Sharing as networking
Hello!
Welcome to a new week and the second week of July. It's odd because we are past the year's first half, but it never sinks in on the first week. Time is a weird construct.
Over the past few weeks, I've had conversations with managers and engineers regarding getting their direct reports more "exposed" to the larger organization or how to share their work more widely. Often, we feel alone when pursuing ideas we consider interesting. Other times, we would like to bounce ideas with other folks, but it might be that your team shares different interests.
Oddly enough, I've been reading books about content creation and came across this book called "Show your work" by Austin Kleon, which I feel provides some exciting ideas that can be applied in this context.
Why share?
Sharing your work, even if you think it's small, allows you to get "discovered."
Discovery can take multiple shapes. People will think about you because when they come across a topic you've talked about or shown interest in, they might throw work your way. Or people will come to you for advice on one of these topics, and you can become a go-to person. You'll be able to find your "tribe" at work and form a group of people with whom you can share ideas, get feedback, and help them. Another aspect I've come across is being invited to meetings on related topics; people think of my subjects as adjacent to theirs. This has expanded my network, developed my mind to other ideas, and given me access to generate new ideas from those different contexts re-applied to my organization or teams I work with.
There are significant benefits to sharing your work, but how do we get started?
How to share?
How to share is one of those things that might not be as important as starting to share something somewhere. Sharing can feel intimidating, and I needed guidance on where to start sharing.
Promote via email
When starting, the safest place to start for me was sharing with my manager. Whenever people asked me a question over email or I expanded an opinion about an email thread, I forwarded those to my manager.
The initial purpose for sharing those emails was because I was investing a chunk of time from my work week answering questions. But with time, my manager also helped me notice themes around the topics I was answering or topics I was more interested in.
Another type of email I've talked about was sending a weekly update.
Since I don't work in sprints or directly with a team, much of my work is "invisible" from the perspective of not being tracked by Jira or similar planning software. The audience of my weekly status updates has changed over time, as well as the content. Now it's more focused on the evolving scope I'm part of, as well as communicating and reiterating the general goals of our organization.
Promote on forums
Beyond email, another place to start that felt safe enough for me was a weekly forum we have in our organization. It's "agenda-less"; if you have something interesting, you're free to share it.
I've seen organizations with "show and tell" or lunch meetings for sharing knowledge. Other types I've seen focus on technology (e.g., Node.js, Java), web development, mobile, or backend. These have helped me to focus. Most of the time, I'm all over the place in topics of interest and breadth-focused. I chose an issue in one of the forums and focused on writing that presentation down.
Promote in a site
In the organization I work, we have a GitHub Enterprise instance, and I've taken the time to set up a GitHub page site for my notes.
It's a single static site built with Astro and has a plugin for Mermaid.js (which I use a lot!). I use this site to store my thoughts around relevant topics in the organization or when new projects are coming. I write reviews and links to pertinent information like 1-Pager, Solution Design, and Architecture Decision Records (ADRs). I also document my opinions about the future or relevant topics to my role, like mentoring or why we chose a particular technology stack in the past. Before having a static site, I used our Confluence instance under my profile.
Every time I write something new, I share it with people I work closely with, not only for feedback but also to start conversations. Most of the time, people I communicate with tell me like this other person told me the same thing, then I share with them and keep expanding my network. It's a cool thing to do!
What to share?
Ok, so we know why and how to share, but what are we sharing anyways?
Well, we can share a lot of things! When I started sharing, I did so from links I came across during the week. It was a safe thing, not mine; it was more about something I found exciting or resonating with me. Whenever we had a daily standup, they said at the end, "Someone has something else to share?" I mentioned something I came around during the week or the past day. I saw this video yesterday about Kubernetes, Continuous Delivery, etc.
Teammates would share other links with me, and we started sending links back and forth.
After sharing links, I also started sharing my comments on the link, like why it resonated with me and if I agreed or disagreed, expanding on the original material. As I gained more experience writing my thoughts and expanding on other people's work, I started writing my reviews on a random page in Confluence or my GitHub pages site. These pages gave more of an anchor point for my thoughts, and people could come back to my profile for reading instead of trying to remember which link I shared and when.
Some of my written pieces eventually became presentations I gave to other people. That's not to say you can't do it the other way around, I've met people that kind of thing in presentations, and it's easier for them to sort their thoughts if they're writing in slides format.
Even if you share links, posts, or presentations, the most important piece is your story, how these topics resonate with you, and why you're so moved that you need to share them!
How do I share links on topics that I'm interested in my work? When sharing links to topics of interest, we're not far away from sharing our work.
One time I became interested in Elasticsearch and started sharing why I liked it and how we could use it at work to improve our search functionality. I should use it in some capacity to have more informed opinions. I got to work, and it took me a month to go through all the red tape to get a cluster approved, application instances, you get the idea. But when I got my service running, I could finally see that part of my original conclusions were misguided. Most of the things were true, but it wasn't as easy to set up a ranking algorithm, among other things.
Then I got to write about it and share it with several folks around the organization, who gave me feedback and helped round my opinions even more! That was a great learning and sharing experience for me. It gave me access to other folks in the organization, like Database Admins and infrastructure teams, who helped me expand my ideas and shape them more concretely.
Your turn!
Let me know if you share links or other media types with your teammates. What are you sharing? Do you also share your thoughts? Do you write a lot at work? Do you share what you write? Why or why not? You can reply to this email!
Happy coding!
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