Notes for May 13th 2023

* The transgender community needs moderates who support their choices, even if we don't agree with every one of the edicts. For some transgender people (not all) to accuse supports, like me, of transphobia is not a good look for their cause. Your cigender, crossdressig ally will continue to support the transgender community and their right to choose, even if they reject me."

Of note here is the classic trope of folks making enemies out of allies. Snider was on the fore of gender politics in the 80s, following David Bowie's lead. He went against congress and spoke directly to them about free speech in the context of rock music to avoid state censorship. And he told the republicans to get out of town when they wanted to use Twisted Sister as a theme.

• Keep in mind, the trouble he got into with some subset of the community was for saying, "I do not think kids have the mental capaibilities to make rational, logic decisions on things of a magnitude that will affect them for the rest of their lives." This is not the words of an enemy to the community. The community itself needs to flush the loudmouths out. They're seeking ideological purity, and that's just not how people work.

I was considering my climate tax on the world with monthly (ish) flights to London for a day or two. I tend to fly out of Dublin airport in the morning to get into the London office in the morning. It's about a 50min flight, and the train to the office is about 30mins from there. London transport is so brilliant that I'm able to completely not plan my day around it at all; it'll just be there for me. Dublin, however, requires me to get a taxi for much more cost (and carbon footprint since driving 1 car for 1 passenger is stupid) because the bus route means taking upwards of 90mins to get into the city and back out to the suburbs. I live 10-15mins drive from the airport.

• If I took a boat & train I would consume a full working day. But the cost to the climate and the budget would be infinitely smaller. I have considered it, but having 2 kids means taking 2 full days around the 2 days in the office in London just isn't feasible.
• When in Japan, I did one or two days' work outside of Tokyo but was able to take a shinkansen which got me to my destination at blazing speeds, rivalling an aircraft when you consider security lines, etc.

Back in the good old days of IRC, bash.org was the single source of truth for funny moments on the networks. User-submitted content that still operates to this day. Bash link bots were common, as were links being dropped into channels across the various servers that existed. I was wondering, as we enter a new wave of social media being more distributed or federated, would something like that be interesting today. A place that can parse links or copy/pastes from Mastodon clients/URLs, Bluesky, even Twitter, etc.

I note in my tabs for this week that Tho Tungusz references sales engineering as a leader in sales. This has been my profession for over a decade now. From individual contributor through to strategic/execution-focused leader. I've done this across a few organisations at various phases (startup, scaleup, IPO and enterprise). Right now I'm in the startup->scaleup motion with a company that I enjoy working with. But I've often, through the prism of some experience, been noting that our org, being the nexus of business savvy and technical prowess, often feels a bit like the tail wagging the dog. But more often than not, AEs or partner managers come to me or the leaders in my world asking where we should place them. Not the other way around. That's both mature, and terrifying.

• At the risk of cross-pollinating too much, I am also hiring in Ireland or the UK.