And hey, I work for a company with an octopus mascot! I knew that office art would come in handy.
Long story short: I’m joining Unified API — or “Unified” for short, online at unified.to —as their Supreme Leader of All Things Developer Relations. That’s not my official title, but it’s the most accurate description of my role.
Unified’s product, like the best startup products, is something its founders needed but couldn’t find, so they made it: a unified API.
It’s a way to call all a whole lot of SaaS APIs from all sorts of categories — HR, ATS, CRM, marketing, authentication — from a single API.
If you’re going to join a startup, you had better believe in the founders, and I believe in Unified’s founders, CEO Roy Pereira and CTO Alexey Adamsky. I know them from when I live in Toronto — Roy from Toronto’s strong startup scene and its then-monthly DemoCamp gatherings…
…and Alexey, who developed one of the apps that I regularly showcased when I was Microsoft Canada’s breadth developer advocate for Windows Phone 7:
I’ve also had the pleasure of meeting and being vetted by Unified’s Head of Marketing, Kailah Bharath and Head of Sales Michelle Tomicic:
And yes, with the addition of Yours Truly, that’s the entire company. I’m back in startup mode!
The Pragmatic Engineer’s chart comparing working at a startup vs. working in big tech. Tap to view the source.
It’s going to be an interesting change of pace, moving from a big tech company to a small and scrappy startup, but part of the allure is the adventure. As Gergely “Pragmatic Engineer” Orosz puts it, the good part about startups is that they’re are amazing places to learn in, and you can make a large impact and directly influence the company.
Of course, adventure doesn’t come without a “risk tax.” Being in a startup can be unsettling: there’s less financial stability, you can’t “coast,” and you’re always looking over your shoulder for the ever-present spectre of potential failure. But I prefer to live by this Venn diagram:
Unified is based in Toronto, but I will remain based here in “The Other Bay Area,” Tampa Bay, operating from my home office, pictured below…
My home office, where the developer relations magic happens!
I’m going to spend a lot of time going over Unified’s documentation, SDKs, blog, white papers, dashboard, and every other part of the developer experience and do what I can to make a great developer tool even better!
I’m looking forward to the adventure with Unified!
One of the upsides of being laid off is that you get a couple extra hours a day — and only a couple, because getting a new job is your new job — to pick up some things that have fallen by the wayside. For me, one of those things was playing around with electronics and IoT (Internet of Things) devices, and I’d been waiting for a chance to pull out my “IoT box,” pictured above.
Clockwise from the top:
Pimoroni Badger 2040W: It’s an ID badge that’s also a wearable computer with Wifi and buttons, so it’s interacive as well! It has an E Ink screen, so the display can still show text and graphics, even with the power cut off.
Elegoo 37 sensor module kit: Lots of blinking lights, speakers, buzzer, laser emitter, keypad, temperature sensor, humidity sensor, light sensors, sound sensor, infrared motion sensor, magnetic spring sensor, and more.
There are big payoffs to being able to tinker with and fix physical things: it helps build a “can do” mindset that will serve you well, especially during a long post-layoff job search during a time when the jobs market is tough. It’ll take you far in work, life, and play.
I’ll write more about my IoT/electronics projects as I complete them.
One of our emergency battery-powered lights had a relatively simple defect that could be fixed with a relatively simple repair. Luckily, I had my soldering iron handy…
There are two main reasons why I’m relying on connections and referrals to land my next job:
With one notable exception*, every job I’ve ever had came via a connection or referral, and
Applying “cold” means filling out asinine applications like the one pictured above — and hoping to get noticed among the hundreds of others filling out the same form.
At the very least, they could’ve posed the question in a cool way…
🚨 Content warning: Samuel L. Mother-effing Jackson!
The “years of experience” field for English is probably the result of the application form software or the person who set up the form. They probably wanted a fluent English speaker and entered “English” into the “required skills” section. The software simply asks for years of experience for any required skill.
It should be noted that if your primary language is English, filling out the “years of experience” field for it gives away your age.
✳️ That exception? Auth0, which was later acquired by Okta. I saw the job on LinkedIn and filled out the application form.
I was sorting out some of the stuff in my office near the desk when I saw the scene pictured above and thought to myself, “this would tell an interesting story.”
Going counterclockwise from near the top left, the items are:
1000 won note from South Korea from my stash of travel currency that I was organizing
Adafruit PyGamer handheld game console, which is also programmable in CircuitPython, as well as Arduino’s C-like language and the languages supported by MakeCode Arcade.
The keyboard and Storyteller Tactics were prizes I won in the “Tracy’s Treasure Chest” raffle at last Friday’s Spring Tech Fest, a.k.a. Tracy Ingram’s 50th birthday party.
The raffle was unusual in that a winning ticket wasn’t for a specific prize. Instead, a winning ticket would allow you to enter a prize room containing over a hundred items, where you could choose what you won. You could buy multiple tickets, and you could win multiple times.
Proceeds from the raffle are going to girls’ STEM education in local high schools, so Anitra and I bought ten tickets and won three times (she got a Kemove K68 keyboard). I think we did all right!
Software may be eating the world, but software needs hardware to run! In this talk, I’ll talk about the value of knowing how hardware works, as well as how to get started on building your hardware skills, from basic soldering, to how chips work, to playing around with “Internet of Things” devices like Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. Find out more and register here.
ℹ️ TL;DR: While wandering around the streets of Austin, Texas, I unknowingly stumbled into Twitch/OnlyFans streamer PeachJars’ “Free Advice 4 Charity” table, and hilarity ensued. Scroll down to see the video!
“What do you mean?” I asked, because I wasn’t sure what he was referring to.
“At the start of your talk, you mentioned that you were recently laid off. It’s brutal out there right now, but you wouldn’t know it from the way you gave your talk. You look like you were having fun.”
Me, at the start of my talk at Civo Navigate North America 2024. Photo by Jay Boisseau. Tap to view at full size.
“Maybe I’m wired that way,” I replied. “But it’s also that this isn’t my first layoff. I find that things go better if you have a firm belief that you can make things better.”
“In fact,” I added, “because this isn’t my first rodeo (hey, we were in Texas; I’m supposed to use that metaphor!), I know that inside the rough times, there are a lot of surprising good times baked in.”
Thursday morning
This was the day after the conference. It was morning, and my flight wouldn’t depart until 6:15 p.m. I had a couple of choices:
Option 1: Hunker down in the hotel lobby and continue the job search. After all, it is a brutal job market at the moment, even for people with my experience.
The Moxy’s lobby isn’t so much a hotel lobby as it is a pretty nice hangout space with good free wifi and coffee, lots of tables and power outlets, good music, a bar, and a nice taco restaurant. I could easily get a lot of job search work done there, which some might say would be the smart thing to do with that time.
Mural near my hotel.
Option 2: Leave my bags at the hotel, break a twenty-dollar bill into small change, strap on the accordion, take in the sights, sounds, and people of Austin, and make some people’s days a little odder (and hopefully better).
You’ve probably already guessed what I did.
I met Ryan the busker on Guadalupe Street. Tap to view at full size.
I met Ryan the busker at Guadalupe and 23rd and put a fiver in his bucket. In exchange, he invited me to play Tom Petty’s Free Fallin’ with him, and as a Florida musician, I am legally required to be able to play Tom Petty. We had fun.
A number of people at the nearby bus stop shot video of us, so you might see it floating around the internet.
Free advice for charity
PeachJars’ “Free Advice” table. Tap to view at full size.
The breakout moment of my walk was when I passed by a table that was promoting free advice for charity, where the charity was Alveus, an exotic animal sanctuary that provides permanent homes to non-releasable exotic animals.
A cheerful young woman sat at the table, flanked by another holding a sign, and a third running what looked like a streaming camera rig. I confirmed the “streaming” part when I saw that the table had a sign that showed the seated woman’s Twitch URL.
PeachJars, I thought. Cute name. I’ll have to look up that channel later.
Rather than tell you what happened next, let me just show you the segment of her stream where I appeared. And be sure to read the stream of comments in the right column!
Quite possibly the first (and maybe last) time that I have been called a GIGACHAD.
😘 My thanks to PeachJars and company for being so kind!
Lunch with new friends
Tap to view the original post on LinkedIn.
I had posted earlier on LinkedIn that I was in Austin for the day and asked if anyone wanted to do lunch. Luckily, Connor Brown, Noah Birrer, and Jacob Colvin answered the call, and we got together at Iron Works Barbecue, where Noah covered my lunch and I enjoyed the conversation so much that I forgot to take a picture.
Find the good times in the bad
I could’ve stayed in the hotel and worked on my job search, and I might be a few hours ahead today. But because I chose to step out onto the streets of Austin — a city that I don’t see every day — I had experiences I wouldn’t have otherwise had, met people I wouldn’t have otherwise met, and my headspace is even readier for the hustle.
I now have a better answer for the person who asked me how I stay optimistic while being laid off. It’s because I set out to find the good times in the bad. If you’re laid off, see if you can do the same.
I’ll close with this quote from Sigmund Freud that I’ve been hearing repeated lately:
“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
