Hi folks! Once again I have to apologize for not writing in a while. I guess I have no obligation to write, but I feel bad whenever I leave you without at least a short blog post every once in a while.
I have a good excuse, though, and coincidentally that’s what I want to write about today.
One of the things that was on my bucket list for this year was to work on my management skills1. I talked about it with Michael, Port Zero’s CEO. We didn’t immediately follow up on it, but after I looked at other companies and decided to stay at Port Zero we had a big talk about things that we should work on and decided to tackle that whole management topic.
Since then I’ve started taking on more and more things: I have now taken over responsibility of our internal infrastructure, was Michael’s stand-in while he was on a management retreat, supervised an office move, talked to new candidates and clients, wrote invoices and offers. And, to both Michael’s and my surprise, it seemed to go mostly smoothly. I think he’s not used to being able to hand over responsibilities like that, and I was surprised that I didn’t completely ruin the company.
So we decided it’s time to make it official and talked to the rest of the team. As always with these things, a part of me assumed that everyone would object and tell me that I’m a fraud and shouldn’t manage anybody, and I lost more sleep due to that than to any of the actual management tasks. Long story short, noone objected, and I’m incredibly grateful to work with a team of bright, talented, and gentle people who think I can be useful to them.
The title of this blog post is “One Foot in Management”. We’re a small company, and I’ll still mostly do hands-on work. I’ll still work with clients, and not slack off as a developer. I’ll try and actually earn money for my company while helping run it. We’re self-sufficient, there are no investors involved, no VC. We simply can’t afford a CTO that’s “only” doing management work, and I expect that I wouldn’t be happy doing just that. Fortunately, I don’t have to.
In other words, sorry I haven’t written anything2, but I just took the best job in the world, and it’s been a wild ride. If you want to join us, let me know.
Footnotes
1. The other two things that I wanted to learn were Ruby and Kubernetes, by the way. One down.
2. And sorry for the lack of technical content in this blog post. There’s a lot of technical stuff in the pipeline, but I keep having to postpone it for all kinds of reasons.