During the past few weeks, I’ve noticed that I work away from my manager for long period of times, where I’m still required to provide a proxy to her org, or guidelines as she would provide them.

Under these scenarios, I’ve come to start communicating with her asynchronously, but also I’m looking for alignment with her. I could/should not provide with incorrect guidelines, or opinions that would eventually contradict her in some manner.

Alignment becomes more important, the more autonomy that is given to you. Because having autonomy doesn’t mean that you can do whatever you want, at the end of the day, you and your manager are accountable for where you’re spending your time, and effort.

I try to constantly share what I’m working on during the week, and what I have in my “back-burner” after immediate tasks are done. I also try to specific questions, like things she or her peers in the org are caring about, that might impact any of the initiatives I’m looking into.

Mind the spec

The first month of the year has gone by. I still feel like the year hasn’t started. For some reason, everything has been very slow-moving lately at work. Or so it feels, perhaps I’m no longer in the right rooms?

For the past few months, between the end of last year and this year, I’ve been deep into the weeds of gathering all the existing API specifications available in my organization. Having a heterogeneous set of APIs altogether puts a lot of the organization’s “personality” into perspective.

Collecting these API specifications has been a journey and showed me the lack of guidance and standardization over the years. By reading the auto-generated specifications, you start noticing the personalities of the different teams that built the APIs.

This week I had my “mid-year” conversation with my new manager. As we were having this conversation, we talked about being aligned on vision, as I’m now a direct report of her, discussed managing up to avoid creating “drag” and instead help within the org’s success.

These past few weeks have been very tiring, and I had to work a few more hours than expected. But I also took the time to research tools like Foam or Obsidian. These tools allow to build and manage knowledge via markdown files and links.

This year, like every year for the last six years, I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts and generate something out of them—either this newsletter, or my blog, or even documents that can be shared at work.

But this time, I think I’ve found what I’ve been looking for. Given the rise of note-taking apps supporting backlinks (or wiki-links), like Roam, or even iA Writer, Bear notes, or Obsidian. I decided to try out if this manner of using notes was better suited for my style. My style is having many markdown files scattered around, but this time I can link between them more effectively. Allowing me to “view” and understand the relationships and how I’m coming back to specific topics, especially if you connect from your “daily note” and weekly notes, etc.

Now to “actually” produce something, I’ve been investing in lowering the bar from a random markdown file in a repository to a shareable URL. For now, that looks like this:

I recently saw this tweet getting on my feed