Happy Friday,

Around two or three times a year I'll experience an urge to learn a new programming language. Usually, I resist and wait until the feeling passes and I realize learning a new language is not a good use of my time. Well, I fell to that urge and I started learning Clojure.

Why Clojure? Well, it has been on the periphery of my life for a long time. When I lived in North Carolina their offices were less than a mile from where I worked. At other jobs people become interested and then obsessed with the language and that kind of passion is as infectious as it is off-putting. Finally, it is so completely different than everything I've done that the shock of it has novelty.

So I'm doing what I normally do, I'm using TDD and building a simple vending machine. I was able to cobble together a basic one after about a day or two of bumping up against lots of problems from simply not knowing how to do something. I'd ask AI for examples of those things, try them out, and refine them. Even though it was my first contact with Clojure, AI made obvious mistakes that I had to correct.

After graduating from that example I thought, "Hey, why keep things simple and achievable when I could make myself miserable by making a game?" So that is what I'm doing now.

Even though that idea is a bad one, I'm approaching it with my basic approach of reducing risk by isolating and solving. A great example is that I'm not just jumping headlong into building the game with Clojure. There are too many things to deal with at once. I'm prototyping the game in something called Pico-8. Once I have the basics of that I will have the scaffolding of the game, then I can isolate my challenges to the technology side.

Send help.

I have a talent, for breaking things down in a way that lets me make reasonable progress and reduce risk. At my last client, I got a reputation for how I'd scope product MVPs. This same talent applies to understanding and troubleshooting less obvious issues in companies. One example of this is how a lot of communication in companies mimics the child's game of telephone.

A senior leader says something, which gets interpreted and said to another group who does the same in turn. By the time it reaches the lowest level of employees, the initial remark of curiosity is now an imperative.

So an activity I've done in the past to help troubleshoot these issues is to trace communication. The idea is simple enough. I work with the concerned leader, observe what they are communicating, then show up at different levels of the group to ask what they learned. This gives me a good picture of where the filters and translators are in the group which then provides options on how to alter communication methods and vectors.

If you want to read more about this, you can here.

Sincerely,

Ryan

PS: I'd love a distraction from learning Clojure. Schedule a free call with me so we can talk through what is going on in your group and some small experiments you can try.