Only you can decide how to define your voice. Will you gravitate to the content that is most popular, or will you gravitate to the content you think is most important?
I had Google Analytics (GA) enabled for my last weblog at prefrontal.org. It was exhilarating to see how many people visited, which pages they went to, and where in the world they were coming from. GA was a powerful lens to evaluate the attention of my audience so I could dial in my content. When I saw an uptick in traffic on a post about neuromarketing I kicked out a new longer article that got some nice attention.
I have given up on that approach for this site. I am not going for page views, or clicks. I am thinking more about impact, as I define it.
The charter of this site is to be the resource I wish I had when starting out as a software manager. Having site analytics is not required to achieve that goal. Perhaps it would help, but when using GA it feels like I am no longer writing the articles that I think are most impactful. Instead, I am letting the metrics lead me where they want me to go.
One of my favorite jokes takes that approach to an extreme: “With enough A/B testing, every website becomes a porn site.”
Having analytics on your site is more-or-less standard these days. I don’t even want to dissuade you from using tools like GA since they can be so empowering. My only advice is to think twice about why you need analytics and whether it is helping you achieve your goals.
Don’t be afraid to turn the analytics off either. You can always turn them back on later – the best kind of two-way door…
Photo: Thousand Steps access path to the beach in Santa Barbara. At high tide it is often a path to nowhere. Fun fact: there are far fewer than 1,000 steps to get to the ocean.
I’ve been an aerospace geek since, well, always. In the great book of life there is a value representing the excessive number of times I watched the movie Top Gun as a child. There is another extreme number for the count of crazy Lego spacecraft I have built. I probably don’t want to know the number of dollars spent on pilot training, but anyway…
It is in that context that I feel compelled to tip my hat in the direction of SpaceX on their successful “catch” of the Starship first stage on October 13th.
That was the equivalent of a 20-story building maneuvering to a precision landing and being caught by a pair of manipulator arms. Absolutely unreal.
The last time I felt that level of aerospace exuberance was when SpaceX simultaneously landed two Falcon Heavy boosters at the same time. I watched that scene in a conference room with about 20 other software engineers, who were all going crazy with excitement at what we had witnessed.
Topeka, Kansas is a small city that can sometimes surprise you. One of the surprising bits was the ability to take four years of Russian language classes in high school. By some crazy random happenstance Topeka High School had Russian instruction going back to 1973.
The local Russian teacher, Mr. Lonard, went into the middle schools every year to drum up interest in the classes, making sure there were always a critical mass of students. The highlight of the program was a biennial exchange where high school students from Kansas would host high school students from the former Soviet Union. A few months later, students from Kansas would then be hosted in Russia or Ukraine.
I wanted to go. Sitting in that middle school classroom, I knew I wanted to go.
Fast forward three years. I was a junior in high school and on a plane to Kharkiv, Ukraine. I had been to Mexico once or twice while visiting family in San Diego, but this was a different scale of international travel. Having two-ish years of Russian classes had prepared me somewhat, but my conversational language wasn’t great and I was getting thrown in the deep end.
I was scared out of my mind.
My host brother Dimitri stayed with his maternal grandparents in a suburb of Kharkiv called Piatykhatky. This was done so he could attend the local secondary school, which was one of the best in Kharkiv. Piatykhatky was home to the former Ukrainian Physics and Technology Institute, now called the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology. With such a concentration of scientific talent the local school had an amazing set of teachers.
As told by my Russian teacher, Piatykhatky was completely closed to foreigners while Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. Now, a group of high school students from Kansas would call it home for six weeks – just four years after the Soviet Union collapsed.
I spent the majority of each week with Dimitri and his grandparents in their small apartment. We then spent the weekends with Dimitri’s parents and sister. They lived on an Army base on the outskirts of town.
I could go on for many pages about how wonderful Dimitri and his whole family were to me. There are dozens of stories to tell of Dimitri’s visit to Kansas as well. I could also go on for pages about how friendly the population of Kharkiv were to a bunch of wayward American high school students as we tried to navigate a large town half a world away from home.
The original exchange program between Topeka High and School 62 in Piatykhatky ended in 1998. There were rumors of corruption as the Director of School 62 allegedly solicited bribes during the exchange selection process. I was happy to see recent news that students from Ukraine are once again attending Topeka High School.
It is enough to say that I have been thinking about Dimitri and his family a lot lately. Russia invaded Ukraine and Kharkiv Oblast over two years ago. According to some reports, the invasion started at Piatykhatky, which is only 17 miles from the Russian border. Kharkiv, the city, has been under unrelenting artillery shelling and missile strikes ever since. School 62? The building where I took classes is reported to have been destroyed.
It is a cruel action taken against wonderful people, and a country that I have held in high regard for almost thirty years.
I am looking forward to the war being over one day. I dream of returning to Piatykhatky after three decades away and walking the same streets I walked as a teenager. For now, this is an impossibility. It will have to be enough that my thoughts are with Ukraine and its citizens.
A new weblog is both a roar and a whimper. It is a roar as the author plants a flag in the ground and definitively states “I have something to say”. It is a whimper because there is no audience and therefore nobody listening.
I blogged for seven years as a cognitive neuroscientist at prefrontal.org. Across 117 posts I discussed everything from mundane current events to deep dives on scientific topics. Some percentage of those posts are of questionable quality, but there were a few gems in the mix. My weblog work introduced me to some amazing people, got me invited to conferences, and led to a few invited papers.
It has been eight years since my last blog post. Why (re)start now? Why scream into the Internet void at all?
Maybe I have something to say again. Maybe.
I’ve been in the software industry for over ten years. I have had several successes and an even greater number of failures. I have worked as an engineer and as a manager I have worked at small startups and the largest companies in the world. I have embarrassed myself in front of CEOs and vice presidents. I have been promoted due to skill and promoted due to luck. I have also had role models who demonstrated both what to do and what not to do. Putting it all together, I finally have experiences to share that are worthwhile.
So, if I have something to say, then who am I speaking to? Who is the audience?
Ultimately, I think I am writing for myself, ten years ago. I would love for this to be the weblog I wish I had when I first got into software management.
As I stepped into management for the first time two things became immediately clear. First, I was in way over my head. I just didn’t have the skills or previous experience to make management immediately successful. Every day was an effortful push to figure things out. Second, my own blissful ignorance is what enabled me to say “yes” when I was asked to lead my first software group. It is also what enabled me to carry on when the going got tough over the next few years.
There were a handful of books and weblogs that were critical in those early days. They helped orient me to the role, taught me what to value, and helped me avoid some rookie mistakes. These resources helped me scramble up the learning curve far more quickly. Today, ten years later, I give those authors a huge amount of credit for their assistance.
Now, it’s my turn to give something back.
Photo: A view to the south from the top of Gaviota Peak in the Santa Ynez mountains.
