Jon's Ink 🖋️

Vincent: "Seven fat years and seven lean years."

Sam: "That's what it says in the Bible."

When times get tough in my career or the industry overall, I find myself returning over and over to John Frankenheimer's classic film Ronin starring Robert De Niro, Jean Reno, Natascha McElhone, and other great character actors.

The movie is about a group of ex-operatives who have been brought together as mercenaries after the end of the Cold War. I won't go into spoilers about the story, but what really draws me back is how it feels.

Throughout the entire movie, there is this pervading feeling of paranoia, unease, anxiety, and desperation. In the old order, there were clear sides, right and wrong, and resources to match. But now, these agents, so skilled and capable, have been cast out on their own. There may have been a feeling of loyalty before; but now, it’s clear that was a mirage.

You can see where I'm going with this. Even we’ve had downturns in tech in the past 10-20 years, this feels different. Tens of thousands of people have been laid off over the past two years. Hiring still hasn’t come back, despite (or because of?) excitement over AI.

We’re in a new era of tech rōnin. Where do we go from here? What happens to all of us? Do we all become mercenaries, hiring ourselves out to whoever can give a payback? Does power become even more consolidated with the select crew and more unequal than before? Or is there some kind of rebalancing in the cards?

Wow, it's been almost seven months since my first post. No excuses, but I hope to make the third one come a lot sooner.

It's been a weird time in the tech world the past 12 months or so. After the tech layoffs started in late 2022, things got really dark and scary. The environment doesn't feel a whole lot different now, other than perhaps we've become slightly desensitized to it all with the passage of time.

The job market still feels really tough; there's still an extreme imbalance of the number of applicants to the number of job postings. If you're lucky enough to have a job, you've got to be incredibly careful not to get cast overboard. It feels like a death sentence.

Yes, there are a few hopeful signs out there. The AI boom is still in its early phases, but that feels like a wave that is only being enjoyed by the privileged few who are in a small set of companies. Signs are pointing to a soft landing for the economy. There have been some good earnings numbers recently, and we can only hope those result in more hiring down the line.

Welcome to my new blog! This is the first post. A blog in 2023 feels like an anachronism, but there are many internal and external factors that make it the right time.

Why a blog, why now?

I recently re-read the excellent book How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens, which came out in a 2nd edition last year. When I first read the book a few years ago, my mind was blown by the concept of the Zettelkasten for taking notes; it felt like a huge piece of the puzzle I had been missing for years. Back then, I set up my own Zettelkasten in an initial burst of enthusiasm. Since, however, I haven't added to it consistently. This makes me feel a little guilty when reading books, like I'm wasting my time if I wasn't adding notes into the slip box. I still feel like that's the case, and I want to get back to the deeper level of thinking that comes with taking notes in the right way.

This blog is a part of my renewed effort to re-engage with my Zettelkasten. One thing I've I understand now is the necessity of having a final output step, such as writing, that uses your notes as input. Without using the notes, you don't have the feedback loop that makes the whole system complete. This blog is, in part, a place to do a little writing to help me complete the loop with my Zettelkasten.

And there are other reasons for starting a blog right now that come from recent events in the broader tech world.

One is the recent happenings at Twitter. Everyone knows about the recent rapid degradation of Twitter under its new management. Twitter was always my social media platform of choice, and so this is incredibly tragic to me. Over the years, I came to respect many of the ways the teams at Twitter managed the product with noble intent. It's been sad to see how quickly all that's been undone. While I do hope that many of the alternatives, like Mastodon, will be successful, the whole experience reminded me of the importance of owning one's own platform. With what we've seen happen, is it really wise to donate content to any proprietary platform right now?

A second development in the tech industry was the release of ChatGPT a couple months ago. While it has generated a lot of optimism about the impact that AI will have on the way people write, my reaction was the opposite. If we do go into a world where everyone relies on a tool like ChatGPT as a scaffold (or a crutch) for their writing, the people who actually know how to write well in an original, human voice will be at a fantastic advantage. I'm not there yet, but I hope that having a blog will help me develop my writing skills to prepare for the new world of an AI standardization of communication.

The path to a new blog

I've also taken a new approach to launch this blog.

In the past few years, I've had several false starts. Whenever I felt the urge to blog, I'd spend all this time trying to create one from scratch using the shiny technology du jour. This meant wasting a bunch of time learning things like NextJS, Gatsby, templating libraries, and hosted CMS systems before I got down to writing a single post. Invariably, I'd get bogged down in learning the technology and never launch.

Recently I read Steven Pressfield's The War of Art, and that taught me what I had been doing wrong. In the book, he talks about the many aspects of "Resistance," all of the mental barriers and obstacles that come in the way of doing any kind of creative or knowledge work. It made me realize that this desire to roll my own blog every time as a form of resistance that was getting in the way.

This time, I've chosen the absolute minimum approach to start by using a template with the absolute minimum of customization. In this case, I've used Matt Jennings' excellent SvelteKit blog template. Perhaps I'll customize it a lot further down the line, but not until I've got a lot more writing under my belt!