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I hear it’s a good idea to introduce the theme, purpose, and author of a blog in its first post. So here it is.

When I started work as a junior software engineer in a large consulting company (back in 2003), I tried to figure out what would be my “competitive advantage” there. I observed, I thought, I observed some more. I saw two kinds of people around me: business people and IT people. They were like milk and chocolate - together all the time, yet so different. People could jump between the two camps, of course. Every once in a while I’d meet a former programmer who became a business-head. And, more rarely, there were some who went back into IT after a long and perhaps illustrious management career.

Very consistently, though, people seemed unable or unwilling to manage both at the same time.

Inspired by the example of my first manager, who was non-technical but otherwise an excellent manager and positive role model, I set myself the goal of becoming a mixture of the two. That, I felt, was my advantage - an ability to leap around the thought-space, free of bounds, and be able to discuss high-level planning with the business guys while still keeping the ability to drill down into a very specific technical problem. So I pushed in that direction. I transferred to the consulting arm of the company (which allowed me to acquire the ‘business’ skills more quickly), and I worked on building up that side of the equation, since I felt that my technical knowledge was already adequate, after more than a decade of variously geeky activities at home.

It turned out there was a very good reasons why most project managers never got involved in the technology, as I found out 2 years later when I led my first project: lack of time. Being a project manager is very time-consuming, and a good project manager (technical or not) will in fact actively distance himself from the nitty gritty details to avoid being sucked into unnecessary discussions. I met with people who tried both approaches - hands-on and hands-off - and the hands-off managers were definitely the winners.

The corporate world demands this kind of specialisation. You can’t do everything at once because you’re only being paid for one of them and you’re expected to do that one full-time. The small business world, it turns out, is rather different.

It’s now been 2 months since I resigned, and one month since I left my job at the consulting company where I had started (though I must say it feels like a year has come and gone). For the year before I finally quit, I worked early in the morning and late at night to get my business started. For over a month now I’ve been working from home, putting my precious hours into my own online business instead.

One of the things I’ve discovered while running this business is that unlike the corporate world, specialisation is actively nefarious in this new life. I need to be able to jump from customer support to writing code, to shoring up bits of infrastructure, to planning my work for the next month, to discussing strategic directions with my business partner, to designing new functionality, all within the same day several times. If I can’t do this, my business will die.

Suddenly, my ‘competitive advantage’ is back, and I love it. Variety is the spice of my life.

What, you may be asking yourself at this point, does this have to do with the blog?

Everything. The mixing and matching of completely different activities into the same brain is the very essence of this blog. It’s what I’ll be writing about.

The main themes will be Business, Technology and Life. That’s what the three circles in the logo represent. I may dabble into some of my other interests on occasion, but the goal is to stick to these. I imagine they’re wide enough to cover most of what I want to write about.

In short, what you’ll find here is a strange, unique, and hopefully interesting mixture of productivity ideas, technological walk-throughs, “life” concepts, etc.

Welcome to my blog. I hope you’ll enjoy the show.