Transitions, Beginning, Middle & End

I’ve had challenges with transitions and knowing when something’s over. Paying attention to those more has been helpful in a few different ways. Whilst transitioning from spring to summer, here’s a recap that covers a lot of tech development in 2023. Here’s a summary of what I’ve been exploring this year, separated into beginning, middle and end

Beginning: AI

The big hype. A lot of people have experiences, feelings and concerns. Meanwhile back at the ranch, I have a series of thoughts and experiences on this…

First; when will the tech industry take a look at how AI impacts interviewing? I think that that conversation is coming, if not happening now.

Second; my AI usage has focused more on reducing/eliminating writing unit tests, as part of that work is boilerplate that I believe could be improved. On the Ruby side, I’ve used ask_chatgpt to create unit tests on a Rails 7 app. On the Node side, Pythagoracan create tests for any repo provided. I’m currently working on using that with QueerGlobal’s frontend. The maintainer has been very open and is using open source to differentiate his offering.

Third: I’ve been looking into smaller models that can be downloaded & used locally; whether Alpaca-lora, LLaMA.cpp or other models. I’m working my way through these stacks & solutions.

I’m also using AI in ways you can find on a blog post (career related projects), and don’t have much to say beyond what’s out there in general. I believe in the possibility and the skeptics, pay attention to both, and learn more to make good and useful decisions with regards to technology.

Middle: QueerGlobal

Here’s where the fun starts! My last gig was for 4.5 years all in all, and looking back on it, I can speak to two major period of time with an accompanying team / organization change. While spending the first part of this year as a Director of Engineering for QueerGlobal, I’m happy that a few objectives that we’ve been working on for awhile have come to fruition. In particular, I’m proud of:

• the people who have signed up to volunteer for existing projects
• the open sourced projects we now have available

Getting volunteers I’ve found has been work and a project in and of itself. Making oneself available for inquiries, solving tech onboarding challenges, building a collaborative culture where people work with each other without me being the spoke on the wagon wheel. This was a good dose of preparation and habits meeting luck to increase the team size 400% from January to today.

While a lot of good work has happened to get to this phase, I’m recognizing that it’s time to make transitions. So I’m augmenting the docs and working with other volunteers to cover tasks I’ve been working on, while focusing more on deeper work. This combination will position both QueerGlobal and I to move more effectively, continue work on React, NodeJS and Go projects, and keep people on the team and in Slack engaged.

This post celebrates and serves as a marker for this phase of QueerGlobal development. Check those projects out; open an issue, create a PR.

End: Hourly Work vs. Flat-Bid & Lack of Endings

“Although we’ve come, to the end of the road”

In past and current freelance endeavors, I’ve focused on hourly work, as flat-bid pricing in my experience led to me being underbid and overworked. This perspective is limiting to both perspectives. This video explains how charging by the hour can hurt the person charging, especially if that person has experience; I can be punished for working too effectively. On the other hand, flat bid pricing can work with some additional planning. Similarly, hourly planning can be used to offset sorting out deliverables and milestones up front, and time’s the most important expense.

Discovery happens whether it’s planned for or not. It’s better when these are planned, because every new team deserves to flesh that out easily. Some clients and companies don’t believe in doing that explicitly. I can work on that implicitly, but that can be an additional challenge depending upon the client, and not all clients are worth it.

I’m moving on from that polarizing, linear perspective to come up with proposals with more substance, as well as flexibility with regards to engagements. The other thing I’m ending is not having endings for things.

It feels good to recognize the beginning, middle and ending of things. Makes for more opportunities for things 😀.

— Mark Nyon (he/him) 🇬🇾 🇱🇷 (@msnyon) June 22, 2023

An incomplete tweet that still meets the meet, so to speak.

Recognizing when a ticket has ended, or when a project has ended helps me bring closure to a set of experiences. Knowing when to leave or end something has enough importance for me to end this post, here & now, as I’ve imparted everything I believe I need to.