Skyler's Thoughts #1

Lessons and teachings about life from my experience as a professional

Why a newsletter?

So here it is, the first edition of my newsletter. I’ve been hard slacking on starting this for 4 months now to make sure I “got it right” or had a following or something like that. There’s really no better time to start something than right now. That’s a consistent theme I see mentioned ad nauseum from big thought leaders in the Twitter-sphere and people who have newsletters with six-figure followings.

I’ve been inspired by the likes of Gergely Orosz, Justin Welsh, Lenny Rachitsky to share my experiences as a professional software developer at multiple companies and how I’ve found success in various roles.

Who am I?

I would describe myself as an empathetic software developer with a strong interest for building great products collaboratively and making mistakes along the way.

Simply put I would say I’m a product-minded engineer (credits to Gergely Orosz and Sherif Mansour for coining the term)

I hope to learn a lot from publishing this newsletter like improving my writing skills and communication, I want to share stories that help people and learn from theirs too.

Previously I’ve held roles as a software developer at Lightspeed Commerce working on retail and ecom software as well as payments. I worked at AspenTech on cloud solutions for Fortune 500 companies in the process engineering space, and I’ve been the Chief Technology Officer of 2 companies (GeoClique & Croogloo), one pre-revenue in the real estate space and the other an established PMF small business catering to productions for film & TV.

Why should you give a sh!*?

—> I will include at least one actionable item in every edition to help you become a better developer, a better colleague, or a better person.

• I’ll share stories from my past that have taught me a valuable lesson or been foundational to my ethos

• You will also learn about actions you can take to be a better employee, colleague, and friend to those around you

• Probably more stuff also… we’ll see where this goes. I am always open to suggestions :)

Weekly Actionable Tip

Empathy and caring about others can make or break your organization, force yourself to think about the feelings and situations of those around you on a regular basis

This is a theme I will touch on much more in future editions and part of my core ethos in my day to day life as well as professional life.

Whether it’s

• A CEO telling their organization we’ve just had a record year due to covid, but also no one is getting raises this year due to covid

• Acting in a selfish or rude way towards to a coworker because they are different than you

• Losing patience with your elderly parent at their inability to understand and work with modern technology

All of those situations are real-life ones that I have been involved in, whether on the “good” or “bad” side. Each one indicates a lack of empathy from someone in my opinion that could have been rectified and a non-issue by being more understanding of one another, as well as better communication (another big topic for my newsletters).

If you want to hear about those stories and how I navigated them, the subscribe to my newsletter for free below.

I’ll release a new edition with an approximate cadence of once per week (sometimes it will be less than 1 week or closer to 2 weeks,)