every planning session to system sustainability work (“sustainability” instead of the more common “technical debt”).

Sustainability work is a much better term than technical debt. With so many negative connotations about the word "debt", and a tendency to write poor code under the technical debt moniker, the term should be retired.

Three questions to ask while leading your team:

• Where are the bottlenecks that are slowing us down and how can I eliminate that friction?
• What can I do that will make the development team better in the next month?

In the software world there is a strong idea of finding rockstars and ninjas - the so-called 10x developers. These are the near legendary developers so powerful they accomplish ten times as much as a regular developer.

The problem is, many of these 10x developers tend to also be cowboy coders:

Cowboy coding is software development where programmers have autonomy over the development process. This includes control of the project's schedule, languages, algorithms, tools, frameworks and coding style.

A cowboy coder can be a lone developer or part of a group of developers working with minimal process or discipline.

source: wikipedia

What do you do when you have to remember some bit of information that used a couple of weeks ago?

For me, remembering a quick snippet of code, a URL, or a database query that I used to accomplish a temporary task is nearly impossible.

But retrieving that information again has come in handy time and time again. To solve that, I created a file on my computer desktop.

I call it scrapheap.txt.

Eleventy is one of the sparkly new generation of static site generators. As a technology, it takes markup and compiles it (mostly at deploy time) into the static pages that can be quickly served to the user.

Unlike something like Gatsby (from my understanding), Eleventy doesn't do anything like rehydrating pages or pulling in information from APIs (mostly).

I see it as the true bare-bones - yet powerful - static page generator. For things like blogs, I don't have a need for anything more than a static site, so Eleventy is the perfect solution.

Pages built from Eleventy can be created from html, markdown, javascript, and other sources. It's agnostic about what source the content comes from.

It’s probably no surprise to anyone in the know that the followup to my email about Netlfy would most likely be about Jamstack. After all, Jamstack was created by Netlify.

Jamstack is an architecture that improves the speed, security, and scalablilty of websites.

While writing my last post about Netlify, it occurred to me that while it was beneficial to know what it was at a high level for my own educational purposes, I did not really think about the technology as part of a solution specific to a project or organization.

That led to my thoughts about what questions I would ask when assessing a new technology.

• What key business problem (s) will this technology solve?

"Everyone" in the circles I follow seems to love Netlify. I haven't used it but want to learn more about it. Here goes...

Netlify has been around since 2014 and was created because of the trend toward git-based deployment as well as static site generators[1]. It is essentially a serverless backend for websites.

According to their website, setting up a Netlify site and delpoying it is as easy as:

1. Connecting to a git repsository.
2. Creating build steps.
3. Deploying.

Ryan is the VP of Creative at HUDDL DESIGN. They’re a startup creating amazing designs from acoustic panels for interior spaces.

Recently he told me how amazing it is working with his partners because there isn’t a sense of ego or politics. He shared an example with me (and which I share with his permission):

He was putting together a RFP, but was struggling with “designer’s block”. He had ideas for the pitch but couldn’t quite get started. Ryan openly admitted that to one of the other partners. Even though design is his area of focus, his partner hopped on a video call and they brainstormed ideas - even going as far as creating some ideas in Powerpoint as it was the easiest tool for both of them to collaborate. Together they pushed past the block and Ryan did amazing work on the final RFP presentation. (I saw it, it was very cool ;-)

One small utility I love (Windows only) is PureText.

This little tool sits in the dock and provides a fast way to remove all of the formatting of something you’ve copied to the clipboard.

While it’s running, I know that hitting CTRL+SHIFT+V will remove anything from the text and paste only the text itself.

This article now lives at RACI.

Communication is critical in organizations and on project teams. If I can learn something than improves how a project runs, I’m all for it.

One thing I learned is the RACI method, or RACI matrix. As a communication tool, it allows teams to understand who is responsible for what.

Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed

Derek Sivers started the idea of a /now page to keep visitors to personal sites to date on what’s going on. It came about because an /about page doesn’t really describe what a person is up to, and digging through social media is too in the weeds to be useful either.

It occurred to me that I created a document of my own I called “The Plan” and it was a lot of what I would consider to be a /now document. Here’s my stab at it; I’ll likely turn this into a page on a site somewhere/sometime. I’m keeping it career-based for now.

If you’d like to see more /now pages, you can visit Derek’s nownownow site.

Now