Still Dancing
A while back I wrote about dancing the limbo, about being stuck between two bars, unsure how low I’d have to go before something gave. A few things gave since then.
I am self-employed now.
I support companies with feature flagging, mostly, but also with speaking and with growing other people’s careers. Put together, that’s not a new job. It’s the same three things I did before: software engineer, team captain, tech evangelist. I just do them without anyone else’s name on the door.
Flagsmith reached out first, contracted me first, and pays for more than the evangelist work. They’re funding the OpenFeature provider TCK, the project that lets us swap providers and trust they behave the same way underneath. That’s not a small thing to bankroll, and I don’t take it lightly.
Where I’m behind is Left of the Loop. The promotion is late, the finalization is late, the space moves faster than one person writing about it can keep up. I wrote a book anyway. Maybe it’s still relevant by the time it’s out. If it isn’t in the exact way I planned, the point underneath it still stands: I want people to focus on each other, not just on their tools. The draft is at leftoftheloop.dev, and feedback is still welcome.
That’s also an invitation. If you’re throwing a party, I’ll dance at it too.
The thing I named last time hasn’t fully resolved. A few people reached out after the last post, and now I have regular calls with them, which is real progress. But I’m still missing someone who looks at my development from the outside, not a peer checking in, someone whose job it is to ask the harder question. A mentor, probably.
I keep talking myself out of asking directly. It feels like forcing yourself onto someone else’s calendar for your own benefit. But I’d say yes immediately if someone offered. Maybe the fix isn’t finding the right person to ask. Maybe it’s hosting the party myself and seeing who shows up.
Conference season is starting. Let’s see where the dancing goes.