Mine has had quite a few over the past three years:
New job - At a professional level, I moved to a company where I finally have the opportunity to work on bigger problems and move above and beyond the title of “senior engineer.”
New house - I moved to the Gig city and went all-in on remote work (before it was cool).
New son - He rules. And screams, but mostly rules.
New pandemic - COVID-19 destroyed lives, businesses, and a little bit of faith in humanity.
New technological landscape - crypto flamed out and burned, AI is writing code and creating art, and we are actively learning to navigate The Muskening of Twitter.
New global recession - We are suffering through the market’s hangover after the longest bull run of all time. The age of convenience is over. The supply chain will never be the same. J-Pow and his rate hikes cannot be contained.
It’s terrifying. And it’s not just me, everyone is living with more uncertainty than they have in recent decades.
The scripts that used to work don’t anymore.
The rate of change will only continue to increase. The feeling of disorientation will only get worse. By the time you can write new scripts, they’ll be outdated. The uncertainty and speed at which things move can be better understood through thinking like a state machine:
Thinking in state transitions
In software, there’s a pattern called a State machine: With other data structures, you think about how the data is structured and what you can do with it. With state machines, instead, you write code that handles transitions between the states.
Styling on the web also has transitions. Instead of styling the two different states of an element, you have to write an initial state and then “tweens”: instructions for how to change from one state to another.
Instead of thinking about where you are or where you are going, state transitions are about focusing on the liminal space in between.
I think this could be a useful model moving forward.
How can you cope with [broadly gestures at everything]?
That’s what I aim to explore in this newsletter:
How can people and organizations get better at handling change and uncertainty?
I can’t do it alone
I can only tell my story and the lessons I’ve learned. I hope to talk to others and share what they are seeing. I want these posts to be the start of conversations and a space where we can figure out what the hell is going on together.
Chat will be enabled for this Substack to give people a place to connect.
Here are some topics I’d like to cover…
Planned topics:
Senior+ development
Learning to become a mentor
From interview candidate to interviewer
Writing about code overwriting code
Thinking strategically over productively
Career strategy
Developing long-term career strategy
Finding the right-sized companies for your skill set
When learning new technologies
How to get oriented at a new organization
The changing world
What impact will AI & ML have on the job you have today?
How to navigate the Muskening
…unless something changes.
“Things that have never happened before happen all the time.”
- Scott Sagan, Stanford Professor