Sheep Code Enters 2023
Preview of what is to come
Happy New Year! 2022 was one of the best years of my life both professionally and personally. I started my dream job at AWS. Our team was part of the Amazon CodeCatlalyst launch. Sheep Code was launched! My wife and I had our first daughter. The college football team I cheer for didn’t have the season I wanted, but that’s OK.
When my daughter was born, I had to slow down my Sheep Code posts. My development team was also working toward a product launch, so I had very little mental space to allow me to write. However, with the New Year here, I am ready to pick things back up at full speed. Here’s what to expect this year.
Name Change/Rebrand
The name “Sheep Code” was never meant to be the permanent name of this newsletter. I plan on rebranding it to a new name this year. However, I still have not thought of a name! If you think of anything, please reach out.
Series
To make my posts a bit more navigable, I’m going to categorize posts into series. Names are pending, but here is what I have so far.
DevLife - these will be short posts about my work as a software engineer and other non management roles (like DevOps). I’m going to lean heavily into my individual experience on these posts.
ProCode - infrequent, longer posts focused on exemplary software engineering. Some posts will contain code and diagrams.
TheMgmt - these posts will focus on management at a tech company. The primary audience is for managers, people seeking to be in management, or those curious about what managers do at tech companies.
Posts in a series will have one of those as the start of the title followed by a counter integer. For instance, the first DevLife posts might be titled “DevLife #0 My First Internship”.
Free posts
The vast majority of my posts will not require a paid subscription. Any content I write specifically for beginners or people looking to get into tech will always be free. DevLife posts will almost always be free. ProCode posts will usually be at least partially free.
Paid posts
I do plan to write posts that require a paid subscription to access the full content. Posts where managements/executives are the primary audience are more likely to be paid. If a post requires a paid subscription I will not send an email to the free subscribers about it unless the post has free content in it that is useful. I don’t want to spam your inbox!
What I won’t write
I will never write posts that are overly critical of specific people or companies. Any negative examples I use will be annonymized. I don’t write gossip pieces either. I do appreciate other writers that ethically criticize companies, but that isn’t what this newsletter is about.
Should you become a paid subscriber?
At this point, I have not written any paid content. Thus, you should only become a paid subscriber now if you wish to support me and have the financial means to do so. My paid content will be directed at professionals and management. If you’re a beginner, please don’t feel like you need to become a paid subscriber! If my posts help you break into the industry, then once you get a job perhaps consider paying then.
Sneak Peak
I have a good number of unpublished drafts that I plan to finish this year and send. Here are some of them (titles will likely change):
DevLife #?: How does on-call work?
DevLife #?: Getting the most out of 1-1s
DevLife #?: Navigating the dreaded outage bridge
DevLife #?: Balancing Security and Risk
DevLife #?: Devastating Angry Interteam Dynamics