A Full Dance Card

It has been quiet around me for a while. But it feels like time for another round of self reflection, a bit of celebration, and a few other topics.

I am not sure if I should split this into several posts. This is more about sharing my view than about producing content, so it stays in one piece.

Three things, then. What has happened over the last months, what my plan is, and the anxieties I am currently dealing with.

First, the nice stuff

Surprisingly many, for someone who is unemployed.

The conference list, in order:

I even got asked to do a keynote at one of them. Details and slides land on /talks as they get confirmed.

So, pretty exciting times. And thanks to Flagsmith, I can attend all of them.

Hope to meet a lot of you there.

But what is my plan now?

I still miss coffee, so that offer stands.

A few of those talks are partner stunts, so I have that going. Besides that, let’s see what conference season brings.

Right now I am not sure whether it would be fair to take a full-time gig somewhere else with that amount of commitment already on the calendar. Maybe it is time to do feature flagging workshops instead, or to engage with companies more directly. Let’s see.

And then the anxiety

One part of it is tied directly to the situation above. Will I succeed? Should I be looking for something more stable? Is this the right thing to do?

To be honest, who knows. Let’s see what the future brings, and deal with those fears one after another.

The second part is about the book.

That one is self-inflicted, for sure. I am not good at writing, but I felt like this was worth a book. So I used AI to support me, to help me structure my writing, make sense of things, and lay out my ideas.

I feel like the theory is solid. The manuscript is rough for now. But the fear of rejection because of the tool usage is big, and I am not sure whether to progress and refine more, or to wait for some final reviews before messing around with it again.

Which brings me to the other thing I did not expect: how hard it is to actually get proper feedback and reviews. Asking is hard enough. Following up, and asking a second time, is much harder. Nobody owes you their evening, and I keep feeling like I am spending goodwill every time I send that message.

So I am still not sure whether the book idea is the right one, or whether I should keep going at all. By now, though, I think I have invested too much not to finish it. There are ISBNs. There are domains. There is a designer working with me.

The uncertainty lingers anyway. And most likely it always will. Maybe that is just what it feels like to make something you cannot check against a test suite.

The draft is at leftoftheloop.dev, the series lives here, and feedback is still very welcome. If you have read any of it and never got back to me: that is fine, genuinely. If you want to, this is your reminder that I would still love to hear it.

Anyways, those are my current thoughts and updates. Surprisingly many of them, especially given that I was on vacation.