Esteemed Readers,
For those of you who are wondering what life is like on sabbatical, I can definitely say this — the nature of problems one deals with on sabbatical are so different from work problems that I’m not sure how people go through life without ever taking a sabbatical. I’m currently focussed on the following problem — my desire to smoke is a proxy for my desire for something else which I am not articulating to myself, what is it? What are these desires that I am hiding from myself, whispering into a cigarette and scattering as so much smoke and ash?
He he, the inner work is also work.
As you all know, your subscription helps me to explore topics of interest to us but I don’t like having the majority of the content behind a pay wall. So from time to time I take previously paywalled articles and publish them for the next tier of readers.
In this episode, the article “PMs are from Saturn, EMs are from Jupiter” has hit the free tier! Go enjoy and read all about how one team found unity and peace from the constant bickering about building for the long term or the short term.
The follow up to this article “Dev’s don’t care about business” is coming off the Founder Member tier and is now available to all paid members.
Which is where we will have a little problem if you were previously a paid member. Substack managed to drop every membership information and so everyone has been downgraded to the free tier. I am working on fixing this along with Substack support but their median turn-around time is like 3 days so don’t hold your breath on this. In the meantime head over to https://engineeringorg.com and login with the same email you used to subscribe here and you should find your subscription working just fine.
Which brings me to my next point — issues with substack payments and support are causing me to seriously re-evaluate my choice of platform and for now I am moving to a Ghost hosted blog at https://engineeringorg.com where I have a lot more control over things and the payments work better.
I will still continue to post free stuff here but for now it seems that the new home for my writing is here → The Engineering Org.
Rubyconf Thailand was amazing.
Regular readers of this blog might have noticed a drop in the frequency of publishing. That, dear readers, is because I was invited to give a keynote at Rubyconf Thailand and I just got back from that. Here’s a general overview of my trip →
My talk was called “The Ecstatic Organisation” and was about what spirituality can teach us about running organisations well. Trippy? You bet! Comprehensible? In parts, I’m sure :-)
What it was mostly about was about cutting through all the bullshit orthodoxy around software development, Agile, SCRUM, etc and finding our direct path to ecstasy by cutting out all the stuff that’s making us suffer. And you know, on the subject of suffering, some dudes some thousands of years ago had a pretty good idea where it comes from and how to get rid of it. So my talk was about how do we apply these lessons to our organisations.
I’ll post a link to the talk once it goes up on Youtube. Maybe.
But if there’s one community that gets the whole ecstasy thing it is the Ruby community. Matz specifically designed the language to feel joyful and boy oh boy did he succeed in creating a most joyful community to go along with it as well!
Had a great time in Thailand!
moving to my own site
If you’re considering subscribing, please do so at my new site → https://engineeringorg.com
Issues with substack compel me to make this decision. I will be mirroring posts on both sites but substack is generally a litany of failed payments, poor support and inadequate features to support you all, my dear readers. And so kindly transition yourself to my new site where your membership should already be active if you are a paid member of this substack.
That’s all the update for now. Hit me up with suggestions for new posts. What’s on your mind? Let me know and I’ll share whatever I know about it.
cheers,
svs