As we near the end of 2020, I've gotten the urge to bring my online presence back up to scratch, and consolidate my activity. I'd previously blogged technical content at idisposable.co.uk, and had written up business articles on linkedin.
The tech behind this blog
After advice from one of my team, I have setup this site to use Gatsby (for all the reasons he highlights), and to publish/host via Netlify. I love the simplicity of hosting with them, all of the cloud infrastructure concerns are abstracted away and you ultimately just get a performant, hosted, SSL supported site for free with very little effort.
Topics to come
My focus in my day job now is about creating environments where teams can be their best selves. I still love tech, but I have so many things outside of that I want to improve upon that the tech will likely take a back seat in my posts for some time. As you will see in the about section and some of my posts, my key interests now are organisational culture, psychological safety, servant leadership, psychology, and systems thinking. Expect those to feature in future blog posts.
More on management
Aside from blogging personally on this site in the coming months, but I will also be bringing together a site that I will be sharing soon on management progression and growth. I've written on management on this blog in the past and since doing so, I have expanded out the concepts there and hope to open source a model based approach to holding a conversation around growth for both potential new managers and people already doing the role.
I've found that managers are not typically well supported in their early career. Like me, many are 'dropped in at the deep end' and are required to fend for themselves and learn on the job. In tech, this is especially stark, as often the role someone will have been doing previously was quite far from the 'human', and tended to focus in on software, architecture, and the lines of code. When switching to management, it is a completely different and new set of skills - those who already practiced some of them have a head start, but others will be starting afresh.
I want to create a resource and a space that encourages reflection, discussion, and understanding of the whole role of management. I want this to be as effective for someone coming to the role new as it is for someone who's been doing the role for some time. A periodic check in to support the conversation around growth.
Watch this space :)