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Owen's Blog
Owen Evans' Views on the World
WDCNZ 2013
I love running WDCNZ, and few days about the job are more satisfying than the big reveal.
Today we launched the lineup for 2013, and I’m pretty stoked with the speakers we’ve managed to attract. I love the fact I’ve been able to reach out to these guys, invite them to come and speak and a bunch of them said yes (we did get a rejection or two but everyone is always very friendly about it)
Some of the highlights for me this year:
- two streams are back, I missed them last year but now we have a bigger venue we can do more content
- I want to get more female representation at the conference and almost had a 25% female speaker ratio but that unfortunately hasn’t panned out. It’s always hard picking speakers but I wanted to make a strong effort this year to make sure we had a strong international presence from female speakers working really hard in the field.
- Great variation in technical tracks: I always wanted WDCNZ to be about uniting people working in different web technologies, this years should be fun for everyone
I always get really nervous just before launch as this is the first time we get any kind of feedback on the lineup, but so far it’s been really positive.
What do you think? Check out the programme here and get your earlybird tickets too!
It’s the guilt, stupid
So I read this article http://katemats.com/why-ctos-shouldnt-write-code-at-work/ today as it was picked up off the twittersphere. I can’t help but relate wholeheartedly with the premise.
Over the past 18 months I’ve transitioned from a 90% dev at Xero to more like a 10% dev, the rest of my time is spent (I think) on helping out other developers achieve what they need to achieve. (oh and finally trying to get fit by going running).
I’m not coding much during the day and I’m finally going to stand up and say “I’m ok with that” I do a lot of development in my spare time (most of my nights are spent in my study coding as I hate TV) but during the day I don’t have to open visual studio more than once or twice and I’ll be lucky if I get a line or more written.
I’m ok with not coding
I’m ok with not having much ‘output’
I’m ok with other people being better than I am (and most of the people I hire are better than me)
I’m there to help them get their jobs done. I’m support. I’m about helping them make decisions and taking them away from decisions they don’t need to make. Being one person you can call on to keep the big picture (software wise)
So rather than being an Architect who doesn’t code (I’m really not much of an architect, I’m crap at drawing UML diagrams etc) I’m a manager/product manager/subject matter expert, who doesn’t code.
Today I finally admitted defeat. Realised the one piece of code base I was holding on to wasn’t moving forward fast enough and handed it over.
It’s not that I’m not capable of maintaining and pushing the project forward but it’s simply not on my priority list and doesn’t get done.
This is my confession: I don’t code much any more at work, and I’m ok with that.
