Overdue and inevitable
A New Path
Skill alone will not save you from a layoff
After 3 layoffs in my career (the first happening in high school) I’ve learned that lesson.
Personal growth and adapting to change are the only protection you have.
Taking a Sabbatical
I don’t know where I will be in a year. I may choose to go back to another company.
Every day is a conscious and cautious step towards the future
To that end, I decided to take a 6 month sabbatical to check off another box missing in my startup journey:
Off alone in the cold, building and accountable only to myself
I may build several projects with this time, but the first will be Reading Room
Along the way I’m going to build in public:
- Blog posts here
- Live streaming myself building to Twitch and YouTube as I build
- Distilled build content as well as coaching/consulting content on YouTube
I will also be providing my services to startups:
- Fractional CTO
- Tech Lead
- Engineering Manager
- Builder
Engineered to Ensure Success
Should Reading Room and my other app ideas fail (and they probably will) I will be guaranteed to succeed in a few ways:
- The experience of failure will teach me hard lessons I can pass on to startups I work with
- Building a marketing and sales engine for myself is a skillset I’ve lacked
- Content helps build an audience (even if a small one). That audience will be there for future projects
And everything I am doing will be multiplicative:
- The code I write will also be content for blogs/videos
- The content I create will be shared with my clients
- The audience I build will be for my current project, but also for future ones
- The systems and processes I develop will benefit my future business endeavors
The long road to here…
In hindsight, my career was building towards this moment for over 10 years now.
After cutting my teeth on big company/project government work at the start of my career, I took a risk and joined an early stage startup.
It was wild, chaotic, and, at times, messy. But I enjoyed it much more than the glacial pace of big companies. After that experience, I spent a few years learning how to build things from scratch at a small dev agency. It was like working on multiple startups per year, but with a team that had a process and plan for mitigating the chaos.
Leaving that, I tried again for the big company life, having only worked for a single big company previously.
It was better, but still slow and process heavy, with too many meetings and not enough progress.
So….I went back to dev agency work. This time to a team more focused directly on startups, while also helping a significant number of non-profits.
This was an even better experience than the ones I had had previously. I found myself mentoring non-technical startup founders on engineering, running teams to teach younger engineers what I know, and building tons of apps, including several with a social good mission adding real impact to the world.
I strengthened my frontend skills (React and Vue) and learned mobile development (React Native) after spending far too many years on just backend code.
I built 35+ apps over 3.5 years, several of which I did entirely on my own,
including the client management and PM work needed to go from initial
discovery to final delivery and maintenance.
And I finally achieved a long standing career goal of mine.
To feel like a wizard
To dream up ideas in my head, and know that, with enough focused energy, I can summon just about anything into existence from nothing.
