2023-06-05 day note
- I had two recordings today. One on the platform maturity model draft, a paper I got the chance to review early on. There’s a live stream of it up, and I’ll lightly edit it down to a podcast episode later this week.
- I also did a small panel (with two other people) talking about how US government agencies and groups get better at doing software. It’ll be broadcast in June 21st.
- Tomorrow I’ve got another recording on one of our products, and webinar on Wednesday.
- This can come off as a humble-brag, but I guess it’s sort of weird that I don’t think I do enough. Thinking about this recently, my theory is that this notion that I should be doing more work comes from all the ideas I have that I can’t ever get around to. It’s that there’s more, other things, that I want to do. Also, measuring the impact of what I do is difficult: sure, you can track page views, eyeballs for talks and podcasts…but you can’t answer the question “did people get a better idea of how to improve how they do software, and did it actually result in something?”
- I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make my real life (not work) into a sort of creative project of its own. I am tuned to think in terms of deliverables, projects, and publishing. Regular life isn’t like that at all, and I wish I could better integrate those two experiences so I felt more present, more normal and myself on each. I’ve got two different selves (at least!) across work and real life. And then, at work I have multiple selves (“characters, I guess): my Software Defined Talk persona, my VMware podcasting persona, my solo video persona, and then the persona that I use on inward facing work. Plus the persona of me presenting at conferences, or talking with customers and on sales calls Switching between all those personas, maintaining them, and living them takes so much energy: it’d be cool if they were just one self.
- That Apple headset thing looks pretty great. I’d buy one and suffer through the dorkness of using it.
- I like that Apple doesn’t really care about social media: just very personal media, your inner circle of people that don’t broadcast about their lives. Of course, that’s not really how people behave (they use Facebook and whatever the kids are up to - people like broadcasting and most people like consuming it). That’s part of what makes the Apple lifestyle presented in their ads and presentation seem like kind of an alien world: an alternate reality that totally ignores the gritty, real part of life.
- I’ve been checking out the Detail suite of video recording and editing apps. They have a lot of promise but there’s a few key things missing. First, you can adjust the clips you’ve made. This means you have to do the edit right, or just go through the undo stack. Second, the timeline only zooms in a few levels. I like to make a lot of quick cuts, cutting out as much silence as possible, so I need to zoom super close. I had some weirdness with a project before I closed and reopened it as well: when I’d split a clip, the cut was a second or two before where I wanted to cut it. Their multi-cam editing looks pretty amazing, though, and if the auto-generated transcripts work well, it’s probably a low-end competitor for Descript.