Artisanal Concatenations of Sentient Emanations

Someday I really want to write a book called “stuff no one will teach you”. The problem is that technically I want to teach you these things and suddenly the title becomes an oxymoron. This is the kind of thinking that keeps me up at night.

In the late nineties I worked as a presales engineer in an enterprise sales organization. It was a very different experience from building products and I learned a great deal in that role.

Decades later I find myself applying some of the lessons I have learned and passing on those learnings to people I work with.

Let’s talk about one of those lessons today!

A previous employer had a process for new software development where the lead engineer would write up a technical design document and present it for review in a meeting with engineering leadership.

These reviews were often savage and the outcomes were a mix of “go do it over” and anxiety.

I watched a few of these happen with the same curiosity and horror one might have driving by a road accident. I decided to see what I could do to help make this experience smoother since one of my engineering leads was about to go through the process.

I asked one of the senior engineering leadership why these meetings were so brutal. He smirked and told me that quite often these meetings were usually the first time that people presented ideas to him, and quite often they were missing some key considerations for a popular game at scale. The feedback given was sincere and in earnest—it was just horrifying to the person writing the document because they did not consider very important things that were necessary.

I was a little surprised. I decided to confirm my suspicions and speak to the engineering lead who was about to make his presentation.

Sure enough, he had not shared the document in advance for feedback.

These review meetings were not a place for someone to get feedback that required substantial redesign. They were supposed to be a place where maybe one or two small tweaks were needed to get the design as good as it can be before starting development.

Because this is the first time that some of the senior leadership were seeing the designs in question, quite often there was something significantly missing or an assumption that was fundamentally wrong.

I encouraged the engineering lead to set up a thirty minute meeting to go over the design in advance.

The leadership review afterwards went smoothly.

One of the things that engineering leaders need to learn on their voyage is that you should not be afraid of asking for help or guidance. I encouraged the engineering leaders I was managing to be sure to get advice and guidance before putting their software designs up for review.

Maybe the time I spent working on a sales team helped me to understand the value of getting your work cross-checked. We would always have presales meetings and do dry runs of our pitches and presentations. Even now, I spend time sending materials over to my peers, and similarly review their presentations before sending them off.

I have always found that I have been rewarded by doing some additional work to make sure that projects and presentations have had extra eyes on it.

Most organizations have a formal review process and it is always a good idea to make sure that people who make yes/no decisions on your projects have as much opportunity to achieve understanding as well as put any concerns on the table privately. If you can get some good feedback from them on things to add or adjust, that is also a benefit to the overall product, and I think people enjoy hearing you thanking them for the ideas when it is finally time to get the project approved.

Do not be afraid to put some extra work in before presenting a new project for approval at work. The more time you spend outside of that meeting making sure that all of the stakeholders have an understanding and a window to give you feedback and suggestions, the less time you will need in a large room filled with stakeholders making adjustments and addressing issues.

It makes your project look better and it respects the larger group’s time.

This does not just have to apply to project work. When I am sending emails around crucial conversations at work, I also reach out to people to get feedback.

You should give this a try at work. Collaborating with decision makers and making sure you have great shared understanding with them will only help you in the long run.

Thanks for reading along! I look forward to telling you more stories next week and seeing if there is something with which I can entice a profit-making click from you with my Amazon Affiliate account. Every two or three months they send me a reminder that I have made zero nickels and that the pending balance will carry forward. Clearly a case of “tell me I am a bad affiliate marketer without telling me I am a bad affiliate marketer”. I accept it as honest feedback even if it is attempting to gaslight me into selling more.

I apologize for my unexpected and unannounced absence last week. We took the kids on a trip and I do not like to advertise that I am going to be out of my house for many days before the fact. Because the looters. The media tells us these are difficult times.

So I am back home now, minus fifty percent of my celery plants due to a surprise heat wave. A shout out to the pumpkin plants that sustained nearly zero damage in our absence. Based on how well the pumpkin plants did without water during extreme heat, I am going to remind people during challenging times to imagine themselves as a pumpkin plant. I will nod knowingly after sharing this wisdom. Actually that is not true. I will sigh patiently and explain the difference between the celery plants and pumpkin plants given what I have learned in my haphazard home gardening experiments.

I am going to slightly change the subject now.

Today I am going to talk about next year. More specifically what my father told me about next year.

I wrote previously about stuff my father told me, and it was an absolute hit. It did not net me many nickels of shameless Amazon affiliate merchandise, but it resonated. In a sense I have become my father because almost all I do now is make new and interesting mistakes and then lament about them to anyone and everyone who will listen. In the not-so-distant future I will prepend these stories with “you know what is wrong with the young people today?”. Then the circle will be complete.

I digress.

My father was a farmer and he loved it. I loved farming a lot less than he did. I ran away screaming from farming at the first opportunity. It is why my life now involves so much computers and so little frozen manure and unchopped firewood. I will let your imagination fill in the details.

The one thing I will always remember about my father and farming is fall time harvest. At the end of the year, when the grain is all bagged up and the bales of hay are all neatly lined up on the field, I would walk around with my farm-loving father who would survey the harvest output. He would go through some mental internal post mortem and at its conclusion he would nod slowly and make a profound declaration.

“Next year will be better.”

After hearing him say this a few times, I did my own mental inventory of the year’s produce.

He would say this in good years and he would say this in bad years. At an early age, when the years were good, I was admittedly confused. My advanced math skills told me that this declaration made some sense during the bad years and that it made less sense during the good years.

I never challenged him on his declaration during the good years—I was too busy plotting my great escape from a life of chopping firewood and extricating frozen manure from one location simply to move it to another.

It was not until decades later that I realized that he never actually considered the year’s output in his declaration.

He was performing a ritual to help him prepare for the coming year.

Farming is a lot like running a startup. You have unexpected natural disasters, supply chain issues, and a host of other unfortunate surprises. Whether it is market economics or fields being flooded, bad things happen at an incredible rate in both worlds.

I remember the first time I had to shut a company down. I gave a thoughtful presentation at GDC if you are interested in hearing more about it. Disclaimer: I get zero nickels from GDC clicks—you can watch it free of concern that I am exploiting your thirsty eyeballs for the moneys.

After we went through the process of shutting everything down, I remember a moment where I was alone at home and feeling a sense of quiet deja-vu. It was like I was suddenly a teenager again, standing in a field staring at rows of neatly lined hay bales. I could almost feel my father standing beside me as if this was some kind of sappy Kevin Costner Turner Classic movie.

I do not know what possessed me to do so, but I nodded slowly and found myself repeating my father’s mantra.

“Next year will be better.”

I find that I have adopted my father’s farmer mindset now that I am in charge of all my decisions.

It does not matter if it is a good year.

It does not matter if it is a bad year.

I always tell myself that next year will be better.

This is such a super serious subject for me that I don’t know how to follow that up with a smarmy request for “blah-blah socials” or “something-something buy this”.

I will see you again next week.

I have spent a decent amount of time in the past few weeks experimenting with marketing. Some of this involved flat out spending money on audio equipment and some of it involved “Collabs”. Some of this also involved figuring out how to inspire curiosity on the tweeters.

For those of you who did sign up at derfdice.com as a result of all that marketing—Thank you! I have been randomly handing out premium account upgrades like they are candy due to the volume of good feedback I have received from people.

I am super glad to see that I am starting to get traction.

I will be sprinkling more of my personal learnings into my weekly posts. I am very sorry if that is less interesting than my reflections on decades-old career mistakes. I cannot pretend to know the desires of the silent majority and I have not yet gotten any requests for content from the vocal minority. Do I even have a vocal minority? If that is you, say something!

Today I want to talk briefly about making cool tables. There are a lot of people out there writing about the problems that Derfdice solves and even some well-dressed internet people posting videos about it.

I discovered this week that there is considerable value in show don’t tell.

I initially just started sharing the text outputs from a few really good tables. That did not get me many stars on the Yelp.

So I decided to leverage The Power Of The Internet And Technology. I have been using some really cool procedurally generated art tools from starryai to help generate some more visually compelling posts. I think this has been successful.

I think I started getting more success when I decided to create my own new tables to show the art of the possible. In a magical world of tomorrow I am hoping to feature other people’s tables but for now I am going to eat my own dog food. You can Google that if you like—it is a popular enough and important enough early startup activity that merits its own gross-sounding soundbyte.

This week I built a table to generate ominous random buildings and that is when people started showing up to the party.

The good news is that making tables is fun. The bad news is that I need to figure out how to get people to stick around on the site long enough to want to make a table or two. Part of the magic in making tables is in using other people’s publicly available tables.

I am going to include the top level of the Ominous Fantasy Buildings table for an example:

Ominous_Fantasy_Buildings

1d13	Result
1-3	{cthogan::Somewhat_Sinister_Site_Names}, {Building_Descriptor} {derflib::Fantasy_Religious_Buildings}
4-6	{cthogan::Somewhat_Sinister_Site_Names}, {Building_Descriptor} {derflib::Fantasy_Civic_Buildings}
7-9	{cthogan::Somewhat_Sinister_Site_Names}, {Building_Descriptor} {derflib::Fantasy_Military_Buildings}
10	{cthogan::Somewhat_Sinister_Site_Names}, {Building_Descriptor} {derflib::Fantasy_Religious_Buildings}, {Building_Special}
11	{cthogan::Somewhat_Sinister_Site_Names}, {Building_Descriptor} {derflib::Fantasy_Religious_Buildings} built on the ruins of a {derflib::Fantasy_Military_Buildings}
12	{cthogan::Somewhat_Sinister_Site_Names}, {Building_Descriptor} {derflib::Fantasy_Military_Buildings}, {Building_Special}
13	{cthogan::Somewhat_Sinister_Site_Names}, {Building_Descriptor} {derflib::Fantasy_Religious_Buildings} built on the ruins of a {derflib::Fantasy_Military_Buildings}, {Building_Special}

This is probably a bunch of noise to most of you but the above table from derfjohn uses tables from both derflib, an account I made that was populated with a bunch of really simple tables, as well as cthogan, a good friend who created some really cool tables.

If you scrutinize this table closely what you will see is that it generates a handful of really common structure names 9 out of every 13 times. There are a few different building types to add variety.

If you look closely at the remaining 4 out of 13 times, it generates a Special description.

Building_Special

1d11	Result
1-3	shrouded in dark clouds.
4	in the heart of a decaying forest.
5	on the edge of a rumbling volcano.
6	amidst a corpse-strewn plain.
7	atop a treacherous peak.
8	in a misty valley, reeking of death.
9	overlooking the ruins of a destroyed city.
10	surrounded by a swampy moat.
11	where {Royal_Male_Name} fell in battle.

The end result is a pretty wild collection of ominous buildings.

You will notice that some percentage of these entries are pretty much trash—This is okay!

The beauty of this site is that it generates a whole pile of randomly rolled stuff so you can pick out the parts that you want to use.

It is far easier to pick three really cool sounding things out of a list of ten items than it is to create three really cool sounding things.

You will notice that there is a hefty amount of special buildings that are shrouded in dark clouds.

This table is a work in progress. I expect that will eventually just be “1” instead of “1-3” on the table. There are some tables in derflib that have 200 entries.  At the end of the day this will probably be closer to 20 than 11 but you never really know.

Feel free to check out derfdice.com if you need to generate random content—whether it is for a TTRPG game or for a bunch of NPCs in a video game or even if you want to make a funny spicy internet startup name generator.

As always, please feel free to Socials this post. Hopefully you find something here interesting enough that is worth sharing.

If that doesn’t happen I think I have enough eyeballs here to start assaulting you soon with Raid: Shadow Legends ads. I am hopeful it will not come to that!

See you all next week.

I am going to start off this week strongly recommending you read The Power of Habit. Yes, this is an Amazon Affiliate Link. Yes, I fully intend to profit madly from it. Yes, I am aware that this is totally wishful thinking even though I liked this book so much that I have purchased it repeatedly.

I first became aware of this book when visiting the office of a random HTML5 game company and noticed that they sprinkled copies of this book around the office. It piqued my curiosity and I decided to buy my own copy at home and read it for myself.

I wish I had read this book in 2004 even though this book was published in 2014. Reading this book would have helped me to understand why one of my game publishing experiments was doomed from the beginning.

One of the important parts about releasing a successful game is understanding that you need to release one or more unsuccessful games before that happens. You need to build a lot of stuff to ship a game and very seldom will you fire on all cylinders right out of the gate. I have come to understand that you sometimes need to build these pieces in isolation so you can stack your successes on top of each other. You are correct if you think I have written about this before.

The previously mentioned doomed game publishing experiment was a Flash game that I released on Kongregate. I decided to create and publish a game that included some fun narrative elements. In order to keep the costs down and reduce the schedule I wanted to keep the feature set very small. I wound up making it too small. I decided that building a progression system was not important to the story and therefore would not add much to the product.

I am going to fast forward a few months to the blistering comments in the three star reviews. The universal feedback that I received is that this would be a much more engaging product if it had some progression systems built in.

So how did I wind up in that place?

The answer is a strange one and an infinite one. In fact, it is also an adventure and it is space.

For those of you who assembled the keywords correctly, I am in fact talking about Strange Adventures In Infinite Space.

Strange Adventures In Infinite Space, referred to as SAIS for the rest of this post, is an entertaining little roguelike game where you are piloting a spaceship into a vast and unforgiving universe.

Every game you played was randomly generated and filled with unequal amounts of wonder and dread—emphasis on the dread. Most of the time SAIS is a very short and brutal game. You launch yourself into the cosmos, you encounter horrific and bewildering aliens, and sometimes find mildly better technology for your ship.

The vast majority of endings are terrible. You either die in the nether reaches of space, or return home unprofitably and wind up broke.

I wanted to love this game so much, I really did! Unfortunately playing SAIS is like scratching a mosquito bite—it is fulfilling in the moment but leaves you with painful welts and scars.

If you are a dirty roguelike lover, you are probably mad right now. I accept that. I am happy to have made you angry because that is the response that loving a roguelike inspires—it makes you angry. You should probably slide your chair away from your computer and count slowly backwards from ten while you process your emotions… I assure you that I am gaslighting you from a good place.

SAIS is absolutely a “critically acclaimed indie masterpiece”. That means it did not sell millions of copies.

I do think that the creator of this game would have similarly benefitted from a read through of “The Power of Habit” which I have linked above in an effort to steal nickels from you and Jeff Bezos at the same time.

I will not steal the thunder of the aforementioned book. I stand to profit from vaguely encouraging you to read it in many many ways. I will at least say that I have accepted into my design tools the importance of habituating players to games.

And this is where SAIS and many roguelikes have failed.

It is important to get players into the game as fast as possible and experience what a game has to offer. Through the power of modern analytics, we can put most games under a microscope and understand things like “replayability” and “churn”.

A deep study of graphs and data from mobile games will show you how fast a player will yeet out of your game. I know these are very scientific terms and I hope you will believe me when I say that a player is much more likely to stick around and play your game if one of two things happens: They have to be rewarded for their time in some capacity or at least believe they have the ability to be rewarded in the near future.

Modern roguelikes have accepted that this is important and similarly learned the lesson of my failure on Kongregate—progression is important! I will call your attention to the elegantly crafted “Vampire Survivors” game. It has tens of thousands of overwhelmingly positive reviews on steam, and is a game where you tend to die frequently and horribly.

Regardless, they have added a sufficiently valuable progression system that lets you carry some success forward from your failure in the form of collectable gold coins you can invest in your baseline character for marginal gains for each replay.

This is an important lesson to learn if you are building games. It is also an important lesson to learn if you are building consumer products in general. Establishing habits and rewards for players is a very important factor in the success of a product. Habits and rewards would have improved the outcome for my little publishing experiment. Habits and rewards would also have catapulted SAIS to greater success and fame.

The most amazing part of SAIS for me was its sequel. I do not think that there is a sequel for a game that has failed so hard to be better than its original than the sequel to SAIS. It is so bad that I do not want to name it or link it. It is so bad that I actually feel like I need to give you one of those “this product may cause injury, rashes, pain, or worse” disclaimers like one of those creepy tv commercials for medications before you go off looking for it.

I talk quite a bit about SAIS because I wish to make my own version of a space exploration game. SAIS was very close, as was another similarly unrewarding mobile game called “Out There”.

A space exploration game that is more fun and more enjoyable than SAIS is in my list of top five products I wish to make. There are probably a hundred things in that list or more. I always tell people I am more than happy to talk about items six through one hundred because I know I do not have time or ability to do anything about them.

I talk a little less about items one through five because they are My Ideas and they are Precious to me like that stupid One Ring is to Gollum.

I will share “John’s Big Five List Of Games I Want To Make”, even though talking this much about them takes me completely out of my comfort zone.

1. An MMO where every sentient creature (monster, animal, and player) is driven by players rather than AI.
2. A survival game where crafting patterns are granted one at a time to the world to “craft progenitors” who create artifacts for a time limited window that get incorporated into world lore before patterns become widely available.
3. A train game. Heck yeah! Who doesn’t love train games?
4. A space exploration game with delicious emerging narrative. See SAIS. Also see: The Expanse.
5. A modern Gateway To Apshai variant, which just so happens to be the 8-bit successor to Diablo.

I reserve the right to reorder this list of Audacious Projects and move things up and down into the top one hundred. I have seen items from the middle of the list emerge into the marketplace as novel products with varying levels of success. There are no new ideas I suppose.

In the meantime, I hope you at least decide to take a look at SAIS and perhaps even read the previously linked book on Habit. Hopefully you have all made a Habit of reading my weekly ranting.

Speaking of weekly ranting, this one would not be complete without me attempting to gaslight you all into being my marketing department. If you enjoyed this assemblage of letters dancing over your eyeballs then Retweet! Share! Print-and-fax if that is all you can do!
See you all next week when I once again fail to get nickel-inducing clicks on my precious and clearly labeled affiliate marketing links.

I know I generally set aside some time to write posts on Sunday but today I spent the whole morning writing documentation. I would feel terrible if I did not sit down and say something for a whole entire week.

I am going to take this opportunity to talk about my Derfdice product. I previously described the problem late last year as the “Joe-the-Elf” problem. It is a problem I have found in my own games and I believe that it is a problem that exists for other game masters. I have found some evidence this is true.

There is a bunch of my personal and professional philosophy wrapped up in this product, which I won’t get into much here. Not today. I want to talk to you about the marketing journey that I am undertaking.

I have to start by saying I do not know much about marketing. I can spell the word and that is basically about it. I have at least two friendly marketing friends who are spending time, out of the goodness of their hearts, to help me learn a little about their craft.

Here is some of the stuff I have learned so far:

If You Use It, You Love It

I am now getting unsolicited feedback from people who are creating tables. A few table creators have made tables that they will start clicking on them and completely lose track of time. Some people are also using these tables in their live games and sharing stories about outcomes from their games.

Product Market Fit

I do not know if I have product market fit… Yet. I have a product—I have yet to see a complete stranger get into said product and independently decide to pay it. I am early enough in development that I happily gave a free year or two of premium access to literally everyone who has communicated to me that they have signed up. I am hopeful with the next round of FTUE changes that I will be ready to see if everyone agrees with the economics for the product I have proposed.

Content is King

I also know that as much as I wanted this to be a pure creator’s platform, it is actually more of a consumer platform than I believed it would be. Derfdice will live and die by the quality of the tables that people can share with other people. I have made a few tables now and ultimately I think that people making their own amazing tables are a smaller subset of users than folks who just want to come and randomly click on prebuilt tables. This may have been obvious to other people—it was not quite so obvious to me.

Socials

I have spent some time trying to get good at Twitter. I am better at it now than ever before and that is not saying much. I created an account specifically for Derfdice and I am now attracting followers and sharing fun stuff. I have created a table of random promotional items that takes advantage of the linking feature to promote awesome homebrew creators and their fine quality items.

I have joined a few Discords to talk about my product—with varying degrees of success. I have sponsored a few prize pools for user competitions with the best of these because the quality of their community is really great.

I am also about to experiment with TikTok. Do not hold your breath for me to get up there and start twerking. I do not wish to hurt my knees or your sensibilities. Enough people have encouraged me to go this direction that something will soon arrive—yes I am vaguebooking.

Video Production

At the gentle urging of my marketing mentors, I have created some video walkthroughs for my product. I acquired new hardware for this exercise and created a “not terrible” tutorial channel. Nearly immediately after, I discovered new words like “subsonics” and “microphone shock mount”. I am going to be doing a before and after comparison on these once I have finished assembling my new toys. I may as well include an Amazon Affiliate link to the Pop Screen too since I ordered all three. These videos are linked to the friendly welcome screens that adorn the front page.

PS: Yes I am actually linking Affiliated Links for products I actually purchased!

I Have Amazing Friends

Even as recently as yesterday I have gotten text messages from people who are evaluating Derfdice with constructive feedback. Sometimes it is hard to test all of the screens on all of the devices. I am super grateful for all of the feedback I have received from people who have checked things out and informed me when there are issues. I am extremely grateful for all of the feedback I have received on the journey so far.

Speaking of the journey, it is only just beginning. I have a few low cost marketing experiments to conduct over the summer and I am still in the process of looking for suckers early access partners from friends and family who may want to play around with a dungeon master’s tool—especially if you are feedback oriented!

I will keep you all posted on the journey. I am probably going to follow up again about some of the marketing experiments I have conducted and maybe share some fun stories. In the meantime feel free to check out the site at www.derfdice.com or check out a few tables I have shared publicly including some that are created in collaboration with dungeon masters.

See you next week for more story telling with about fifteen percent less shameless self promotion!

One of the most important things to do as a leader is to give people enough space to make their own mistakes. It is really hard to do and it is important. Some people learn better from making mistakes as opposed to being told that they are making a mistake. Ideally, they learn over time that it is better to listen to counsel than to keep making mistakes.

Now it is time for me to tell a story about my father.

My father hated everything about computers. I understand his reasoning although given what I do on a day-to-day basis you might expect that we disagree on this point. He has done multiple jobs over the course of his life—farmer, butcher, woodcutter, and many others. Over time he built up a beautiful farm where I was raised. I did not appreciate that very much when I was growing up—I was too busy trying to figure out how to escape to pursue my own dreams.

I have two older brothers who continued on with my father’s way-of-life. I watched from the sidelines as my father attempted to teach them valuable lessons. More often than not, they would hear my father’s advice and choose to do their own thing—they wanted to make their own mistakes.

I wanted to write about this because I realized recently that he was trying to impart his wisdom to them and I was struck by one phrase he used repeatedly.

“You are going to stick your hand into the fire. The problem is that you are dragging my hand in with yours.”

He would say this with a visceral amount of frustration. I could hear it in his words and see it in his pained expression. Nonetheless, he would let them stick their hand in the fire and shake his head sadly when something went wrong.

I still do this from time to time—I stick my own hand into the fire, as well as have my own hand dragged into the fire by someone else.

I appreciate his frustration and pain much more now than I did when I was growing up on the farm.

The hope is that you can communicate the pain of a mistake sufficiently to someone else that they can agree not to stick their hand in the fire. It is much harder than it sounds.

If you get burned by sticking your hand into a fire, it is a good idea to admit it and acknowledge it to anyone whose hand you dragged into the fire with you. You owe them the courtesy of the mea culpa.

It is also equally important to admit it to yourself. This will help you appreciate someone’s advice in the future when they are going to counsel you not to stick your hand in the fire.

If you scoffed at this article, then please click on this link. This is a book about making mistakes. For example, it would be a mistake for me to link this book and not tell you that I am going to get paid as an Amazon Affiliate. Maybe it is a mistake for me to recommend products on Amazon that I have not actually bought? Either way, thank you for reading along this week and I apologize for last week’s holiday induced hiatus. I truly appreciate you reading along even if you are not providing me with a veritable shower of nickels and dimes from sweet, delicious Amazon Affiliate merchandise.

See you next week when I hope to have all of my FTUE stuff live. 

PS: If you are all about that hashtag TTRPG and you also think that tutorials are for suckers, you should go and sign up now before I go and improve site onboarding.

Nothing to see here, move along.

I remember one event vividly in the first seven years of my career. I was working with a peer on an incredible product. We decided to go grab coffee. Out of the blue, my colleague decided to pop off on one of the other products. The language was shockingly coarse and the tone of the entire conversation was angry and surprising. My colleague continued on in this manner for about ten to fifteen minutes. At the end, he took a deep breath, looked at me and sighed in relief. 

“I feel better,” He said with clear satisfaction, “Now let’s get back to work.”

I believe this was my introduction to venting.

So what is venting? What is good about it and what is bad about it?

Venting is a method of relieving stress and tension. Over the years I have seen many flavors of stress relief—from disconnecting, quiet introspection (often while walking), and venting.

Venting is when you articulate many or all of the things that are bothering you about a particular subject. I have met many people who want to vent about their problems before they can constructively solve them. There are times that I like to vent about things.

When I am venting about a subject, I am not always looking for feedback or any action items to address the problems. I just want to articulate what is bothering me. The act of putting words to topics that are angering or frustrating me feels good. I think this is true for others because I have heard many people vent about issues to me also.

It is important to pick your audience when you are venting. It is very bad to vent to the wrong person. You might find your angry words come back to haunt you if you decide to “go off” and the person to whom you have vented is not a friend or confidante. I have had many of my subordinates vent to me over the years and I generally double check with them to see if they are just getting things off of their chest or if they need my help with them. I absolutely relate to someone if they tell me they are just venting.

I am not sure if there is a good or easy litmus test for how to pick someone you can trust to vent to. Sometimes it is a peer with whom you have been through a stressful work event, sometimes it is a good friend who you do not work with directly, or maybe it is a family member or a mentor.

If you are on the receiving end of someone venting, you should listen to them and empathize with their situation. I have caught myself a few times wanting to offer feedback or advice and I try to refrain unless I know that is what they are looking for. Sometimes someone just wants to be heard.

Another tendency to be careful about is to minimize their experience. It is easy to say “I had it worse” or “is that really your biggest first world problem today?” It is not always helpful to the person who is venting.

If someone is venting to you, it is important to realize it means they really trust you. You should listen to them intently and keep their frustrations in absolute confidence. You should talk to them about how you can help with these problems and they might tell you “I just needed to talk about it, I do not need any help.” You should absolutely respect their wishes in this regard. This is a hard one for me because I love to solve problems.

The longer you work professionally, the more likely you will develop a trusted relationship where you or someone else are capable of venting.

If your boss is venting to you, you should cherish that. You are getting a glimpse at what problems are like at the next level and it means that your boss trusts you.

I decided to write this because recently someone started venting to me. I appreciate when people decide to demonstrate that level of trust. It is a special moment.

If you are not in possession of a trusted friend or colleague, then please consider buying this obviously promoted and super expensive spiral bound venting journal from Amazon. Yes I am an Amazon Affiliate, and yes I found the most expensive product to shamelessly shill. This is also the first time the product I am suggesting to you is related to the topic—and probably the last. 

Unless, of course, you are moved to purchase said item by the mental imagery of writing down your angry thoughts coupled with the thrilling sensation of ripping that page from your journal, crumpling it up and setting it on fire (disclaimer: be responsible in your use of angry fire) as a means of solo ranty release: Behold my smooth words!

If this works you can take pleasure in the fact that you set me on the road to riches and greatness. Remind me later that you are the reason that I am successful and I will let you follow me on the Insta.

Hashtag Grateful

Hashtag SeeYouNextWeek

This past month was largely conversations directed at people who are doing some soul searching in their career. Does their employer value them sufficiently? Are there jobs that they are interested in? Do they have the tools to go find a new job?

In the process of having these conversations with some friends who were hiring managers, I talked about how important it is to value your great engineers.

My friend asked me the following question:

“What makes a great engineer?”

There are a lot of attributes I have seen in great engineers over the years. Many great engineers possess one or two of these attributes and some of them possess more. I do not know that I have met a great engineer who was excellent at all of these things.

Shipping software

First and foremost, the best of the great engineers I have worked with deliver software over the finish line. There comes a time in every project where you have a list of remaining issues and someone decides “we will ship this today.” Very few projects are perfect and even fewer are defect free. A great engineer will take software over the finish line and deliver it to production.

I have met some very capable engineers who can get a project to eighty or ninety percent, and then they require someone else to help them over the finish line. Shipping software is a key attribute of a great engineer.

Communicating ideas

Another attribute for a great engineer is the ability to communicate ideas. This can be both translating ideas into layman’s terms or it can be expressing the intent of a system so a more junior engineer can maintain it long after that engineer has left the company. I want to talk more about the latter than the former. We all make jokes about opening one of your projects from five years ago and having no idea what any of it means—and when I say five years, I mean five months. Great engineers will leave highly maintainable code in their wake with sufficient breadcrumbs and tombstones that someone can pick it up and maintain it without too many surprises showing up in production.

Recognizing patterns

Recognizing patterns is a very important attribute of a great engineer. I believe it is one of the most important skills to have as your engineering career goes into the world of Staff Engineer/Architect/Director of Engineering. If you can identify patterns of behavior of people and software, you will be able to create solutions you can apply to those patterns consistently over time.

Choosing software

This is probably the hardest attribute for an engineer to learn. Being able to make a pragmatic choice for a software language, platform, or software package is really important. Too many engineers attempt to apply new software to a problem. It is great to experiment and learn new tools. Sometimes production environments for large projects are not the place to do it. A great engineer will sit down and evaluate the requirements of a project and the capabilities or interests of their team before choosing software. It is dangerous to choose software in a vacuum. What percent of the team would be comfortable with that? Who in the organization will be strong enough to be subject matter experts in it? There are a lot of things required to make a decision on a language, development tool or software package. This is especially true for larger teams. If you are a software engineering leader and you mandate a big change in your software choices for the team, be aware that you will create delays, frustration, and employee churn. If you are a more junior software developer and you are bringing in new tools to a team, it is better to have an up front conversation with the team and team leadership about the pros and cons and include a prototype of some kind to demonstrate what the value will be.

Deleting code

You might expect me to say a great engineer writes lots of code. There is an even split for the most voluminous software writers I have worked with between “great engineer” and “I am firing this person”. I do not think there is a good correlation between volume of code created and greatness.

By contrast, I do think that great engineers are experts at removing code. Software engineering projects are complex beasts. Any time people can simplify software or reduce it in complexity is a good thing. Deleting code helps reduce noise in the codebase. This is very important for software systems that are mature. I have seen far too many people chasing down urgent defects and serious issues in large codebases where they have wound up wasting time in dead code. Great engineers help to reduce that distraction and inefficiency by cleaning up after themselves and other people.

“Software spider sense”

I wish I had a better name for this attribute of a great engineer. Great engineers have an uncanny ability to identify complex issues in software. I have run into my fair share of issues in production environments that defy the ability for teams to reproduce them and address them. I refer to hard-to-find-and-hard-to-fix issues as “Heisenbugs”. This is perhaps one of the rarest attributes of a great engineer. I can name less than a dozen people who I know who have a magical ability to “think like broken software” and work with a production environment to isolate and categorize symptoms that result in fixing or mitigating defects.

Comfortably uncomfortable

The last element of a great engineer is that they are very calm under pressure. This is an attribute that is the easiest to acquire through repetition and exposure. Dealing with production issues and urgent deadlines is stressful. It is also a crucible of fire. If it does not break you, it will forge you into a great engineer who will be able to step into a dire emergency situation without getting stressed or anxious and help you to focus other people’s energies and efforts to address the issue.

Thank you again for reading today. I make a living helping engineers unlock their greatness and I consider it to be pleasurable and rewarding. There are probably other attributes that great engineers possess—I may revisit this article in the future with an updated list. If you have worked with a great engineer and you think that I have missed one of the key things that makes them great, I would love to hear about it!

PS: Amazon.com suggests that this is a frequently repurchased item on their website, so I am attaching a shameless affiliate link that will result in generating revenues for yours truly if you click here and become the proud owner of a case of Orange Mango Recovery Water . I have now made more than one dollar as a professional Amazon Affiliate. Eventually I will unlock the magical powers of influencer marketing to turn this into a livelihood.

After last week’s article I gave a few people a courtesy review of their resume.

I am always happy to look at someone’s resume and give them some feedback. That is just as true this week as it was last week as it will be every week. Do not be shy. If you are reading this post, you are two to three clicks away from figuring out how to reach me via email or socials.

Unfortunately, most people do not like to click two or three times. That is why I am really crappy as a paid Amazon Affiliate—even when I pimp delicious unsweetened cherries. To make your lives easier, I am going to give a quick review of what I look for in a resume.

Is the resume reasonably sized?

I am not a fan of a ten page resume. There are times when it does make sense, if you are including speaking engagements, publications, patents, or significant experiences. I think of a resume like an Executive Summary—I want it to be short and concise. The ability to distill your professional experience down to a few pages is important to me. I expect one to two page resumes for people who are relatively early in their careers, three pages for most of their career, and maybe four pages if they have over fifteen years of experience.

Does the resume feel consistent?

The next thing I look for is the verb tenses for job descriptions and consistency across job descriptions.

I appreciate reading sentences that start in the past tense to describe accomplishments:

• Increased Revenue 15% through deployment of a new feature
• Developed a hiring pipeline to scale the engineering team
• Coordinated GDPR requirements with legal and platform team

I struggle when someone starts with this kind of formatting and in the next section of their work experience they swap to a different format:

• I built a new framework for cross platform mobile development
• I was responsible for three key releases for new titles.

I deliberately added a period to the second sentence as another form of inconsistency.

If possible, try to make sure your various job descriptions remain on the same page. I have seen far too many resumes that are three pages where the third page of the resume is just one line of text.

Does the resume include a mission statement or career goal?

This is not as important as other parts of the resume but I do love it when someone has a strategic career goal and can explain it to me.

You run the risk of someone reading your long term career goals and deciding that the role is not aligned with them. That is probably for the best, because that will become evident to everyone soon enough after you start the job anyway.

Are there specific successes or metrics included?

I like to see specific outcomes included in people’s career accomplishments. Did revenue increase by a percentage? Was there a decrease in site outages? Did the product ship on time or under budget? The more senior you are in your career, the more important this becomes.

Are there too many errors in the resume?

If you have too many typos or grammatical errors in your resume, I get nervous about the quality of work you will leave behind for someone else to maintain. I have a three-strikes policy with peoples’ resumes. If you have one error in your resume or possibly two, you might be sending out your resume under duress. If there are three or more things wrong with your resume, I become nervous about how to keep accurate documentation and accounting for your work output.

Is this person just a bad resume writer?

After I have finished going through a resume with my blowtorch and pliers, I take a step back and ask myself one last question: “Is this a solid employee who is just bad at writing resumes?”

If I believe this is true, I get pretty excited about interviewing this candidate. If they are a good worker who is bad at writing a resume, then they will get fewer interviews and I have a better shot at hiring them.

It is also something I can help fix. I am really happy when I can teach something really valuable to a potential employee.

How can you tell if someone is just a bad resume writer? That is really the million dollar question here. Unfortunately, I have yet to be able to articulate it well to other people. I am still working on describing patterns I see in a resume that indicate a really compelling candidate who simply needs to work on their resume writing skills. “I know it when I see it.” I would love to be able to explain it better.

You should take some time to give your resume a once-over. If you have a friend who has experience interviewing and hiring people, It would make sense to ask them to give your resume a once-over too.

If you have no friends, or none of your friends have experience interviewing and hiring people, then shoot me a note. I am happy to give it a once-over and ask the questions I have outlined above.

Thank you for reading along as usual. This post is not brought to you by the shameless profiteering of my Amazon Affiliate Link nor is it sponsored by my tool to help TTRPG DM’s improve the quality of their stories (derfdice.com). Raid: Shadow Legends has not driven a truck full of nickels over to my house and I am not getting an endorsement from the calorie-free smooth delicious taste of Diet Coke: Enjoy Coke! 

Maybe I should put half of my random ranting behind a paywall over at Substack? Information wants to be free, but John’s minivan also wants to be paid off.

See you all next week.