Happy New Year 2024
Reflections for a new year plus some of the things I've been thinking about, learning about, and exploring across work, tech, wellness, and life.
Dear Friends,
Is it just me or does New Years somehow feel like too far in the past to still be writing about today?
New Years Day was Monday. Today is only Saturday. It’s the very first weekend of 2024. It should feel perfectly normal to be writing about the New Year today. Yet somehow it feels like New Years was weeks or months in the past, not 5 days ago.
3 years ago, I tweeted “I can’t see the future but I know it looks nothing like today.”, and followed up with “The world is changing really, really fast right now. The rate of change will never be this slow again.”
Those words felt true back then, and they feel just as true today.
But I’m nothing if not disciplined, so I’m sticking with my plan to reflect on the new year on this lovely first Saturday of 2024.
I Don’t Do Resolutions
I’m not alone in saying New Years resolutions never worked for me. It’s not so much that I tried and failed; they just seemed so stupid to me I wouldn’t even try. (Side note: I’ve written about leading a shift from annual goals to quarterly goals at work and it was one of the best things I did to improve my team’s effectiveness)
A few years ago, right before New Years eve, I was visiting the Morikami Japanese Gardens in South Florida and on my exit through the gift shop I snapped a quick photo of this mug which lists 10 ways to good health using a very simple Less/More framework. Less Alcohol, More Tea. Less Meat, More Vegetables. Less Salt, More Vinegar. Less Sugar, More Fruit. Less Eating, More Chewing. Less Words, More Action. Less Greed, More Giving. Less Worry, More Sleep. Less Driving, More Walking. Less Anger, More Laughter.
These aren’t strict rules. It doesn’t command “No Alcohol. Only Tea”, but a gentle nudge towards behavior change for better health.
Inspired by this mug, I quickly wrote down a few of my own More|Less wishes for the new year. I didn’t give much thought to it. The big surprise for me was how effective setting broad intentions were at changing my behavior than setting specific resolutions or goals. They became guiding principles for my year. And now I continue with this format every New Year.
2024 Intentions
Less dogma. More Karma.
Less Judgement. More Curiosity.
Less Winning. More Learning.
Less Inside. More Outside.
Less Sitting. More Moving.
Less Frenzy. More Focus.
Less Doubt. More Confidence.
Plus, MORE yoga and strength training, writing, podcasting, being present - especially with family, serendipity, travel, and commitment at work.
Some Of The Things
A quick recap of some of the things I’ve been reading/listening/getting into:
Master Data Management podcast - I’m helping one of my consulting clients with an MDM implementation and found this conversation to be nuanced and authentic, and reinforced the most important concept about MDM being a business discipline and not an IT project.
Identity Management & Orchestration podcast - Identity Management is something all or most developers have to consider and integrate with, but maybe rarely spend much time thinking about. Identity orchestration is managing Identity across multiple clouds, multiple vendors, like kubernetes and terraform but for identity.
Self-Organizing Teams - I’ve been a fan of self-organizing teams since first hearing about the concept about a decade ago in my first agile/devops transformation. Several examples popped up this week. First, was the /count channel in Farcaster with a group of strangers counting. It’s a silly but great example of permissionless participation of complete strangers towards a common goal with no formal communication, coordination, or rules. Then, Charity Majors, cofounder and CTO of the observability platform honeycomb, shared her thoughts about whether engineers need managers, with a nice systems 101 lesson reminding us that hierarchy is a property of self organizing teams. And then finally, Vitalik Buterin, cofounder of Ethereum, casted about the tension between people who think hierarchies are efficient but also claim they would never work under boss.
Top 3 Salesforce Security Risks in 2024 - New blog we released with our partner Hubbl. I’m planning to create a companion podcast next week to go along with this article.
The GM Farcaster multi-platform broadcast workflow (sounds fancy, doesn’t it?) continues to expand, with all episodes now available for binging on our youtube channel. This month we launched a sponsorship program and booked special guests for Fridays - Rish building Neynar, Grace building Unlonely, Jack building Icebreaker, and more to be announced.
And here are some visuals of other things I’ve been up to. Top row: Untermeyer Gardens holiday light display, sporting new jewelry made by a 6 year old, getting a physical copy of photographer Kirill Polevoy’s recent work. Bottom row: Pixel art IRL by Shawn Smith, an art display of infinite candy (take a piece, the museum replaces, endless supply) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres , and a bookstore, all on display at the Hudson River Museum.
A Note to My Subscribers
I started this substack in December 2022 as an experiment to see if developing a writing habit would help clarify my thinking and/or provide other benefits. You can read about my original intentions in my first post or my more recent reflections after sticking with it for a year.
I write about twice a month and share musings, meditations, and links to things I’m finding interesting as I build out my consulting company, raise my kids, and have fun creating and learning in the worlds of crypto, tech, finance, science and wellness.
Thank you for supporting my writing and journey. If you’d like to get in touch you can reply to me here or find me on X and farcaster.
Until next time, keep putting good into the world. —adrienne🌏❤️
Happy New Year, Adrienne!
Yes on that resolution thing. Behavioral change goes best when you ease yourself into new (better) habits. The less/more thing is a great idea, and you don't have to wait until January first. Still, that is as good a date as any to start building new habits.
Looking forward to more GM Farcaster fun.