My last post offered a bit of a survey course on my experience at FOSS4GNA in St. Louis. I have a few aspects of the conference I want to unpack and it may take another post or two to accomplish that.
For me, personally, the experience of helping to organize FOSS4GNA, then attending and reconnecting with a number of people – some of whom I hadn’t seen in a very long time – was very refreshing. I have worked from home for about 8 years now and I am now self-employed. I do a lot of Teams calls with people I’m am working with, but I spend a lot of time by myself. I have begun to mitigate that with periodic trips to a WeWork in DC. I am often able to set up meetings while there, but the change of venue and the background activity of the other people there is enough to shake things up.
I have enjoyed working on conferences – two FOSS4GNA and a FedGeoDay with another FedGeoDay and the next FOSS4GNA on the way. While I write a lot of code, jumping into an open-source project as a contributor feels a bit out of reach. This isn’t because I doubt my technical skills or the community, but rather that my consulting work consumes me and I don’t think I could contribute to the level I’d like. So working on these conferences is a way I can give back to the community that enables my work to a great extent.
Once I was on the ground in St. Louis, I had a familiar feeling – the slight rush I got when I was leading a team and we were in the same place. To be clear, I wasn’t “in charge” of anything specific for the conference, but the collaboration with the team brought about that feeling, as did connecting people with each other.
One of the things I miss most is leading a team. There was not much about it that I did not enjoy. Consulting is a different form of leadership, but it doesn’t have as much of an “ownership” component and leadership is more through influence, which is more subtle. The work on FOSS4GNA gave me a chance to be more active and flex my leadership muscles. Working on sponsorships helped me connect and engage with other leaders in the industry, similar to working with vendors and partners in previous roles. In short, the entire process felt good and scratched the leadership itch.
When I first stepped out on my own, it had been a few years since I had done a lot of technical work. I wasn’t sure if I could code or architect software the way I previously could. That question has been definitively answered as I spend most of every day in Python and SQL and am getting deeper into AI and machine learning.
Working on FOSS4GNA gave me a feeling reminiscent to team leadership – enough to make me realize how much I miss it. It also reminded me that I need to keep leadership activities in the mix of things I am moving toward. There are a lot of forms that could take and I won’t presuppose its eventual shape, but I also need to take care to ensure it doesn’t get swamped by the code.
