Nick Manning ⌨️

So I'm crafting content for a small book and course over this winter break - heck why not? Topic not yet public! Yesterday was day 0. I’ll be documenting my naive shot at this - because again, why not? Maybe it can cajole others to give a go? At minimum I can get some helpful feedback along the way from others. Here’s what I did yesterday starting from absolute 0: 1. I recorded a brain dump video, talking about who, what, why, how etc about my idea. Somehow video recording myself "put me on the spot" and I was able to focus more on conciseness. 2. I generated a book/course outline from this. I uploaded the video to otter.ai to transcribe it. I refined it into a tentative chapter outline and dumped it into Notion. Side note: I typically like the otter.ai iOS app to quickly record my thoughts so that's why I went with that. And for some reason I'm not a huge fan of writing like this in Markdown (i.e. via Obsidian) so I'm trying Notion. I like the writing experience in Notion especially with the prospect of later collaborating with an editor later. 3. Then I recorded a brain dump video on "topic A”. So this time not a video, just for convenience. I used willowvoice.com's macOS app to just talk away for 30 minutes directly into Notion. Talking for about 30 minutes gave me roughly 2000 words. Calculating how much I need to do this gave me a lot of motivation. For example, I want to craft a book and course where someone can choose to read or consume video. For video, I want to keep it to max 2-3 hours so I'm going for 10k words per hour. Therefore I whittle it down 2000 words with heavy editing. I think that after a few weeks of repeating this process I can achieve this goal, then heavily edit the content down further. Notes for the engineers reading this (warning, needless geeking out here). I may consider just self publishing later later + host the video version on a microsite served by a simple web-app that pulls the content straight from Notion (cached of course when served up). I can later host multiple publications courses using that same web app as it could support multi-tenant (extract domain from HTTP header -> determine tenant to serve up, host on same VPS for dollars a month). substack.com/@seenickcode if anyone wants to keep tabs on my progress and gain some insights. Definitely not an expert on this entire process but I think the conversations will be interesting along the way.

Stressed navigating a challenge as an engineering manager? People challenges can be tough. I’ve found more and more that thinking in and leaning on frameworks to navigate those challenges at bare minimum can nudge one in the right direction. Stress can down immediately too thus leading to clarity of thought and an optimized outcome. And if the framework is repeatable and ends up useful, bonus – note it down for next time. My personal fav: SBI

Je ne commanderai plus jamais chez @SGMJ_Officiel. Ces génies ont saisi MANUELLEMENT mon adresse de livraison INCORRECTEMENT dans @ChronopostSAV et l’ont envoyée à la mauvaise personne. Une incompétence scandaleuse.

Is it just me or do most engineers not really have a solid idea of what an engineering manager actually does?