rememberlenny

Turning 31, and reflecting on the past 10 years

August 22, 2020 by rememberlenny

Tomorrow is my birthday, and I turn 31 years old. I didn’t think as much about what turning 30 meant last year, so taking a pause to write down some thoughts about the last 10 years, and the next 10. Taking time to think about my happiness, goals for future, current life circumstances, and future concerns. There is a global pandemic going on, but outside of this sentence, I won’t mention it again.

Ten years ago, in 2010, I lived in Aliso Viejo, had a blackberry, an HP laptop, and drove a stick shift Saturn. I had been back to college for one entire year, after dropping out and moving to Los Angeles, where I lived in a one bedroom apartment with ten other tenants, while figuring out what I was trying to do with my life. Prior, I worked a graveyard shift at CVS (10pm to 6am), and found time to paint graffiti on rooftops and empty streets. By the Fall semester of 2010, most of my classmates were on study abroad, and I was in the midst of a clinical trial to pay off some credit card debt I accumulated. My best friend was in rehab, and I began taking my Buddhist practice seriously to ground myself and master my own tendencies. I began painting canvases as a means of blowing off steam, and also began exploring how to program. I worked in a concert hall as a part-time gig, and pursued contract web development opportunities on craigslist.

Ten years ago, I wasn’t on Twitter, I didn’t know who Paul Graham or Peter Thiel was, I didn’t know anyone who worked at or ran a startup, and I wasn’t on a pursuit for wealth or riches. My parents were finally settling into a regular life, after our family went through a drawn out bankruptcy and legal dispute with a nation state. And a reasonable trajectory for me was either grad school or a well paying job. I recall seriously thinking I would attend law school, reading the One-L, and even starting a club at school to prepare for the LSAT.

By 2010, I had developed interest in the digital humanities and online culture, specifically from the lens of communication theory. I researched everything I could about Reddit, and believed that the intellectual and social capital found in subreddits was a completely untapped resource. The Arab spring was erupting and I recognized that the live updates found from direct experts in subreddits was far more valuable than anything the news was publishing. The on-the-ground photos and clear community run explainers felt like the future.

As a student, I was studying Chinese – poorly – and doubled down on an academic interest in propaganda, marketing, and what “dialogue” looked like online. I thought the Chinese influence in Africa was the most under appreciated power play for the century. I was also pursuing a personal interest in local politics, by attending city council meetings – and considering a possibly future in education, which I vetted through volunteering at a nearby alternative school.

In a nutshell, 2010 was the decline in my academic focus, and my shift toward a pragmatic commercial future. I had peaked my interest in getting the best grades, and shifted to wanting to learn the most without wasting my time. I was considering moving to China after college, where I thought I could get experience in wholesale trading and factory production, but also considered the values of knowing Mandarin for what ever global political shifts were to come.

Outside of the Arab Spring, I wasn’t mentally or emotionally invested in the US occupation of the Middle East, and had been largely apolitical outside of the excitement around Barak Obama’s presidency.

In 2011, I was elected as the attorney general of the school student government, and did my best to contribute to the university’s mission. I can’t point to any long lasting change that was made, but that period gave me a close look into the operations of a Robert’s Rules oriented body. Looking back, I was hyper focused on the “creation of value” and maximizing my time spent.

Since I had dropped out of college for a semester in 2008, all of my entering classmates had graduated by the spring of 2011, and I was absorbed into the following 2012 classes’ student body. At this point, I also moved out of the college dorm, which 95% of student body lived in, and commuted by bike from my parents home to attend classes.

Over the next two years, the major events in my life were my older brother’s death, and moving to China.

I arrived in China in the winter of 2012. I began my travels with a month long trip with a classmate in the Western Yunnan province. We spent a month going between tropical climates in the south to the coldest areas in the north bordering Tibet. The month of traveling was what I thought would be a good transition between my final semester of school.

From Yunnan, I took a two day overnight train to Shanghai, crossing from the Western most part to Eastern most part of China. I was ready to start school, and also kept my attention on the possibility of finding work. I also connected with local street artists, who had a graffiti studio. This group of friends ended up becoming major influence in my following decisions.

While I started language classes, I quickly realized I did not feel the effort needed to succeed would necessarily result in learning the language. Instead, I felt the classes would be a waste of time, and given the recent events in my life, there were more important things I could focus on. I ended up finding a part time job as a bartender, actively engaged myself in the startup tech community, and began actively soliciting work as a web developer.

Surprising to myself, I was able to find quite a bit of work very quickly, and realized that school was not necessary for me to take the next steps in my life. Not completing the one semester I had left for a college diploma was not the greatest of choices, but at the time, I considered it would be possible to finish later.

At my peak in China, I had grown quite comfortable with working multiple jobs, and furthering my programming ability. I had a very fortunate series of events, during which the one weekend I took off for a school trip, my bartending workplace was raided by the police for employing international workers. This reinforced my doubling down on programming related income streams, which by that time I had plenty. I grew comfortable with finding new web development clients by going to foreign businesses that I thought might need programming help, or by talking to foreigners at coffee shops and introducing myself. This was surprisingly effective.

In 2013, approximately at the one year mark in China, I decided it would be valuable to finish my college diploma. I wanted to personalize that I could move on to the next phase of life, confident that I finished the things I started. This was quite a shift, going from working every day to being a student.

Through a series of factors, I decided New York was likely the most similar place to Shanghai, given my attention on wanting to find a job and avoid moving back home with my parents in California. At the time, a girl I liked from college lived in New York, and I thought if we were in the same city, it was possible for us to get together. While initially that wasn’t the case, we are now married.

In New York, I enrolled in weekend Chinese language classes and a full-time contractor web development job. I hustled for the next few months and finished my college diploma, which was a major accomplishment given the series of options I had available. Soon from there, I began my first full-time salary based employment in the media industry as a senior level software engineer. Up until then, although I had never actually worked at a company, my contractor jobs had resulted in advancing my knowledge in areas that companies happened to need. I was always under the impression that I didn’t know enough, but given the constantly changing nature of software, what I had learned was the most important at the time.

From 2014 and on, the following years were largely based around my work and side projects. Most of my time outside of work was heavily engaged in my Buddhist community, where I would attend meetings, visit with friends, and help organize numerous weekly activities. Also being relatively new to New York, I attended meetups in the tech industry, so that I could learn what I didn’t know. I volunteered at conferences, co-organized hackathons, and made a weekly routine of reaching out to people online to meet in person.

At one point, the team I was on at work had been awarded recognition for performance, which made a major impact on my sense of accomplishment. At one level, I was very aware that we just did our job, but instead happened to be working on the right thing at that time. Our team had launched the New Yorker paywall, and in the process, made off without a hitch. A precious memory was the official launch, upon which some of us slept over in the office to see the job through.

Throughout this time, I was more and more aware of the potential of starting a company. I still hadn’t taken any concrete steps, but absorbed the startup narrative around the difficulty of hiring. I took that and decided to maximize the number of people I could meet in case of some future event that would allow me to hire my friends. I got involved in many incredible communities of designers, programmers and entrepreneurs.

Notable in 2014, I started a routine of traveling to a new country every few months. I went to Ecuador and Peru for two weeks to go on a road trip with friends. I also went to Berlin fo a tech conference, of which I made some great friends. In the following years, I also made a short trip to India, where I was able to get away and focus on a personal project.

By 2015, my effort to “network” was in full swing. I wasn’t intentionally going to networking events, but for the meetups I did attend, I always tried to make one friend who I would then plan to get breakfast with at a later time. I had hit my stride at work, and while contributing to the advancement of my team, I didn’t want to limit myself to a job, and saw my engagement in side projects as a crucial factor in my learning. I was highly aware that the work I was doing at that point was only possible from the many side projects and contract gigs that I had done before, so my pace of out-of-work work was critical.

Around this time, I attended various classes and enrolled in extracurricular learning opportunities to propel my technical knowledge. I was aware that while I could be employed as a senior level software engineer, my colleagues had spent years studying computer science and had a technical foundation that I was unfamiliar with. In the big picture, this was not as important as long as I was proving my execution ability, but the awareness of this lacking knowledge had continued to motivate me.

Although I didn’t need to at the time, I found opportunities to contract with major companies I never imagined working with, and also continued my in-person public soliciting of web development.

In the midst of working, a major shift happened in which I started a serious relationship with my now wife. Prior to this point, much of my personal activities were barely keeping my head above water. Planning, communicating, and coordinating with others was not my forte. Acting on impulse and corralling others was my strength. Through a series of major mess ups as a boyfriend, such as double booking a celebratory birthday trip, and bailing on major holiday celebrations, I started maturing as a person who could truly consider and plan around the needs of others. This is something that until being in a relationship, I was able to get by without.

By 2016 and on, I was in a new job, working for the federal government of all places. I didn’t foresee that given my juvenile trouble making. The ability to work for a cause oriented organization was a big shift I was yearning for. Also given my workload, I was making a mental shift away from continuing so much contract work and wanted to double down on projects that aligned with some meaningful future state. I was tired of the transactional one-off clients, and wanted to see the work I did outlast me.

A number of my side projects from 2014 were still active, and I considered occasionally trying to translate the ideas into businesses. Two in particular were a street art tracking project and a service for publishers to engage readers who didn’t finish reading long content. In the midst, I also seriously pursued a project to help people working on side projects to gather an audience before they are ready to launch. Interestingly, now in 2020, this is a surprisingly common company theme at the cross section of a Twitter meets OnlyFans. Another major project was an attempt to codify my practice of meeting strangers for breakfast, but as a service to meet other professionals. Based on my exposure to the professional world, I only saw the value to expand around side projects, but now realize the larger potential of the idea.

Teaching a community center lesson on how to spray paint in Ecuador

My shift aware from short term pay and longer term self sustaining projects eventually resulted in my exploration into harder technical fields. This aligned with the popularization of machine learning. Specifically the advancements around image recognition, which made computer vision applications approachable. Given my prior interest in tracking street art, this drove me to look at working in a company in this space. With two years at the federal government, a startup seemed appealing.

Worth noting, while in China, I worked at a startup that was somewhat in a unique situation. As a company that had raised venture capital, they spent too much money, too early, without product market fit. When they finally got to a point where growth would be important for capturing market share, they couldn’t raise another round of funding. One cherished memory at this Chinese startup was our pure scrappiness as a company. The office we worked out of was in such state that although we had desks, the rest of the floor plan was under construction. This resulted in exposed live wires and the need to wear particle filtration masks while working, due to the construction materials in the air. Good times.

Coming back to now – the major events in my life recently were around getting married and the shifts leading up to it. As I saw gettin married as a major life event, I reconsidered my role at the startup I was at, based on my financial optionality. I gauged how much the stocks I owned could be worth, and realized that my time working at a larger tech company would likely be more valuable and less risky. While not initially having anything lined up, I contracted as a UX engineer at Google, which topped any other workplace I was at before. My specific responsibilities were on a team of contractors, but gave me insight into the big tech company ecosystem.

Outside of work, a major part of 2016 to 2018 was a youth festival organized by my Buddhist organization. We gathered 50,000 people at 9 different venues around the country. The largest which was in New York, the organization that I was most invested in. The entire festival and preparation required incredible effort in my life, which I felt deeply appreciative to have been able to make.

While the preparation for the festival put traveling and side projects on hold, I had been able to make steady progress on scraping street art off the internet. This fortunately got some attention, which eventually allowed me to participate in some events which were hugely formative in my interest around building a company. For one, I was able to meet face to face with many established founders of multi-billion dollar enterprises, and put a secular quantifiable form to my own interests in positive societal change.

I was also able to go to Japan, and Korea for work and a friends wedding. I feel there is much of the world which I am still yearning to see. Unmentioned earlier, I was able to take a very refreshing trip with my wife to Europe, upon which I visited Paris, Budapest, and briefly Lisbon.

By now, I am capturing a very wide period of my life, and largely focusing on elements surrounding work, career, and personal relationships. There is much more to unpack, and countless meaningful experiences and personal relationships I never touched on, but at a high level, this provides some perspective on how I think about the last ten years.

In most recent notable change, I ended my contract with google, started a full time job, and two months later left that job. I finally realized that I want to commit seriously to building a company, and believe there is never a right time, so I will do it now. In these last 10 years, I haven’t exclusively worked on one thing in isolation, and feel this is a major personal shift which was a long time coming. As I determine to grow my current project into something that I can both be proud of, I expect a lot more personal development to take place.

I started out writing thinking that I am considering what my next 10 years will look like, in addition to the 10 years of reflection. At this point, I know for certain that my next ten years will involve starting a family, and being more invested in the outcomes of my extended family, on both my wife and my side.

I do want to formulate some clear themes around how I imagine my next ten years to resonate, but for now this is what I have.

Which expensive events permanently go digital?

August 21, 2020 by rememberlenny

One of the more interesting conversations I had recently was with a b2b sales director, who could clearly articulate the before and after changes from Covid. In short, companies account non-trivial budgets to send reps to in-person events, trade shows, and conferences, knowing there are unattributable affects for these costs. The side channel interactions between conference talks or the face time with in-person attendees is crucial for most sales pipelines.

Using a framework that I was introduced to by Daniel, from Pioneer, these events and their impact could fall into a two axis map of attributable results and costs. This means, there are results that are not attributable to a cause or are attributable. And similarly there are actions that are costly to take or not costly. Between these two axis’ you can have sales channels that are expensive and attributable, expensive and not-attributable, not expensive and attributable, and not expensive and not-attributable.

GPT-3 Make me a stratechery styled chart for attributable results and cost

As noted from the sales side, most efforts to generate leads are not attributable to specific actions, and costly. In other words, sending a sales rep to speak at a conference or signing up for a booth at a trade show are both costly, dont generate leads or sales at a normal cost per acquisition. The intangible benefits, such as exposure and branding are the justified reasons for spending money.

Outside of the individual sales rep perspective, a company’s yearly multimillion dollar event may be held at a huge cost and have relatively little attributable sales impact. While an event can give a slight sales bump, when compared to no event at all, it in no way justifies the huge cost for organizing the event. Think Saleforce’s Dreamforce or Google’s SPAN.

A few other examples of expensive not-attributable actions could be in the recruiting space. Engineering teams may sponsor large events or send employees to attend conferences for recruiting purposes, but don’t actually return with concrete recruiting leads. Again, there are often more benefits that are intangible, such as employee satisfaction, but the point is clear.

Due to the major shift from Covid of in-person events going digital, companies are paying closer attention to costs and attributable results. The digital event equivalents with attributable outcomes will be harder to justify with large costs in the future. If a $4 million event gave a 30% sales boost, but a $300,000 digital event can create a 20% equivalent boost, then the outstanding costs for the in-person event wont be returning immediately. Is the remaining 10% worth $3,700,000? No.

As many more events are moving online, a far greater number of previously in-person events will likely stay online. Considering the ratio of online event invites to registrations and actual attendees are continuing to shrink, the need refine the surface area of online events is becoming more important. A similar email invite and zoom link isn’t sufficient. The event speakers, email reminders, in-event promotion, post-event follow up, and summary resources are more important than ever.

One great write up Ross shared with me was on the webinar industry trends and the reception of the “Cambrian explosion” of digital events. (I had to do it)

You can find that here: https://www.trustradius.com/vendor-blog/the-impact-of-covid-19-on-digital-events

Hmm…which one should I attend?

Companies holding online events are now competing with the newest HBO hit-series release, but have much less to offer. Considering the competition, tools that help companies do promote, run and engage audiences for online events better are more important than ever. As we saw over the last few years that companies went from refined writing techniques over clearly defined visual brand guidelines. Now that well laid out photos and visual styles are not enough, companies are hiring in-house video producers to manage livestreams, tutorial content, and editing recorded events.

Video tools used to be generic timeline editors, like Final Cut or Adobe Premiere, but the consumer tools such as TikTok and livestream tools for the likes of Twitch are revealing the potential for improvement. How many webinars are using OBS to engage their audiences? As new demands are set for quality video content, the tooling will continue to evolve and become more niche.

As the events that were previously in-person move online, I expect a lot more companies to appear in this space.

The Unreal Engine in film production

August 14, 2020 by rememberlenny

Unreal engine used to shoot the Mandalorian using large LED screens synced with cameras

The film industry is an opaque producer of quality entertainment, which I have over-consumed in the past four months. Given the nature of how software and the internet has affected everything else I touch, I was curious how the entertainment industry has changed in recent years.

To learn more, I spoke with a few friends and acquaintances in the post-production side of video to better understand how the industry is changing. My thoughts were that software has changed the coordination costs around huge productions, but most of the tech innovation has been around media distribution (ie. streaming). From what I gleaned, there hasn’t been as much dramatic shifts in shooting a regular TV show or movie, as the majority of the film industry is executing on a complicated production cycle. That being said, there are a few areas that I found really interesting.

Specifically, I was surprised how much the Unreal Engine is being used.

One major change that I heard repeatedly mentioned was the impact of improving hardware capacity today, as compared to 5 or 10 years ago. The increasing speed and capacity of new graphics cards and processors has affected the scale of video detail which can be captured and processed. Previously a camera that could shoot in 4K resolution would need to be downsampled for playback and editing, due to sheer limits in compute. Now footage is recorded in 6K or even up to 9K in some cases, during which cameras are capable of immediate playback, as opposed to the previous delays which resulted in footage needing to be processed before viewed.

Inline with having higher compute available on set, the most dramatic area where a new category of film production has emerged is in the “previs” space. This is not technically the post-production side, but instead the effort done before a shoot to plan a set, so as to capture the desired scenes rendered live with visual effects. Specifically speaking, tools such as the Unreal Engine, which was originally made as a a graphical processor for the Unreal shoot-em-up video game, is used to generate a simulated scene with characters placed as actors, and the camera shots planned. By using a simulated environment, the shot planning can become more intentional, visual effects planned better, and the overall production set to be better understood by everyone involved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW1OTxYDvlQ

Motion capture is also huge.

The same Unreal Engine is used to eliminate significant post-production visual effects work by using motion capture to simulate environments “on camera”, through screens placed in the background of shots. The ability to capture final results “on camera” is a huge cost saving, as it reduces the need for editing footage after the fact. For example, when shooting a car driving down the road, rather than only having green screens in the window, and replacing the content with footage during the post-production process, the green screens can be replaced with large LED screens, and display the relevant visual content as defined in the Unreal Engine environment. By coordinating the screen placement, camera placement, lighting instruments, and designated camera shot, the actual filmed shot becomes a live simulation of sorts that can avoid a major post-production step.

An example media production that showcased this on-camera environment was in the Disney “baby Yoda” hit series, The Mandalorian, during which large LED walls were used in concert with simulated worlds, to capture fantasy landscapes on-camera.

https://youtu.be/ysIOi_MP_cs?t=82

Huge thanks to Matt Baker, Greg Silverman, Andrew Prasse, and the others who spoke with me on this.

Three considerations for job searching

August 12, 2020 by rememberlenny

Over the past 10 years, I have formed opinions on the pros and cons of working at companies and organizations of varying sizes. While there are plenty of guides to the broad qualities of startups or big corporations, I think there is value in capturing these in personal anecdotes. The following is meant to be a reference point for those who are interested in finding a job in the near future. I am undoubtedly a unique person with particular personality, but nevertheless my experience is relatable.

To start, when picking the size of a company, there is on factor that I have found to be the most important: is this company growing, and will its ability to make money continue into the future. This seems obvious, but surprisingly many companies are not growing and their mainstay for making money is often eroding. This is especially true for larger companies, but obviously also true for smaller companies.

Secondly, an important aspect when considering work is whether or not you can see yourself learning. While getting paid exorbitant amounts of money seem fun, and having clout associated to recognizable brands is nice, it all amounts to unbearable boredom if you are not learning. At least for me, this also means I am bound to find other ways to occupy my time, and either decline in my work performance or find something entirely else to do.

Thirdly, make sure you are either getting paid enough to keep you uninterested in looking for another job or considering a offer from another company. When landing on a rate of pay for a job, my largest consideration is whether or not the amount I am being paid will give me confidence that I can stay in one place for at least a year, and possibly two. I have yet to stay in one place for three or more years, so I wont try to lie and say that I would consider otherwise.

With the three points, knowing the chosen company is growing, learning is a constant, and pay is enough to make you take your job seriously, you may wonder what kind of place you should consider. Perhaps its not obvious that the points that I have mentioned above do not write off the options of working at a non-profit, startup, family owned business, or any other businesses that may implicitly be associated to slow growth and limited pay. In fact, the total opposite can be true.

Also to note, I did not mention above that it is important to be passionate about the work you are doing. I can confidently say that if you are passionate about some topics that your work is centered on, you may also be a very boring person. I don’t mean the problems as a whole that your company solve are boring, but it would quite odd if you are excited about spreadsheets, times of day to post on social media, or unending paperwork. There are more important things in life. Seriousness is a necessity, but passion no. If you do get excited by the aforementioned points, I encourage you to read more novels. Particularly pick up some good sci-fi.

One additional point while I am slightly off topic is a very nice to have: a great manager. This is synonymous more with learning than anything. Having a great manager who you like and stands up for what you need, while also keeping an eye on what is necessary for the company is invaluable. The experiences of working under someone who has your back is the difference between wondering whether or not you have job stability and being able to freely explore new ideas.

Senior meets junior lessons learned, and some thoughts about the future of remote work

December 31, 2019 by rememberlenny

High level summary

Last month, I setup a brief survey on Typeform and submitted it to ProductHunt as a project called “Senior meets junior”. Senior meets junior was described as a project that would allow engineers to collaborate together over side projects. Junior engineers could collaborate on real projects to upskill, while senior engineers can improve their mentorship abilities and receive more help on their projects. I’d like to formally share the stats around the response and a few surprising results that I will be considering for the next steps.

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/senior-meet-junior

Breakdown around statistics

After submitting the Senior meets Junior survey on ProductHunt, I received a 186 submissions from both senior and junior developers looking to collaborate on side projects. Of this group, approximately 75% were self-identified as junior developers, and 25% were self-identified as senior. I was able to meet with 19 individuals out of the hundred in 97 people who signed up. All of the 19 individuals only two people were actually from developed countries (US and France), but even one of them were actually traveling abroad, so I actually spoke to 18 people from emerging markets around the world. I’m not sure if the name ”Senior meets junior” is a term that is not appealing to Americans or if the idea of mentorship is more appealing to people of foreign backgrounds, but I was genuinely surprised by how many more people from developing countries signed up to the service. I definitely expected more junior engineers from developed markets, who were interested in upskilling.

One more note along the ratio of senior and junior engineers. When reviewing the applications, I searched the background of each user and noticed that many of the individuals who said they were junior developers were working as seasoned engineers. I couldn’t figure out if people were misidentifying as Junior developers because they wanted to work on other people’s side projects, or if they truly believed that their abilities were not at a senior level.

From a statistics perspective, the most languages people wanted to work on was JavaScript. I asked the question “What technologies is your project based on, or if you are junior, what technologies are you comfortable working with?”. Following that was Python, and then Java. As you will see in the chart, 58.6% people said JavaScript, followed by 50% in Python, and 21% in Java. Ruby, Rust, Scala, and a number of other languages all scored less than 10%.

Interestingly, when asking people where they needed the most help, most people said Backend development. The question was “What areas do you expect to need the most help or if you are junior, what would you feel comfortable contributing to”. Considering so many people wanted to learn or contribute JavaScript, the sheer amount of Backend development help needed was predictable. About half (57%) of the people who wanted help in a certain area also shared they wanted to improve their Frontend application development. This is consistent with the Javascript interest.

One of the questions I found most interesting was around how much time someone felt they needed to be productive. Similarly to the time is takes for a hired engineer to start contributing code on a new code base, I wondered how much mentorship a junior engineer would need to start working on a foreign project. The question I asked was: “How much mentorship and direction can you provide someone who works with you? If you are junior, how (much) mentorship and direction do you think you need to be productive?”. In response to the question, and surprising majority said they only need 1 to 2 hours a week of mentorship to start contributing to a codebase. This is a pretty small amount of time, relative to how much one person can do to contribute.

Areas that I was surprised about

The first area that I was surprised to learn with how dramatic the different the engineer pay rate is outside of the US, and how similar it is in across many developing countries. I learned that in Ukraine, India, Georgia, Spain, Russia, Turkey and Nigeria, the average pay for a Year’s engineering salary is between $30,000 to $15,000 US dollars a year. This means that in one month many Engineers are making less than $2,000, and many are making less than $1,000. This is compared to the regular salary of a US engineer who makes up words 300 or $400,000, or a recent college graduate who can very quickly, man north of $100,000 USD.

https://twitter.com/rememberlenny/status/1204074924576563200

To imagine that there are so many more engineers across the world than there are in the US, and that many of these are English-speaking, and that many more are receiving the same educational resources as those engineers in the US, I cannot help but imagine that these foreign workers will soon be replacing domestic engineers in the US. When I think about how much remote work has been discussed in the last few months, I can also see that the infrastructure for hiring remote workers is maturing and will soon allow for more and more remote workers from developing countries to contribute to domestic projects in the US. I also recognize that many foreign workers may not need anywhere near a US engineer salary, and would potentially be very satisfied to work at the higher-end of their local salary range. When comparing this to an engineer in the US who works at the lower-bound of the salary range for their domestic peers, I imagine the foreign worker to be significantly happier and willing to contribute more.

https://twitter.com/rememberlenny/status/1208068305141018625/

The second area that was quite surprising was around the U.S. engineers that I spoke to who were unhappy about their work and didn’t like work that was primarily based on taking a design to translating it to code, or processing bugs in a bug tracker system that did not require any critical thinking. I imagine that this kind of work which is not desired by skilled laborers in a domestic Workforce, would be very easily translated into Outsource or remote work. I believe that the growing need for constant maintenance and simple types of engineering tasks will reveal the value of having an accessible remote Workforce that does not need to be highly engaged with decision making.

Third, there is a large number of people who are quite adept at the current Frameworks (read: React) and programming languages (JavaScript, Python, Java). These people would like to grow in our less around programming skills or computer science foundation’s, and their interest is more around establishing best practices and means of collaborate. These remote Engineers are people who know how to write code and solve problems for clients, but still need to learn how to deploy production applications or optimized server configurations for scale. These kinds of engineers are ideal for collaborating with other developers, because they are interested in learning things that are not explicitly taught will online but would be able to contribute to a code base if given explicit instructions.

https://twitter.com/rememberlenny/status/1203732117131268096

Lastly, I was surprised that there are a large number of Junior developers were able to learn quickly and could become employed across the world. In many cases around the U.S., coding bootcamps can take someone who has no experience, and help get them to a point where they are able to get a job at a tech company within three to four months of accelerated learning. I noticed many junior engineers across the cohort of users who also could become employable with self-study within a six-month period. I was very naive to think about how on technical I imagined some of the participants who signed up would be from developing countries. I was surprised around the fact that most college graduates are all learning the same things that the US level college graduate would be learning. This means that a computer science student will be focused on machine learning, or an electrical engineering student will be working with Arduino and raspberry pies. Given that this is the same technology that a domestic student would learn from and that the skills are identical, there is no reason why these individuals could not come highly employable in a short period of time as well.

Conclusion

Overall, I strongly believe that remote work and contributors from around the world will meet a crossroads soon. While remote work in the US is becoming more common, I foresee many more engineers from countries around the world contributing to code bases in the US. This would mean that the tooling that helps coordination will likely become more important, and the areas of work that are centered on decision making and executing will likely be separated or clearly organized.

I also believe that the sheer amount of income that current software engineers command is disproportionately high when compared to the education or skills needed to complete certain roles. While I am not sure if the high-salary is necessarily justified, I do think a number of market forces (VC investment, high return of certain software businesses, demand for engineers who are skilled at new technologies that haven’t existed long enough) are likely the reason for driving up engineering value. Not all engineers are necessarily returning the value on their investment, so I could imagine different tiers of engineering work to be more explicitly defined outside of the terminology of senior or junior. The larger tech companies near are already different tiers of engineers from being a principal engineer, a lead engineer, or different tiers of software engineer.

I’ll be moving forward with trying to interview more of the Senior meets junior sign ups, and expect to continue expanding the cohort from engineers to other fields such as design or product management. If you or someone you know may be interested in this project, please sign up at www.smj.dev, or contact me directly at [email protected]

Please excuse the grammatical errors. This was written using dictation, and followed with slight edits.

Thoughts on side projects

December 18, 2019 by rememberlenny

I recently visited my best friend from college.

We were both city boys who caused trouble as teenagers, and connected over our free spirited willingness for fun. Since our friendship began 10 years ago, he has taken up farming and lives in Oregon on a nine acre plot with crops, animals and a seasonal business. I ended up in New York city, married, and working at a tech company as a programmer. Both of us studied philosophy and literature, both of our lives took unexpected directions, and I think that we both ended up exactly where we want to be. At least for the time being.

I wouldn’t necessarily call the farming a side project, but I also don’t think my friend will be a farmer for his entire life. He spends his days and nights farming, but his dreams are around writing and his real income comes from highly successful real estate deals. If all of his time goes toward one thing, and all of his money comes from another, then which is the side project and which is the job?

Similarly, my income comes from a consulting contract, but the majority of my time isn’t spent at work. In one sense, this is because I found a great company to work with, but in another it is because I prioritized finding a source of income that allowed me to spend a lot of my time on side projects. In my own defense (not that I need one), my time spent on projects makes me much more impactful in the other areas that I end up working in. But I don’t consider them work.

Given the two cases where a side project ends up becoming the main allocation of time, I conclude that a “side” project doesn’t necessitate a minor allocation of time.

For the past seven years, every winter, I have taken on a side project.

In 2013, I traveled around the US and built an artistically laid out website that described an educational pedagogy. In 2014, I went to India and learned enough Objective-C to make an iOS app. In 2015, I made a hotline for people to share their breakup stories. In 2016, I built a ruby API and bot that traded stocks (very poorly). In 2017, I built a deep learning machine and trained some amateur image recognition models. (Surprisingly I never used this to mine crypto.) In 2018, I indexed millions of street art images and built a web application to explore them online. All the while in between, I was playing around with unfamiliar tech and building out personal projects for fun.

This winter, I haven’t “built” anything, but I have been thinking a bit more deeply about what the output of all my side projects have been. I have a nagging feeling that while each project was unique and fulfilling in its own right, I don’t have any concrete products to point to. Once the project becomes too expensive (or no longer interesting) to maintain, I often let domains expire or spin down servers.

My usual process is this: The output of the side projects is a website, possibly with a registered domain, and some efforts to gather attention. This results in a boost of page views/downloads while the promotion efforts happen (ie. Reddit/hacker news posts), but then eventually drops to a crawl. The remaining traffic normally comes from search, and otherwise never surges again. At the point that the traffic doesn’t feel worth the small but real cost, I start sunsetting the project.

This brings me to the question of why I do side projects, and also what more I think could come out of the projects.

While reading a great book about note-taking (How to take smart notes by Sönke Ahrens), I was intrigued by the idea that all notes should be taken with a purpose in mind. In the book, Ahrens states that notes should be taken with the mindset of needing to write about the material being read. In the same way, maybe defining clearer purposes for side project, could ease my feeling that more could have come out of old projects.

(I preface this thinking with an important point: Doing a side project for the sake of doing it alone is absolutely a good enough reason. I think if every side project must have a predetermined purpose or end goal, you will end up a person with boring side projects. And you would likely become a boring person. For example, if you feel all side projects need to result in becoming a business or passive source of income, then the pursuit itself will result in a series of unoriginal projects that are hard to maintain over time. Personally, doing projects out of sheer interest and a desire to learn or experiment has been the greatest force for sustaining my excitement and investing my time into producing something new.)

Now, let’s assume there is some definition of a side project. It’s a pursuit of some idea, which, in my case often revolves around technology, and results in a product (ie. an app, hardware), a community, or a collection of knowledge (ie. research, blog post, dataset, academic article).

That being said, the yearning sense of looking back at projects and not having some clear value to point to s concerning to me. With some projects requiring well over 100 hours, and in some cases hundreds of hours of time, I do wish I could point to something concrete that crystalized my effort.

Value I have derived from side projects:

I can honestly say that the projects I decided to work on made me more interesting and have something worth talking about.
If I was just doing “work”, I would feel dull.
In the process of learning something new for a project, I regularly made new friends to expand my knowledge and perspective on a problem.
Along the same lines of being “interesting”, by making something new, I felt I established some authority as a developer or product maker.
I established more confidence in my ability to contribute to other people’s projects.
When in work atmospheres that were less than exciting, side projects gave me something to be motivated about when work was not.

Moving forward, concrete things that I’d like to do

First, I need a lessons learned blog post and some kind of summary of the project. I don’t know if this is a series of gifs and screenshots, or some kind of gallery that can be previewed. Or at least a document or single place of reference that explains the project would be great.

Second, if data or an untapped area of interest is involved (ie. my street art project), I strongly feel publishing in an academic journal article would be possible. I don’t know what the process is like to submit to an academic journal if you aren’t affiliated with an academic institution or research entity (except I sometimes treat my projects as research entity), so understanding that early and then pursuing the project accordingly could be interesting.

Third, wouldn’t it be nice if all side projects resulted in some $$$? It’s not possible and shouldn’t be the goal in most cases, but in some cases the project could be wrapped up as a deliverable to someone who wants to buy it. When doing explorative projects, there are certain decisions I have made that I didn’t consider too seriously. If I had considered a sale of the overall codebase/community as an original goal, I imagine I would make different decisions along the way.

Anyway, I’m sure I will come up with something to work on this winter. If this year’s project doesn’t survive a year from now, and doesn’t become an academic study, and no one buys it, I think it’s still okay. I’ll still be happy working on something.