Notes for 6th Jan 2023
- Christmas/New Year was great. Our family is bigger (2 kids and a dog!) and our home, as usual, played host to a bunch of visitors. I cooked dinner on my Big Green Egg and it went down a treat. My family does a "secret Santa" each year, and I'm very difficult to buy for. So getting a mini synth was awesome!
- Kickoff season has begun, which means packaging and repackaging strategy and tactical plans for the year. Over and over again. Until three major things align: the app we're presenting in is appealing, the messaging is "clear" and there's a solid CTA. All for an audience that likely won't be paying attention anyway.
- I say that last part because annual kickoffs are about one thing in a GTM organisation: quota. The drinks afterwards won't have reps bragging about the things they learned on the day. It'll be about how they'll hit their new quota with their newly assigned territories.
- Getting meetings out of the way is something Shopify has decided to go balls-to-the-wall on, by removing 2-person calendar meetings. I find this hilarious because some of my most impactful conversations are one-on-one. But that might be a symptom of my role. While the spirit of it is definitely good, the practicalities of it aren't as I bet most Shopify staff wound up rebooking meetings, and the actually useless stuff (daily/weekly standups and the like) were held onto by middle management. Also, I wonder about the culture of meetings where everyone's expected to come from a meeting feeling like they've given birth; new ideas are given air to breathe and everyone walks away with a sense of achievement and splendour.
- I'm a volunteer chair of an association, and it consumes a bunch of time. Particularly, it takes away from family time very often. I'm stepping aside this year at our AGM, but the anxiety of not having achieved enough this year is a real head-twist. I wonder if this is what folks feel as they approach retirement.
- Traffic in Dublin tends to be chronic at the best of times, which is why I optimise commuting by bike (on my electric Van Moof S3, which I adore). But our mornings are now dominated by getting 2 toddlers to crèche, which I can't do by bike, despite it being a 7min cycle (or 20-30min drive given the traffic).
- I found the Riese & Müller Packster 70 with 2 bucket seats an ideal solution to allow me to cycle my kids to crèche/shops/activities. But the cost is prohibitive. That is ok, it's a luxury bike, but there's effectively no resources to drop the tax or make it super affordable to take me and my SUV off the road for that morning commute. The benefit to the city and my family of using that instead of the car (a Tesla Model Y) is so much greater than the value of the tax or payment scheme necessary to make that a common sight on Irish morning commutes.
- For what it's worth, I tend to bring the kids to crèche at 8.30am, and go home to work in my home office. But if I go to the office (2x/week on average) I come home with the car, then cycle to work as it's infinitely quicker and more enjoyable.
- It is urban hell to see how much we tolerate cars parked on the side of roads in suburban areas like mine. Espeically during commute times (morning/evening). They are the cause for so much additional headache and bottlenecks in traffic. It's completely pointless to tolerate it.
- I'm buidling a new mechanical keyboard. I have a few that I've acrued over the years but want one major expensive "premium" one. And a project, frankly. I've settled on these specs:
- Case: Monokei x TGR "Tomo" SE in blush pink
- PCB is stock requiring soldering
- Mill-max hot-swap stubs to allow me to modify the switches in future without too much misery
- Aurora stabs (because the ones I really wanted weren't in stock)
- Banana split switches
- JTK Night Sakura key caps