Quarter one retrospective

I registered this domain about 3 months ago and started posting shortly after so it seems like a good time to do a quarterly retrospective.

I've always thought the retrospective, done well, is one of the most powerful tools in a team's arsenal for making their lives better and improving their processes, so I'm going to try to do one periodically with myself for this blog.

First Quarter Results

Published:

• 10 posts by me.
• 1 guest post.
• 1 'meta' post to kick things off and an 'about' page.

My aim when I set out was to publish about 1 per week in the Mon-Wed time frame. I didn't want to be super-strict about the schedule in case other things came up or a post took longer than I thought to get together. Mostly got there. The longest gap between posts was 12 days but that was a job-interview heavy week so I'll give myself a little grace there. I haven't been super strict on achieving a Mon-Wed delivery either.

Takeaway: Setting the one-post-per-week goal at the beginning was beneficial. I'd like to tighten it up for the next quarter and try to hit a more predictable schedule and post every Wednesday.

Numbers

The How to be a leader when the vibes are off post did the best numbers and it's not even close. Ironically, it was the first one I didn't post to HackerNews because the previous ones got basically zero attention. Someone else posted it (thank you, whoever you are) and it got some serious traction. It's sitting around 40,000 views right now whereas my next top performer (unsurprisingly: Why AI Probably Won't Help Your Team Ship More Product is in second place with 3,500. That one got picked up by a newsletter that drove some traffic.

The other posts were much more modest, bordering on disappointing. I'll attribute that to my own discomfort with self-promotion which is something I'm probably going to have to get over if I expect that to change meaningfully.

Other than HackerNews and that newsletter, Reddit (/r/engineeringmanagers) and LinkedIn have been the best drivers of traffic - probably because those are the only places I promote them. Mastodon, similarly doesn't seem to drive much traffic but I don't have a huge following there.

I started writing some promotional blurbs when I post to LinkedIn and Reddit. It makes me uncomfortable, I'm not going to lie. There's so much cringey content on LinkedIn especially that I hate to be one of those people but it does seem to help and I'm trying to keep it from sounding too ridiculous or clickbaity.

Takeaway: I should probably work a bit harder on threading the needle between doing next-to-nothing to promote this blog and becoming a shameless shill for my own brand without going full-influencer.

Reception

Thankfully, no internet randos have come to yell at me about anything I've written or not written (I didn't read the HN comments). Most of the feedback has been from friends and former colleagues and has been basically all positive. My favourite one:

Enjoyed reading your recent blog posts. I know you didn’t use AI to write them because they sound like you.

That part is important to me. For what it's worth I don't use AI to write them. I write them in markdown using vim without any kind of plugins or assistants. I'm not anti-AI as a rule. I do use ChatGPT and Claude pretty much every day. In the context of writing I definitely use it for proof reading since I don't even have a spell-checker in vim 😄and I sometimes use it for helping me organize my thoughts around an idea but every word I've published has been written by me (or is an attributed quote from somewhere I consider trustworthy).

I did also have one company looking for someone to lead their engineering team reach out and ended up interviewing with them. That was always kind of a secondary goal of this endeavour so happy that worked out (though the job didn't - which is fine - I had a good experience with them).

Takeaway: The feedback has been encouraging enough that I think I'm on the right track. Stay the course.

Next quarter

Main thing to change I think is doing a bit more promotion and seeing if I can grow the audience for this. That said, it's not political hot-takes so there's a long-tail opportunity to let it just grow over time organically which is also fine.

I have no direct plans to 'monetize' this content. I publish with Ghost and it does have a paywall/subscription feature but at this point it doesn't make sense to try to turn this into cash-flow. At the very least I don't think 12 posts are enough to say I've demonstrated enough value that anyone's should be ready to pull out their wallet. In any case, it's probably better suited to just be a capsule summary of my management style and can serve as a long form advertisement for hiring me to do manager-y things rather than writing for a living.

That said, I am living off my savings right now so I reserve the right to change my mind if I need income more urgently.😆

What else have I been up to?

Coding

I've been coding! While we're in the midst of all of this AI stuff I've been exploring that space, primarily the tooling and code generation aspects while working on a real product that might be in shape to launch soonish. The product itself isn't in the AI arena, but I've been curious about the tools and how well they do. My approach has been not to 'vibe-code' but to find the way to use them while still being aware of what they're up to enough that if they poofed out of existence I would not be left with an unmaintainable mess. The code base I'm working on was initially built by someone else over the course of a year or so and was build in a stack that was pretty much all stuff I'd never worked with professionally. So, steep learning curve, plus I've only really dabbled in hobby projects for the past 15 years since my day jobs have all been manager roles. I'll maybe save the details for another post since my first AI one did so well, but I'll summarize my findings this way:

• Helping me find my way around an unfamiliar code base: 👍
• Explaining what some bit of code is doing: 👍
• Writing some tedious/boring code with a small scope: 👍
• Writing anything with any amount of complexity: 😵

It's really tempting to just let it run sometimes but it becomes counter-productive at some point if it takes me longer to figure out what it did than it would to have just written it myself. I think this is where some of the "feels faster but it's actually slower" measurements that are filtering in from out there are coming from. It still feels like early days for this tech though. It's already changed so much since the first time I tried it. Lots left to be discovered, good and bad.

Anyways, I've used ChatGPT Codex, Cursor, and Claude Code and right now I'm mostly using GPT Codex but I keep it on a short leash. After all, the humans are still the ones on-call.

Unofficially on the job market

As mentioned, I've taken a few interviews here and there. One of the reasons I wanted to write this is to get some more of my management philosophy out there so any prospective employer can see what they're getting. I really want there to be a 'love match' between me and any future employers, with strong alignment on philosophy and approach. When that's not there it's never a good time. Work is enjoyable when you're doing what you love in the way you feel is best and it's no fun at all when you feel like you have to compromise on that.

On to the next quarter with gratitude

Thank you again for being a subscriber. I really appreciate it. Please feel free to get in touch if you have something you feel like I should write about or if I could be a help to you or your organization in any way.

No plans to stop at the moment. Hopefully I don't run out of ideas!

"Driver's side rear view mirror on 1955 Carpenter / Steelcraft school bus (built on 1954 GMC chassis)" by Darron Birgenheier is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .