Some of the things #22
Where I share some of the things I've been thinking about, learning about, and exploring across work, tech, wellness, and life.
Dear Friends,
It’s Friday afternoon and I’m happy to be closing out the week by writing. I’ve had a busy two weeks since my last update - did a quick visit to Los Angeles, launched a new offering at work, and continuing to find inspiration through learning and creation.
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Some of the things I’ve gotten into
New Launch. When I started a consulting company last year, my partner and I targeted mid-size enterprises - companies with over $100M in revenue and 500-2000 employees. To our surprise, we’ve had some success this year with smaller, younger companies as well. Smaller companies (20-100 employees, $5M-$50M revenue) have different technology problems than larger organizations but it turns out taking a modern approach to tech works at any scale. I published a blog this week describing our answer to traditional Managed Services - we called it Tenger Thrive and it’s what IT Support would look like if you designed it from the customer standpoint - extremely flexible, affordable, staffed by highly skilled specialists who meet SMBs technology needs of today without compromising scalability and growth. If you know SMBs, non-profits or startups looking for better IT support, reach out anytime (and let me know you found us through my substack)
Farcaster Fall was announced a few weeks ago, a celebration of everything Farcaster Scenius with daily drops from artists, musicians, poets, writers and other creatives. My contribution was a personal essay (you can read it here), where I compared the protocol to the season, gave shoutouts to channels, and celebrated the people of Farcaster. I used paragraph to publish my essay instead of my usual Medium or Substack. One thing interesting about paragraph is people can collect your essays and you earn $matic as rewards (I’ve earned about $6 of matic so far, enough for a latte which is not much but more than I’ve gotten from this substack). To check out all the other great contributions to Farcaster Fall, Community artist ChrisCoCreated built a page that agreegates everything here.
As I’m writing, Dan Romero just posted this image to Farcaster boasting how crypto is becoming usable. And he’s right. Slowly but surely, and completely under the radar, crypto usability keeps getting better during this quieter time. This week Warpcast launched warps which you can use to cover costs of connecting to third party apps and mint NFTs from zora. About the new mint UX, Ted called it seamless, adding “more seamless than instagram shopping or TikTok Shop and as seamless as ApplePay. this isn’t a crypto product, this is a consumer product.” Last week I watched a friend onboard to Farcaster using her iPhone, no crypto wallet necessary, no seed phrase, nothing. It just worked. It’s low key really exciting to have a front row seat, even if it’s on the sidelines, as all this is going on.
20 life lessons from a former Vice Chairman of Blackstone’s Private Wealth Solutions as he enters his 90s. “Concentrate on finding a big idea. Treat everyone you meet as a friend. Every year, do something you’ve never done”
Everyone wants to get rich but be careful what you wish for - the rich have many problems.
The Greatest Invention in the History of Humanity is… gynecology? The article makes the case that it’s not tools and weapons that helped us advance as a species but gynecology. Childbirth was risky and dangerous: figuring out how to keep more mothers and babies alive is the reason we’ve managed to succeed as a species. The author asserts that it was the arrival of midwives…“when we started to become human.” And goes on to celebrate the importance of strong female bonds and the nurturing and collaborative female spirit. “alloparenting—the concept of caring for young who aren’t your children—is both distinct in our species and vital to its ascendancy, and was instrumental in our long, slow transformation to more cooperative societies with strong female bonds.”
Episode 4 of my podcast Four Old College Friends is out. In this episode, recorded on September 29, 2023, we talk about our career paths - from college to today. Lauren went from pre-dental to physical therapy with some pharma sales in between, Deanna was pretty much speech pathology the entire way, Jessica went from restaurant management to sailing the world to chef to reality TV producer (her path is the best obv), and I went from environmental engineering to tech.
I’ve been continuing to co-host GM Farcaster with the Prof three times a week - every M, W, F at 8:30 AM ET. GM Farcaster is a 21 minute live stream morning news show where we talk about the happenings of Farcaster - protocol updates, app launches, and memes. It’s an experiment in onchain new media. We use unlonely.app to livestream, engage with our audience via the live chat, and then post recordings as NFTs on Zora. Starting soon we’ll be making our episodes available as podcasts as well.
As I’ve written about before, my primary interest in starting podcasts this year was to learn about mechanical aspects of podcasting. Continuing to produce Four Old College Friends and co-host GM Farcaster has given me more learning opportunities. This week I’ve added some more skills/knowledge to the minimally viable podcast techstack. I used MP3 Tag, a free open source download, to add JPG cover art to podcast episodes, and have started learning audacity to do my own editing.
Gene Kim, author of The Phoenix Project, The Unicorn Project, The DevOps Handbook, Accelerate and more has a new book out with Steven Spear called Wiring the Winning Organization. I had the privilege of previewing the book this summer and loved it. I may decide to write a longer form blog post with my notes, but for now sharing this blog written by Gene where he describes the 3 layers of work - from the technical (hands on keyboards, the actual “work”), to the tools and instrumentation (the tools that make layer 1 easier), to the social circuitry which dictates how information and ideas flow. The book’s audience is for the “boss of the head of the technology” and asserts that leaders who focus on improving layer 3, using the methods of slowification, simplification, and amplification are able to “wire” an organization to win.
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 any other benefits. You can read about my original intentions in my first post here.
I plan to continue to write about twice a month and will be sharing 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 twitter and farcaster.
Until next time, keep putting good into the world. —adrienne🌏❤️