rzazueta's comments

> * So public housing can't be at least partially paid for by the tenant, it must be completely free?

Depends on what you consider as payment. I'm in favor of temporary housing (e.g. a tenant is expected to stay in the area no more than five years) being owned and managed by the city in which it's located. "Rent" would go toward maintenance of the building and surrounds, with any extra going back toward city services. Rent could be offset by a number of things - tenant's physical contribution to the maintenance, stipends for public service (e.g. teacher, social workers, etc.), federal grants, etc. The city would be expected to keep rents low. Maintenance could be handled by parks and rec. This is, of course, all dependent on how the city is set up, but I like it as a model.

Permanent housing would also be handled by the city, but only in terms of building and selling. Developers and real estate agents have a LOT of incentive to keep housing prices climbing. Putting this in the hands of the city - not the state, not the feds - has greater potential to help influence positive growth with citizen input while reigning in costs.

The part I have not solved for here is situations like Atherton, which is heavily populated by rich white weirdos who would rather no one other than their own live there, and actively work to discriminate against "undesirables" moving to their city (see the recent hullabaloo there regarding affordable housing). On the one hand, if that's what their democratically elected city government is pushing for, and the citizens agree, that's basically democracy at work. But you can't ignore the folks who are being left behind and simply make them the "problem" of the next city over.

> * No bridge or road tolls anywhere, any time?

Nope. Tax the companies that ship goods on those roads and bridges fairly and you'll recoup those costs. As should the fees for vehicle licensing.

> * No paid street parking either, even in highly demanded areas, like the middle of big cities, where demand needs to be managed somehow

Nope. Parking is self-managed - if there's no spot, you can't park. Adding money only fills the coffers of the local government, it doesn't really do much to actually address the issue. You may argue that the money could go toward adding more parking structures, but I'd argue back it's wiser to build cities that don't rely so heavily on motorized transit for access. The more parking we add, the less room we have for things like homes and small, locally owned businesses.

> Any kind of license or permit or passport should all be free, even for businesses?

Licensing and passports and all that aren't public goods - they're methods of tax collection, authentication (license ID, passport) and authorization (you need a passport to travel internationally). The fees you pay for them are what ought to ultimately be paying for those services (in addition, yes, to the other taxes we collect).

The core of the issue is money. All major news agencies are all owned by corporate interests, and they aren't in the news business for the betterment of society - they want to turn a profit. This affects every editorial decision they make, and leads to consequences like fear-based reporting and, much worse, editorial decisions that favor the interests of the corporate owners, meaning a lot of stuff about them that may be bad is either downplayed, buried, our outright not printed.

This sounds conspiratorial, but it's all just the side effect of putting profit over people, which is the American way.

If you're a PM looking for a role as a freelancer, I'd consider taking the consultant route. If you're a PM with a deep experience either in a particular industry (e.g. finance) or a particular technology (e.g. APIs), you can easily pivot to a consultant to those types of companies, helping their PMs and teams figure out how to compete.

But even when I was a full time freelance developer focused on producing code, though I would not question the value of having a PM, I specifically freelanced so I could manage myself.

The answer to the why of all of this is super easy: greed.

Edit: Sorry, that was probably not polite. But I've been here before too many times. IO Docs, RAML, Blueprint... I guess the question is - why should I adopt this if I'm already committed to the Open API ecosystem, and why should I consider it if I am still deciding?

I actually think we're going to look back and see the massive hiring and good news that came in 2021 is the blip. A lot of these companies that soared during the pandemic - like Zoom and Netflix - are seeing revenues drop. Many companies figured the worst was over and went nuts hiring, getting funding, etc. Now that the fed is raising rates again, a lot less of that money will be flowing around, and companies that hired thinking they would get their next round will find themselves laying a bunch of folks off. It's already started. Every single day there's another version of an article in my tech feed saying something to the tune of, "Batten down the hatches for the next 18-24 months". Executives reading those stories are already making moves to cut costs and try to ride out the storm. Whether the storm comes or not is largely irrelevant as the effects will be the same - and all of that preparation for the storm in many ways ensures its arrival.

If you figure out these answers and get to know your targeted audience very well, you will then understand how they learn about new products and evaluate them. You can then start marketing to them in their language with the value proposition of how your product solves their problems. Put ads up where they will find them, hang out in forums and chat rooms and such where they ask questions, write blog posts about things they are interested in and make sure they get picked up by search engines and - hopefully - news aggregators like this one where your target audience is reading. It's a slow, iterative process that keeps building on itself as you keep going and building momentum. It will be very discouraging at times, but you need to really understand your customers and, when you do, you should be able to figure out why things aren't working when they aren't and how to fix them.

Don't worry about going big and scaling - make enough money to support your needs (and trim your needs as low as you can while remaining comfortable). I found consulting clients by posting on my LinkedIn feed. I have one major privilege here - I've been in the industry for more than 20 years and have built a sizable network as a result, all of whom were eager to help me find clients. The bulk of this network is only a few years old, though, so there's no reason you can't build a similar network yourself, if you haven't already.

As technologists, we tend to focus on the tech. Spend some time focusing on people, their problems, and how you can uniquely solve them - better, faster, more focused, whatever. You may even find tech isn't the answer to solve for - it may be education or writing or running workshops or something else.

And, mostly, build trust in yourself. All of this stuff seems so complicated at first, but that's because we complicate it needlessly. You want o be successful in business? Find an audience that has a need, really understand the consequences of that need and what it means to that audience, create a solution and solicit feedback from the audience, then sell to those who respond favorably. Then, keep listening to them and intelligently improving it to grow the business. If you sit down and think about how YOU would go about doing it, you may find most of the answers you're looking for.

- the 2000 Dotcom Bust

- the 2008 recession

- the 2020 pandemic recession

- Now

The short answer is that no one really knows what will happen. A lot of companies are reading the tea leaves - and regardless of what anyone tells you, that's really all it is - and trying to figure out how to make the best moves given rising prices, rising interest rates, a pandemic that, though mostly tamed, still presents challenges and potential dangers, war in Europe, etc. Back in March of 2020 when I was still actively looking, I went through the same thing you are now - companies who were super eager to hire me all of a sudden stopped the interview process and circled the wagons. And these were the FAANGs.

My advice here is to keep looking, but start working on something on the side that will generate revenue. Working for a company feels like a safe move until the economy contracts and they ultimately decide what they think you're really worth. In every one of those previous downturns, I felt like my sense of self worth diminished along with every rejection or ghosted call - and I suffered a LOT of those. This last time around in 2020, I finally gave up entirely and became an independent technical strategy consultant - basically doing what I've always done, but under my own banner instead of someone else's.

It took six very hard months until I had a solid client base and consistent enough income to survive - I had to borrow money from some folks during the time to pay the mortgage and healthcare, which was humbling, but it worked. I also have a mortgage, a wife, and a teenager to support, so I really had to get a solid income flowing fast - there wasn't a lot of room for error.

If you get a job before you figure out your side gig, great! But maybe keeping working on the side gig because it's nice to have something to fall back on. If you get the side gig running, but it's not making you enough money and you get an offer - take the offer, but make sure you keep building out the side gig.

I was probably about your age when the first Dotcom bust happened - I had been out of college only two or three years at that point - and I gotta tell you, that was frightening. When I got my first job out of college, I was hot shit. I put my resume on Monster.com on a Wednesday and by the following Friday I had received about 100 calls, 10 job interviews, and five solid offers. When the bubble burst, not a single person or company returned any of my calls. For nine months. A smarter man would have spent that time trying to build something to make money, to be independent from the vagaries of corporate America and economic cycles over which he has zero control. I was not that smarter man then - it took 20 years and at least three more cycles for me to finally figure it out.

Be the smarter (person). Keep applying and interviewing, but spend the rest of the time you would otherwise be working building something for yourself to generate revenue. Could be code, could be an online class, could be selling stuff on Etsy - doesn't matter, so long as it's something you can sustain and that can eventually sustain you if worse comes to worse.

Let's take work and debt and money and all that out of the equation for a moment. What do you really want to do? Like, not an activity or a job... how do you want to see your life being led by you? Who do you want in your life? What do you want from the neighborhood you live in? What do you want from the house that you live in?

Get to the brass tacks with this. Really understand the details. Try to envision what you want to do and how you want to live. Ignore the doubts and the voice that says, "No way, never'll happen." Figure out what the road looks like to get there, then start shaping your life to fit that road.

As you look for a new job, ask yourself how that job will get you closer to your ideals. Will it relocate you? Will it give you the time for the things you want to do? Will it expose you to people who you want to be part of your journey? You may realize that, first, money isn't really as important as you think, then realize that you may be happier at a smaller company, or in a different industry, or at a bigger company, or... whatever. It brings things into focus.

Why did you do the startup thing? What was your goal? Was it something fuzzy like, "Get rich"? Was it something startuppy like "Change the way people travel"? Was it personal, that you wanted to build a name for yourself and impress people? Was it because of the freedom it offered in terms of how you spend your time and energy?

Be honest with yourself as you answer questions like these. Maybe a startup-style thing isn't the way to go for you - maybe do something like a lifestyle business (i.e. bootstrapped, organic growth, etc.) or consulting. As you dig into these answers, you may decide tech isn't even what you want to really be doing - maybe you want to start a food co-op in your town, or maybe you want to spend less time working and more time just being. Again, start changing your life choice by choice to begin to fit the ideal in your head.

And, if you get there and the ideal ain't so ideal... start it again. And again. And again. It's all an adventure, and you should try to enjoy the ride as much as possible. Don't beat yourself up for your "failures". I promise you will recover if you just keep at it. I have seen so many lows at this point the floor and I are very good friends. I always bounce because I figure out a way to push through the depression and the anger and the self doubt and the loss of confidence and trust and find an answer and a path toward the answer.

You, too, will bounce.

I think I'm on the other side of all that now. I don't have "one thing" I have three, and I think it;s the same three things every person wants:

* To be well loved

* To be well fed

* To be well rested

All of the complicated things we're told we should want fall into those three buckets. We want a good job that pays well so we can not worry about where our next meal will come from (well fed), nor where we will sleep for the night (well rested). We want to buy things or do things to impress other people and gain their attention (to be well loved).

All of these are easily hacked by moneyed interests who turn your simple needs into a complex arrangement that makes them richer on your efforts. The system we live in is designed explicitly this way, and the people at the top continue to pass laws and policies and set social expectations through their control of mass media to keep this system in place because it benefits them. It sounds wildly conspiratorial, but it's also obviously and provably 100% true, even if the perpetrators themselves don't believe it - and I would argue many think they are actually doing the right thing while conveniently ignoring the damage they cause.

So my new primary goal is to focus my efforts not on improving the lives of some faceless investors who already have more money than anyone needs, and to instead focus my efforts on the people who matter - myself and the communities that support me and which I support in kind. This means my family, my neighbors, and the people in my city - "the people that we meet each day" - must become a higher priority for my attention and actions. But it also means supporting other communities - like the developer community, the open source community, and the gardening community, etc. - that I gain value from.

Ultimately, it all leads to taking control of my life in a way that sees me selecting who and what I interact with based on my values and how these communities support one another. I no longer trust companies to take proper care of their employees - they are all focused on getting the most work for the lowest cost and passing the difference as profit to investors who add zero value to the company. But you can't operate in this messed up system without money, so I still need to sell my time to people. Instead, I consult for a few companies at a time for an agreed-upon sum up front. I'm fortunate to be in a position to have knowledge and experience that these companies are willing to pay such a premium for, but I designed my career that way so... it was somewhat expected.

I'm still struggling with the sense that I "must work for 8 hours a day" and "be at my desk to be responsive to my supervisors". I've only been doing this for a year and that's still a struggle. But I do find the time to go out and work in my garden every day while the sun is still shining. My son's school has degraded to a point where I no longer see the value in his attendance there (they keep cutting things to the bone) so we'll be returning to homeschooling in the fall. This time around, though, I will be able to be more involved instead of relying on my poor wife to handle the load on her own while I gallivant across the globe for my job. My plan is to set aside two hours a day for one on one instruction with my son on a variety of topics, to try and reignite a love of learning in him that has been all but extinguished by academic bureaucracy.

I can't change the world. But I can change my world.

On the advocate end, as a developer, you already know how your peers work, what frustrates them what delights them, etc. Expand your audiences and see what other developers using other languages in other organizations are doing and start to build your own thesis on what makes for a good developer experience - portals, documentation, outreach, code and API design, etc.

Read some technical books and blogs focused more on the design of the things you;re interested in rather than the usual nuts and bolts O'Reilly type stuff. Get a sense for what others are advocating for in your area of focus and determine whether you agree or not. More importantly, work on articulating why you agree or don't. Like, really dive into that stuff - that's where you'll find the kind of knowledge that will help you better build a strong thesis you can share with others as well and find solutions and opportunities to improve processes and tooling. Then, start advocating for that better way - experiment with things, talk to your peers and get their feedback, then collect it all and publish it.

I became passionate about APIs and API design a while back because I was managing an API program that, while solid, left a lot to be desired. I spent a lot of time researching APIs and API design - we're talking 2009 here - and there was just starting to be a wellspring forming around RESTful APIs. But one of the key challenges I saw was that no one really could explains what RESTful was - even the experts.

I set about transforming the SOAP API we were using into a RESTful design - not coded, mind you, just the design. Even though I wasn't on the engineering team, I brought my design to the VP of engineering and they wound up using it as they refactored the code.

This eventually led to a gig as a strategy consultant with an API management company where part of my job was to go on stage and share our research in order to build our credentials and sell our services. I took my interest in API design and turned it into a new service for us to offer our customers, then went on stage all over the place to introduce my methodology. I've basically been riding that wave ever since.

Cool story- a number of years later, I had a meeting in Lisbon with a major Portuguese company to help them define their digital strategy. As I was delivering my high level overview of API architecture and design, I saw this dude who was part of the engineering contingent furiously typing on his phone. I assumed I had lost him and figured, "Fine, I'll make sure he;s paying attention when I get to the tech stuff."

At some point, I brought up my API design methodology, and he suddenly blurted out something like, "THAT'S who you are!" He was trying to figure out why he knew me and had been Googling for the answer. Turns out, he and his team had been using my site to train themselves on API design and were rather devoted about it. That was nifty.

For public speaking, if you feel you need some training, find a local Toastmasters and join it for a while. If the first one you try isn't good, try another - different clubs operate differently and so suit different people. But Toastmasters is designed to fit around a work schedule, so I find it better than taking a class.

If you already feel like you have a handle on public speaking, join a local meetup and offer to speak - I have never met a Meetup that isn't scrambling for speakers and usually fills them in with corporate schills like me cough.

Build an audience. Start a newsletter and send them updates every time you publish something new (if you find yourself especially productive, limit your newsletters to once a week or twice a month). Submit your work to places like Hackernoon and here.

If you can't do this on your own, do it for your current employer - that's more or less what I did. Talk to your management team about your interests in developer advocacy and ask them what topics you can talk about. Your marketing team in particular will fawn over you if you do this. Developer advocacy is not ALL marketing, but it part of it is an arm of marketing, so working with them will get you far pretty quickly.

I;d say it takes about six months to build a following if you stick to it and a full year before you really get something resembling a handle on it all. Be patient, though, and stick with it if you enjoy it. If you don't enjoy it, don't push it - I love programming and still do a fair amount if it on the side, but it's not at all my full time job and not something I find I have a lot of mental space to afford proper focus to when I need it like I used to be able to. That may also just be aging, though.

I still think of it as the most fun job you can have in the industry.

It's extremely interesting work, and pays pretty well. But it's a very interdisciplinary role. I consult and engage in infrastructure architecture, API design, product strategy, product marketing, corporate strategy, sales, engineering... it depends on the project, the goals of the company, and their willingness to take this seriously.

I do a LOT of writing, very little of it ever gets published.

I transitioned more than a decade ago from engineering to a more business focused role, which then transformed into an advocate role. Ironically, I don't think full time devs make the best advocates - I find sales engineers and solutions architects are better suited for the role. They already have the experience in working directly with customers and reacting to their needs. They write demos and documentation for that audience already. And they have the technical chops to be able to cover a wide range of topics where most software devs are focused on their areas of interest. All they really need to do is work on their marketing skills (largely so they can better work with their marketing teams) and polish their communications to make them a bit more accessible beyond just the developer audience (dev advocates work with developers, yes, but also are critical to getting business buy-in).

If you want to become an advocate, but don't have the kind of background I'm talking about, I suggest you just start advocating for the things you love now on your personal sties. Research and post blog posts with your opinions about topics happening in the areas you;re interested in. Use your social media to share that information and start building a name for yourself. Build that portfolio, then use ti land a dev adv position somewhere - or hang out the shingle and go it on your own Guy Kawasaki style.

In regards to your second point, any recommendation on how I might be able to communicate to the user that it's worth their while to fill out the second piece of the form?

If you're creating an app for a specific audience, you should be active in forums, blogs, etc. where your audience hangs out, if for no other reason than to gather customer validation for your idea, etc. You can gauge interest in your idea early on by sharing it in these forums. If you get folks invested early like this, they'll not only want to join, they'll be more likely to spread the word.

Passively posting a "Coming Soon" page is more or less the second step - the first is getting in front of your potential audience and engaging with them in a meaningful way. I don;t think you need to necessarily build a name for yourself, you just need to put yourself out there.