Best Chicago fabric stores for sewing projects, patterns and more – Bookmarking for our next trip!

We need to talk about startups… – Medium – Food for thought.

How’s the new job going? I’ve been asked that a zillion times recently, so it’s probably worthy of a job post. I answer, “So far so good!” To be honest, it’s hard to say. I mean, it’s great for a lot of reasons:

• I work with really smart and talented people who are all super friendly.
• Our product is a thing that people genuinely LIKE. (Sadly, I think this is a career first for me.) They rave about it! Several of my friends have actually used it and emailed me compliments about it!
• I’m learning heaps about things I never had a great deal of exposure to before (like content marketing, email campaigns, etc).
• The work I’ve done seems to be genuinely appreciated and the feedback has been great.
• I get to walk to work every day to an extremely cool office in Surry Hills where we’re fed by a wonderful chef.

So what’s the issue then? I guess it’s more just the ambiguity of figuring out where I fit in. It’s like switching schools. (Sudden 7th grade flashbacks.) There’s a fine balance between sitting back and observing, and jumping right in. This kind of situation always brings out my Imposter Syndrome, and it doesn’t help that I’m probably the most technical woman in the office. I feel the need to prove my bonafides to the guys, but I know how annoying that can be. And then there’s the perpetual issue of being a generalist in a team of specialists. Everyone wants to feel useful, right?

But ambiguity has upsides too. I have the freedom to get involved in all sorts of areas that I wouldn’t before. So far I’ve resisted the impulse to fall back to being a BA (well, mostly – I’ve created a couple Activity Diagrams that were like SCRATCHING THE WORST ITCH EVAR). Mostly I’ve been working on an email marketing strategy, but I’ve also been helping out on the recruiting front and have passed a couple leads over to HR. I’ve identified some bugs in our analytics tracking. I’ve lined up some speaking gigs on behalf of Canva and the company is extremely supportive of that. Next week I’m going to have a stint on Customer Support (with some other new recruits). All of this is new and exciting. Scary, but fun too.

So that’s where I am after three weeks. Looking forward to the next six months and beyond!

(“VP of Gettin’ Things Done” is actually my current title on LinkedIn. I’m thinking of changing it up every six months. Any suggestions?)

Pressure Cooker Pork Stew with Sweet Potatoes and Prunes – Dad Cooks Dinner – Made this for dinner tonight, and it was glorious.

Here’s a giant 800-track alt/indie-focused 90’s playlist in chronological order – Medium – Oh hello, soundtrack to the next 55 hours of my life.

Roald Dahl’s The Twits: How do you make a book that smells? | Children’s books | The Guardian – Great idea, but EW!

IFTTT Blog – Introducing the Maker Channel – Awesome! I don’t have to roll my own tweet service anymore.

How To Marry The Right Girl: A Mathematical Solution : Krulwich Wonders… : NPR – I’m going to use this method to find a builder for my bathroom renovation.

Start-up Costs: Silicon Valley, Halt and Catch Fire, and How Microserfdom Ate the World – How can Microserfs be 20 years old? I need to buy it and re-read it. (I keep giving copies away and never getting them back; that’s how you know it’s good.) I love that book. I first read it when I was working in a startup in the dotcom boom, living in a sharehouse in London with my boyfriend and two other guys we worked with. I identified with Daniel, but I wished I was as cool as Karla. I think about her theory that the body stores memories and emotions in muscular deep freeze every time I get a massage. I cried and cried at the ending. I even liked the silly bits, like the pages where Daniel would free associate words to create a subconscious for his computer. IT SPOKE TO ME, MAN. And now here I am once again in startup life, and everything is different but somehow the same. Poetic, isn’t it? Change all the IRC references to Hipchat and you’re pretty much there. (And I know I’m not the first to point out that Coupland essentially invented Minecraft in this book. I hope Notch thanked him!)

This made me think: Is there a recognised canon for Computer Age books? I think Microserfs should be in it. What else? I recently read The Cluetrain Manifesto for the first time, which everybody else in my book group hated but I loved. (Man, in 2000 we really thought intranets were going to be a much bigger Thing than they ended up being, huh?) I still haven’t read The Cathedral and the Bazaar or The Mythical Man Month, which I probably should. The Snook reckons that The Cuckoo’s Egg is worthy of inclusion. Any others?

Geo for Bootstrap, a Timeless Theme by Divshot – It’s 1996 all over again, and I LOVE IT.