The Why

What's up people! How we doing today? Great? Glad to hear it. Let's dive in and get started on this journey together.

Here's the why behind this blog. As many people are starting to see, the path to gaining the correct skills in order to become competent is difficult to find because of all the options available out there. So how does somehow determine what is really necessary when creating something?

Well, for me it starts and ends with first principles. We need to look at what causes individuals to be successful, and then look at how they can come together as a team. Then it's important to look at team's abilities to be successful together vs what causes them to crash and burn.

My favorite examples of individuals and teams come from my passion in football (Non-USA, Rest of World). For players, there were many great individuals that displayed mastery of craft; Ronaldinho, Zidane, Original Ronaldo, Thierry Henry, Figo... There's too many to name, but without those types of players the teams wouldn't have been able to go as far as they did. They led from the battlefield. The top Individual Contributors if you will.

For teams I like studying the Ferguson era at Manchester United, and the Barcelona La Mesia Squad that dominated world football for years under several different leaders. The leadership are the orchestrators. The symphony players that place the right groups together at the right times. Handling the friction that results and attempting to create a smooth process for all. These were my first studies for excellence in my journey. My desire to be a professional player myself really dictated that interest.

So what can we learn there? Well, without getting into the weeds, it's that results cannot be seperated from the process that created them if we want them to be consistently successful. Sure, there's luck, circumstance, etc., but there's a low probability that those types of things were heavily involved with long term success. Another thing that you'll probably notice if you look at this long enough is that the leaders are directly involved with the process of achieving results. It's never a situation where they just tell the players to score goals and then leave them to it. They are actively describing the process that each player needs to do individually to perform their role better, and then how the players can combine together to gain advantages in the match for themselves. Details, details, details. Everyone was trying to perfect their craft in order to achieve the glories of success.

So how does this translate to technology? Well, there's a difference for purpose of starting for many. There's an enormous amount of people in it just for the money or the status. If you join a corporate software organization you will see a smorgasbord of varieties of this. If the team isn't on the same page about approach towards results then you can imagine what that might turn into because it's an information game instead of a physical game. The medium is slightly different, but the characteristics will be the same. The leader needs to be extremely well versed in the medium if success is to be found.

However, in sports there's a self contained spectrum of possiblities within a well defined boundary. With technology, it's endless. We absolutely need to dictate the process intentionally to achieve our end goals. The leader needs to be experienced in a breadth of areas; enough to be able to start defining the tools that will be used internally, what they'll be used for, why they were chosen,  and the general structure that the product will be built with. Then, they need to be able to communicate that vision properly to their team. The only way that I can see that working well in a timely fashion for software is through documentation. We just simply don't have time to pass on our skills through a word of mouth process. We also don't have time to always hold meetings for knowledge sharing. Most meetings are pointless, but we'll get into that later.

Knowledge storage and sharing is absolutely crucial to team success in any endeavor of life. You need a singular source of truth that is clear, to the point, and doesn't rely on prior knowledge to be useful. It needs to be self explanatory, and it also needs to include ALL of the steps needed to access it and follow it correctly. Right now I see so many examples of tech communication that don't take the other person's perspective into account. The authors make assumptions about things or forget that they have gained things along the way that make their documents sensible for themselves, but not for others.

I've gained an abundance of little tidbits along the way that need to be organized properly so that someone else who is curious to follow can absolutely do that. My goal is to accelerate progress for other's in the way that I would have liked it to be done for me. Explaining the internet in a straight forward fashion so that there aren't so many dots to connect from so many different sources that you then piece together into a sensible picture for yourself. It's necessary to be able to have a model that will work well for many of the tech issues that we face.

I intend to make that a reality. This is my output method for doing so. Subscribe and get updates on when posts come out explaining my process for getting stuff done with computers and providing services that will benefit your surroundings in a truly beneficial way. Hopefully, the readers will also see some important parallels to life strategies that can be used in other areas as well.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read my first blog post! I had a great time writing this and I'm excited for what's to come. Let's get cracking!

Cheers,

DaSeventhHogie