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Preface

Welcome to my new site for 2023 and beyond. Quite a lot of things have changed for me in recent months, so I did what every discerning nerd would do: redesigning my website!

Finding myself

Coming off from a 3-month admission to a mental health hospital, I underestimated how hard it could be to create something, let alone create something that required a personal brand. Back in the hospital, I had help from therapists and personell to help me with this, esp. with the question of where do I stand in my profession.

Writing these lines, however, made me appreciative of this experience. The recent weeks helped me to shape this work further. It needed to be something that catered both to the newly discovered self and some recurrent positive patterns in my life.

Even before the hospital, I was aware that being a generalist was my biggest asset and my biggest problem. It’s highly incompatible with the way most companies are run, let alone the egos of some “entrepreneurs”, managers and startup founders. When the rehab staff worked with me, it became apparent that my generalist tendencies went way beyond technical areas and was actually grounded in how my brain worked.

To the outside, it may look like I’m jumping from interest to interest, occasionally working that interest obsessively until the problem at hand is solved satisfactory and moving on to the next. It’s not just shiny things either, instead very often it’s something that needs to be done and no-one has the resources or the will to do it and it’s far removed from being exciting or exciting to write about.

At the same time, I know how to follow through with a long term thing like a product and the prospect of getting it into the hands of people who value the product, excites me to no end.

On top of this, being a mentor or sparring partner to others, helping them to make their way, is just as exciting and may be rooted in the very same trait. In fact, a few people, who reached out during my recuperation, pointed out how much they appreciate and value my insights. So let’s build on that…

With the prelude done, let’s look at how I try to “make a living” in the future, shall we?

Independent

The first theme you may have noticed is “being independent” or Indie, but it goes beyond my own person. You find that the Indie community very often tries to do things differently than their common alternatives of VC-backed startups and large corporations. This also allows them to prosper in niches that provide a perfectly fine living, but not the growth potential needed to get back an over-valued VC investment.

Indies are not bound to corporate politics and business fads, they do not seek growth at all cost. They are a single person or a small team. They have to do all the things necessary in some shape or form, so they have little to no room to indulge in any of the behaviours commonly seen at companies; we revisit that a bit later.

So a large portion of this site will be rooted in and devoted to the Indie community:

That being said, even if you’re not an Indie, you will get something out of me being an Indie, namely the aforementioned app, open source software and other, hopefully interesting, content. For me, Indie means that I can explore different facets of my interests over time, for which I didn’t have the energy while working for a company due to the personality (dis-)orders mentioned earlier. The technologist in me was and is always interested in solving the tension between technology and design in particular.

Observation, Practices & Principles

The second theme will be catered around the insights and different perspective that some find valuable. I’ll put some “best practices” and business practices into the spotlight, dissect them and try to find the principles that can and should be applied instead. Sometimes this may mean that you have the fitting context to apply the originating practice as is, most of the time however, you may realise that the practice may be wrong in your context, even if the intention was good.

As mentioned before, I can also write about some practices & principles that I never had the energy or opportunity to really explore in the past.

I really hope to create timeless content that is not obsolete and outdated in a few weeks or months, as so many things are these days.

In the beginning, the posts will also include content of a more self-reflective nature or retrospective.

Moonlighting

This theme will very likely see its own treatment, to explore where the notion and naming came from. I heard the term in this context the first time a few years back from DHH of 37signals, Basecamp and Ruby on Rails fame. He spoke about how they had mostly individual contributors who were moonlighting as managers.

My conviction is this doesn’t just apply to management. There is a spectrum between being a generalist and a specialist and moonlighting roles can have a profound effect on the individual and the organisation. Furthermore, depending on your context, it might be necessary to moonlight: again, Indies come back to mind. When it becomes necessity, you want to ensure that you use the time you’re moonlighting effectively.

I even think there is a book or even book series in it, looking at various roles and how they can look like when you want to or have to moonlight them. I hope it becomes apparent over time that moonlighting a role does not mean devaluing it. On the contrary, it might even give specialists in that role a new insight to the importance of certain aspects of their role and make them more effective — something that is hard to do in the day-to-day grind of the job as a specialist.

Let’s go…

With this said, I invite you to explore what is already here and about to come:

I plan to publish one observation per week on average, which will likely include updates to the design and technology of this site. It’s pretty much beta and a lot of things I planned to do, esp. in the editorial design department were postponed to after the launch.

For the projects I envision a six week cycle with two week cool down. It allows for significant progress in all areas, without taxing myself too much as a single person operation. We will see how that works out, either way it will be an interesting write-up after a few cycles. The backlog of crazy ideas is indeed crazy:

Can’t wait to get there. Some are small, some are big, not all will survive the initial exploration (and maybe they don’t need to). Others will probably move between Observation and Project, who knows?!🤷‍♂️

If all else fails, I can still start a true-crime podcast 🫠

…together?

A final part of the puzzle is The Lab.

It’s my way of trying to build a community. If you like what you see and what I plan to do, please consider subscribing. It’s just €5/month* for individuals and comes with a few really nice perks in addition to my heartfelt thanks.

Let’s get to work…

*: the emoji-driven change logs alone might be worth it