Nate Dickson Thinks...

When I first started my career as a software developer I found some little trendy piece of pop culture ephemera, a printed dictionary of “hacker slang”. I wish I could find it again, because even though it was instantly outdated, it still influenced my mindset for a while.

Anyway...

One of the terms it defined was “putting on the tie”:

Put on the tie verb: to transition from programming to management. “Did you hear about Jake?” “Yeah, someone told me he finally put on the tie. Poor sod.”

The concept being that programmers wear t-shirts and shorts and managers wear shirts and ties.

I have no idea if everyone has ever used that phrase, ever.

But I have just recently, officially, put on the tie. I'm moving from my comfortable roles close to software development into a “Directorship” role, a position of actual management instead of just overseeing a few fellow devs.

Clear back in the day, I was sure I would never make the move. but as I've grown older I've wanted to spend more time influencing people and less time fixing bad code.

I keep telling myself things like that. There is much that I like about management, there is much that I enjoy about being in a position of responsibility, and I have a lot of ideas about how to make things better.

But part of me is definitely sad to leave that other world behind.

It's been interesting, talking to all my developer friends, and seeing their responses to this move. Overall it seems to blank incomprehension: why would anyone want to be a manager?

My only real answer is that this is that I like working with people more than code. I still hack around on projects in my free time, but this is more my speed. So we'll see!

I'm doing NaNoWriMo for the 13th year, because I enjoy it. I'm trying something new this year:

I'm not worried about publishing.

I'm just writing because I want to. This is a character I wanted to explore. I'm playing a fair amount of D&D these days and this is one of my characters I'm playing. I guess you could call this an obscenely over-done backstory for a character sheet.

And being me, and being the kind of person who just dumps thoughts out there in the world, I'm publishing my writing in more-or-less real time.

So anyway, if you want to read some real-time nonsense noveling, feel free to check out The Trials of Osmorn.

I'm using WorldAnvil for this because I like the idea of building the world and then letting the characters and story arise from the world instead of creating a plot and building a world around that plot.

One of my friends asked what WorldAnvil offers to make writing better, why it's better than, say, Obsidian, for keeping track of characters. Why does using WorldAnvil make me more likely to have character birthdays and eye color and what not?

And my answer is “it asks the questions.” Of course I could write all these details, but having a place where I can put these notes and see how they show up, how they connect.

So I'm trying to build characters that only interact with my “main” characters in passing.

Here's something I've learned recently. If you're in a position where you end up scheduling a lot of meetings, and attending a lot of meetings, you can protect your calendar in a very simple way:

Schedule “jagged” meetings.

By which I mean meetings that start at fifteen minutes before or after the hour. Most people tend to schedule meetings on the hour or on the half hour, and will naturally leave the fifteen minutes before your “jagged” meeting alone. Occasionally they'll leave you a full 45 minutes before a meeting.

This gives everyone who is attending your meeting time to prepare, and gives you a little breathing room in your schedule as well.

It works on the other end as well. You don't usually need hour-long meetings, schedule them for 45 minutes, and everyone has a few minutes of breathing space at the end.

Last night I stayed up late reading. As in 2AM late. Am I paying for it today? Yes. But I loved it.

I've always been a reader. I've always loved it, always enjoyed the feeling of immersion. And I love my e-reader.

Don't get me wrong, I have hundreds of books. I would never get rid of them, and I love them.

But reading is so much better on an e-ink screen that weighs almost nothing, so I can hold it up over my head, read in any lighting conditions because the screen adjusts to the light without me finding a lamp to position over my shoulder... not the point.

The point is that it was nice to fall back into text, to get wrapped up and immersed in a story, to forget all my responsibilities and cares for a few hours in the dark and just read.

#100DaysToOffload 73/100