🎂 This all started a year ago

A moment of gratitude, introspection and celebration to the year we spent together. To new challenges, optimal growth and joyful experiences in your engineering journey 🥂

Photo by Angèle Kamp on Unsplash

Here’s a small glimpse on what’s been going on behind the scenes in the past 12 months. It’s been quite a ride!

• 💥 Successfully tested concept of The Technologist Podcast

• 🎙 Visited Jonathan Stark’s podcast on two occasions for outreach

• 🎓 Parallel offering of 1on1 mentoring for tech leads and full-team coaching

• ☕️ Invested in a coffee business

• 👨‍💻 Mentored and graduated 8 students from a tech bootcamp cohort

• 🥷 Started private group for solopreneurs and high-performance coaches

• 📊 1k subscriber milestone in 4 months, first paid subscriber^{thank you!}

• 🔵 Podcast and collaboration with the talented crew at typoapp.io

• 📚 Launched book club and speed reading course, now over 120 members

• 🦸🏼 Met

  Adrian Stanek
  and merged podcasts into 🏔 Our Tech Journey

• 💫 Kent Beck joining our book club live for a Tidy First! review session^wow!

• 🚀 400 live viewers record on episode with Nik Sumeiko, React + TDD

• 🗃 Level 20 mentor on MentorCruise

• 🏠 Launching Our Tech Journey community and coffee with regulars

• 📘 Top Voice badge on LinkedIn. I must be doing something right?

• 📌 First hot-join and live coding on the streams

• 🍲 Crafting Tech Teams started covering its own SaaS costs^{thank you}

Main Challenges and Growth

Being a coach, streamer and technologists entails wearing many hats. Especially on the collaboration and content creation side. Here’s the breakdown of my day to day.

Refining Content Strategy

I was losing my mind having a high-frequency echo chamber on linkedin. The hook-baiting advice I absorbed early on in my “influencer” stages lead to growth fueled by controversy. But it was merely a vanity metric.

I also didn’t enjoy the emotional and mental state I found myself in constantly de-escalating flame wars that popped up in my posts. It was clear there was a lot to learn, but my options seemed limited. I sought alternatives to the algorithm-driven echo chamber on LinkedIn.

Aligning Streaming Channels

Fast forward a few months and I stumbled upon Substack. Suddenly the put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is approach made a lot more sense. I met Adrian at around that time and we both launched our respective newsletters. It was clear to us that monetizing early was the only way to go pro and push past the resistance. He quotes the War of Art quite liberally. Regulars will know this.

At the same time it was clear the podcast format wasn’t performing well at the pace I set for it as I couldn’t sustain a constant stream of guests. I started solo streaming and invited an audience on engineering culture and TDD topics initially which later grew by combining forces with Adrian.

We did struggle for a while to figure out how to combine our respective personal channels along with a group one (OTJ). Having personal monetized newsletters seems to be a good solution for now.

However, the streaming twice per week along with writing long-form for a booklet relaunch meant that my attention to the newsletter diminished for a while as you can see from the growth plateau, though it is steadily rising when given focus.

Coaching Business

The coaching business boomed last year. All products and productised services on my catalog saw a positive feedback loop from the social media and knowledge sharing presence:

• ✅ Personal mentoring for tech leads and solopreneurs

• ✅ Team coaching for leadership & tdd

• ✅ Cohort bootcamps

• ✅ One-off coaching / problem-solving / brainstorming

• ✅ Sponsored stream and newsletter collaborations

What’s cooking

• TDD & Leadership Book

• Guided short-form video courses

Feedback and Changes

Going forward there will be a higher focus on clarity of design and ease of use.

• 👨‍💻 Shorter articles with a captioned video head mast

• 📗 Dedicated section for TDD & Leadership to along the book’s structure

• 🏔 More diverse pool of stream guests (topics, opinions and representation)

The Data (for those interested)

I ran a few surveys to get product and audience feedback on all the various channels. These came in two forms: content and nuance.

On the content front it’s clear that our roots remain strong on Engineering Coaching, Coaching and TDD.

For nuance I reached out to you directly.

The feedback centred on mediums of content being consumed daily. In hindsight I should’ve added Video Shorts to highlight the growing trend. ^{Oh well, survey #2!}

Qualitative Feedback

The open questions and your messages aligned on these areas:

• Appreciation for connecting the dots between interpersonal and technical skills

• Creating a safe environment for growth, challenges and accountability

• Deep insights into difficult to master areas outside of proprietary (code) cases

• A positive trend towards continuous learning, CD and engineering culture

The survey is still open if you want to contribute 👇🏼

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Psst, check out the first post from April 24, 2023 👇🏼

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P.S.: Big thanks to everyone rooting for the streams and newsletter content on all forms of social media. It’s a huge help and I appreciate you for it.