Forem: Jeffrey Fate

Channeling Your Superpower

Jeffrey Fate — Wed, 03 Nov 2021 13:10:51 +0000

I recently stumbled on Matthew Pollard's book on marketing for introverts. This is the second in his introvert series, the first is on sales. I will definitely get that book, but this one is a better starting point.

You can't get sales (or interviews) if you don't have leads. You can't get good leads without marketing. Does Matthew's introverted marketing strategy hold up?

A Couple Of Clarifying Questions

Why is this relevant for dev.to?

For me, marketing myself is something I've never been good at. I'm sure there are at least a few others like me who can benefit from an approach specifically for introverts.

What is an introvert?

There are a lot of definitions thrown around, but I agree with Matthew's: someone who gains more energy (or recharges) alone.

Check out my last article on Chapter 1 if you haven't already:

[Book Walkthrough] The Introvert's Edge To Networking (Chapter 1)

Jeffrey Fate ・ Oct 26 ・ 3 min read

#books #marketing #career

Chapter 2: Channeling Your Superpower

This chapter is all about introspection. Most people with jobs or businesses can't say they love what they do. If you take the time to know yourself, being passionate about how you help others is actually attainable.

Do What You Love, Love What You Do

Finding and remembering your passion and mission will get you excited when you network with others. It is like finding a superpower. Spend the time to discover your passion. If you don't, eventually you burn out or lose interest. Connect it with what you do or what you want to be doing.

The Bull-Riding Insurance Salesman

Matthew uses the story of his client, the bull-riding insurance salesman, to show how you can find your passion. Dig down and find the spark by repeatedly asking "why" to all your answers to "why do you do what you do?". Eventually, that surfaces a real reason which is a deep part of you.

Put All Your Eggs In One Basket

You might have multiple passions. I know I do. It doesn't do you much good in business though. Trying to fulfill multiple passions will only confuse people and you won't land the right customers or interviews.

Lighting Your Fire

Understand why you care. Take Elon Musk as an example and see his reaction during the first successful Falcon Heavy launch. Answer these three questions to find the fuel that will take you to new heights:

What one thing do you want to see happen, improve, change, or stop happening in the world?
Why do you care?
What's the driving passion behind it?

To get past a block, ask yourself

Why did I choose this career, job, or business?
What personal stories connect me to it?
At work, what do I get my joy from?
What makes time fly?
What do I hate seeing happen to customers, coworkers, etc?
What do I love seeing customers, coworkers, etc. experience?
What are my favorite types of problems to solve?

These questions might seem unnecessary, but taking the time to find the answers will change your life for the better.

Commentary

Passion doesn't usually point you toward success. I argue that the goal is to find something that you can become passionate about. However, if you are already passionate about something, and it is also a business driver, bonus!

Definitely pick up the book to get all the great customer stories Matthew tells. They really solidify his point and make this approach to networking more real.

Next Time: Niching (You Can't Please Everyone)

Thanks for reading! If you're interested in more ways to make your time count, follow me on Twitter.

[Book Walkthrough] The Introvert's Edge To Networking (Chapter 1)

Jeffrey Fate — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 13:40:39 +0000

You can't get sales (or interviews) if you don't have leads. You can't get good leads without marketing. Does Matthew's introverted marketing strategy hold up?

A Couple Of Clarifying Questions

Why is this relevant for dev.to?

For me, marketing myself is something I've never been good at. I'm sure there are at least a few others like me who can benefit from an approach specifically for introverts.

What is an introvert?

There are a lot of definitions thrown around, but I agree with Matthew's: someone who gains more energy (or recharges) alone.

On to the book.

Why Introverts Make Better Networkers

The first part of the book covers explaining the problem (a vital part of telling a compelling story, but that's explained later), which starts by going back into history. It is really about how sales has changed, but gets to the meat of the matter quickly.

A few hundred years ago, most people lived in a rural setting and everyone knew the people they ran into and being a salesman wasn't necessary. Reputations where solid and people provided a valuable service to their neighbors that they needed. Bakers, farmers, blacksmiths, etc.

As travel became easier, salesmen went from town to town to find more business. They got a few sales in one town and never came back. Most didn't care about being trustworthy or having a good reputation because communication was difficult and they'd likely never be back. This is definitely what comes to mind first when I think of sales.

This describes "transactional networking", which isn't just about sales. It is the what people often think about when it comes to networking. Going from person to person offering what you do to see if they want to buy it. It is a numbers game.

Generally, introverts don't enjoy doing this. Many extroverts do; meeting new people and talking with them lights them up. Personally, I've tried knocking on doors to sell house painting when I was in college. It was miserable. A different approach to personal marketing and sales is a godsend.

Matthew says introverts are listeners so they are better networkers than extroverts. But, we can't just copy the extrovert approach. We need to use a different strategy.

Commentary

At this point I was still skeptical because I'm generally turned off from networking events. Trying to have a genuine conversation in a loud, crowded room is difficult and uncomfortable. But, maybe I haven't found the right kind of event yet.

Strategic Networking

Instead of a "spray and pray" approach, Matthew says to use a system. An approach that has a step-by-step approach. A process. He provides a couple of examples. The first is a business owner; the second an employee. It shows this approach works for both kinds.

The key to this strategy is displaying yourself as unique. You are one of a kind. Nobody else has the same background and experiences you do. Leverage that with positioning. Positioning yourself instead of making what you do a commodity works for business owners and employees. It even works for kids making friends.

All you need is planning, preparation, and practice. Sounds a lot like software engineering to me.

Next Time: Discovering Your Positioning (Superpower)

Thanks for reading! If you're interested in more ways to make your time count, follow me on Twitter.

Avoiding the Reason 92% of SaaS Companies Fail

Jeffrey Fate — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 12:50:57 +0000

The questions I'm answering as the first step in building a SaaS in 2021.

The employee to business owner transition is awkward and uncomfortable. Worse is making that transition and failing due to the primary downfall of SaaS companies: lack of product market fit.

Obvious problem? Yes. Obvious solution? Not really.

Questions I'm asking to find product market fit

Creating software as an employee is the ONLY part, but now that is just the easy part. The hard part is answering these questions:

Who am I helping?
What do they need?
What are they willing to pay for?
Is there competition?
How can I attract people?

Who am I helping?

I've struggled with this for a long time now. My first try at business was in the summer of 2020. I found my first 3 clients in a couple of weeks because I hustled. I helped each of them toward a goal. I was a health coach and the business didn't fit my personality. Building a customized, healthy lifestyle is incredibly important, but I really love working with other developers.

Developers have lots to do with limited time. Work. Learning. A personal life. Parenthood. I must be able to help devs who are burned out, looking for the next level, or trying to get better at life.

What do they need?

Ok, this one is harder. Actually, this is probably the hardest question (combined with the next one). I think I know what developers need because I am one.

Shortcuts.

All developers need shortcuts of one type or another. Really, this is developer experience. Maybe not the way some people think about it, but that's what it is. What shortcuts do they need most? That leads us to...

What are they willing to pay for?

TODO.

Seriously, I don't know what most developers will pay for. The only thing I have to go with is a shortcut to get the correct time zone. This came from a recent episode of The Art of Product, straight from Derrick Reimer's mouth:

187: Wait, There Are How Many Time Zones?! - The Art of Product

I'm not taking this idea too seriously. I think of it as a small bet, an experiment, and a way to get my feet wet building a SaaS business. Will someone pay for a quicker, easier, better way to find the correct time zone? I'll build the MVP and find out.

All the content I've consumed on the topic says I should validate the idea better. But, I'm biasing toward action and speed over accuracy on this one. Maybe I'll find that was the wrong path and correct for it next time. Experiment and learn.

Is there competition?

Yes.

There's timeanddate.com and worldtimeapi.org and of course Google. People must need this problem solved. The key is finding a way to be different enough and add some value that none of the other services have.

How can I attract people?

I have a few ideas about this. Demonstrating the utter rediculousness of time zones is one path. For example, the way time zones are always changing and how it makes development harder. Take this example:

Maz Jovanovich

@maz_jovanovich

PSA: As of today, Australia has 5 time zones once again. Apologies in advance to our overseas friends trying to make sense of this temporal anarchy.

04:47 AM - 03 Oct 2021

Do developers really want to take an extra day or two to add logic for the correct time in Brisbane on January 15th, and also Melbourne, and every other location in all of Australia? Every location in all of the world?

Probably not.

If I can make this explanation funny and entertaining as well as persuasive, I think it will make many people realize how crazy it is to reinvent the time zone wheel. Why not pay for a shortcut?

What next?

Find some developers to interview. I really need to get some answers to what developers will pay for. The best way to do this is one-on-one interviews. Perhaps nobody wants a time zone solution. Maybe there is a different common problem that I can help solve. Time to get to work.

What did I miss? I'm new at this, so please leave comments to plug holes in my strategy. Feedback always appreciated!

Time Zones Are Hard

Jeffrey Fate — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 17:04:39 +0000

I recently saw this on Twitter (hope it doesn't trigger any of you):

NEW TIME ZONES!!!

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1444524436548296705-923'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1444524436548296705&theme=dark" }

What's The Big Deal?

Imagine your application has users throughout Australia. They probably include people in the three red states in the right image above; where time is different during daylight saving time.

Let's also say your application has a feature that is very time-dependent. Let's say live TV recording. Users set recordings based on the schedule, in their local time. They expect not to miss recording their favorite shows.

Without updating and releasing a new version, everyone in the 3 states with a new time zone (only during DST) could miss recording a show at what is now 9pm.

Problems Everywhere

There aren't many devices or applications or services that don't depend on correct time. DRM. Caching. Shoe launches. Events. Reminders.

I bet most people reading this have stored or fetched time that needed to be displayed in the correct time zone. Perhaps you didn't convert the time, but I bet it had to be converted somewhere downstream.

Fix It

One solution to this problem is to do away with time zones altogether. As amazing as this would be for us, the chances are extremely low. If the United States can't convert to metric, there is basically no chance the entire world will ditch time zones.

Time for an engineering solution.

One possible solution is to only persist UTC (coordinated universal time) for any date-time. This gets us partway there. No users (ok, maybe a couple) will want to enter time in UTC, so we'll probably have to convert it. Here's where it gets tricky.

This amazing video by Computerphile puts it better than I could.

Let's see if we can find a solution.

User First

Let's start with a user story:

As a TV lover, I want to record my show in my local time, so that I can watch it later

How do we know the local time? Location. There are a few different ways to know location: IP address, Geolocation API, GPS, asking where the user is, more. Now that we have the location, we must find the time zone.

This is the part I don't have a solid abstraction for. We must somehow map that location (latitude/longitude, city name, address) to the correct time zone. The most accurate is latitude/longitude, but we must fallback to a less precise location too.

Is it feasible to map the borders of each time zone and do our best to match locations to those borders?

The rest of the solution is simple enough. Once we have the correct time zone, we can convert UTC to the local time and we're done.

Logic that does this should be encapsulated into something that can be easily integrated and reused. Something like a REST API or a local library.

Just An Exercise

I admit, this appears to have been solved already, but I thought it was a fun exercise. A reminder that we always have to think about time.

Here are some of the resources I found while trying to better understand time zones:

Olson Time Zones
Windows Time Zones
TimeZoneDB
The radical plan to destroy time zones
What would happen if we abolished time zones altogether?
The hazards of living on the right side of a time zone border
Why we should be watching the sun, not the clock

Adding Sentry to Spring Boot Securely

Jeffrey Fate — Tue, 28 Sep 2021 18:02:12 +0000

Observability.

When I started working with the microservices at my job about 4 months ago, there were numerous ways to know a bug made it to production.

Slack alerts. Cloudwatch logs. Production support.

There was no aggregation of errors and alerting.

I had never used Sentry, but heard a lot about it over the last couple of years. It seemed like a reasonable solution to this problem.

Other folks at my job agreed we should try it. Here's what it took to integrate.

Requirements

To understand fully what's going on in each of the services, it made sense to capture EVERYTHING, at least at first. This meant uncaught and caught exceptions, including the ones already caught by any @ExceptionHandlers.

We also wanted to keep any secrets out of our code and in AWS Secrets Manager.

Follow The Instructions

I found vast documentation on Sentry's Spring Boot docs pages. However, there wasn't a solution that let us store the DSN securely, outside the source.

My Solution

To store the DSN elsewhere and pull it in at runtime, I used the AWS Secrets Manager SDK. Here's a decent tutorial from AWS on how to get that setup. Now let's focus on the Sentry part.

Code

Combining the documentation from Sentry and the slightly different requirements we had, I created a Spring configuration that provides a Sentry OptionsConfiguration bean:

@Bean
@Primary
Sentry.OptionsConfiguration<SentryOptions> sentryOptionsConfiguration() {
    return options -> {
        SentryProperties properties = (SentryProperties) options;
        properties.setDsn(secretService.getSentrySecret().getDsn());
        properties.setEnvironment(activeProfile);
        properties.setDebug(true);
        properties.setExceptionResolverOrder(Ordered.HIGHEST_PRECEDENCE);
    };
}

Because Sentry provides an OptionsConfiguration themselves, I used @Primary to ensure mine took precedence.

I used the Spring profile name to set the environment; for example, QA.

To make sure we see all handled errors, I set the exception resolver order to Ordered.HIGHEST_PRECEDENCE.

Properties

I thought the code changes would be enough. I was wrong.

Turns out Sentry requires the property sentry.dsn to be set to something or the Sentry bootstrap fails when the Spring application context is built.

The solution:

sentry.dsn=dummy in my application.properties file

Summary

Sentry is an extremely useful tool that has a friendly and clear interface. We use it to see production issues and have more context of issues reported by our QA team.

With these small tweaks, we are able to get the data we need to resolve errors fast.

What's your next career goal?

Jeffrey Fate — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 17:16:55 +0000

Do you have a goal?

Usually, we set these with our managers...quarterly or yearly or something.

What's one you're working toward that is really important to you?

What do you hate most about being a developer?

Jeffrey Fate — Fri, 15 May 2020 16:19:03 +0000

Happy Friday!

Sometimes software development SUCKS...

Sometimes it is AWESOME...

Vent your frustrations here!
Exclaim your joys here!

Go nuts!
I'll start 👇

Hi, I'm Jeff Fate

Jeffrey Fate — Fri, 20 Jan 2017 15:06:08 +0000

I have been coding for 15 years.

You can find me on GitHub as jeffthefate

I live in Beaverton, OR.

I work for Nike

I mostly program in these languages: Java, Javascript.

I am currently learning more about Docker and Serverless.

Nice to meet you.