This last week got a ton of stuff done in spite of the season changing allergy onslaught! Meetup recorded on “Does the Cloud Kill Open Source?” with Richard Seroter and got several new meetups lined up with, as always, solid speakers. The meetup continued on into the evening to McMenamins for drinks and food, and great conversation into the night. The topic brought up a lot of things and just let me Lay Down my Burden.
Then the week continued with more craziness, grooving to code and trying to manage the inability to deal with the seasonal allergy eyes, rivers flooding out my my eye sockets! But hey, a groovy tune by Stoned Jesus and cutting the lights while I hacked away on my upcoming talk for DevOps Days Vancouver “Architecture Guidance for Venomous Database Reliability Engineering” worked out pretty well. So much so I’ve got the initial slide deck down now (Monday the 25th!!) and am just shining up some code samples and demos now!
To wrap up the week I found myself also listening to some more groovy stoner doom metal from Conan. Here’s a little Volt Thrower.
🆕 Had a great time at the last Seattle Scalability Meetup. I’ve also just finished processing and fixing up the talk video from this last Seattle Scalability Meetup. I feel like I’ve finally gotten the process of streaming and getting things put together post-stream so that I can make them available almost immediately afterwards.
Here @rseroter gives us a full review of various business models, open source licenses, and a solid situational report on cloud providers and open source.
Goal:Â Grow our follower count and reach, entertain, laugh, make hot takes – as one does on Twitter, educate, and get value out of it ourselves.
Don’t!
Don’t buy followers (i.e. don’t pay anybody that promises X followers, market share, or whatever it is they’re selling). We can’t trust this method as it’s often just a pile of Russian bots or other garbage followers. This does nothing to increase visibility and penetration to those that want, are interested in, or need to communicate with us (i.e. customers and fans).
Do not just repost things via RT or use tooling to just post arbitrary things. People notice this and won’t follow or will unfollow you. It’s a sure fire way to be blacklisted as *marketing* which will involve going to zero eyeballs, even when the account statistics keep showing people see it.
Do not post identical or similar content one tweet after another. i.e. Don’t post a marketing blurb with one image, then post another marketing blurb with another image that’s exactly the same size, theme, and fill up the entire tweet stream this way. The followers you get will not be active, will not be who you actually want to speak with or interact with, and don’t really add value over time if this is all that is done. It’s similar to those blog theft sites that just re-post the exact RSS stream and then, by proxy, get blacklisted and erased from Google/search results.
Do!
Just make it about you. Grow your personal brand first and foremost. Such as “Dern this is a wicked awesome band.” or “Wow, best burger in the world” and add pictures, content, and other interesting things for people. It doesn’t have to be “I just cured all diseases yo, check me out!” you can, and people will follow based on honesty, integrity, taking a stance, being informative, and providing useful information of all sorts. But more than anything they’ll follow the person not any specific *thing* you’re selling, pushing or what not. So be yourself, share, and be involved with the network you create.
Build things you’re interested in, especially when they’re related in some way to products and services you like to use and find interesting – i.e. Apache Cassandra, DSE, Databases, Application Development, etc. Build on these things via threading, via initiating discussion with others that are discussing these things, and among all this find valuable fellow Twitterers that you want to be connected to. This helps all involved, you, your network, the company, the people and companies you connect to, and more. Bringing the network wide with an on point effort around topics will dramatically increase your collective opportunity but also anything and everybody around you.
When retweeting, intersperse it among other things, and happily add content to RT’s. In other words don’t just make it endless retweets, but just throw in a few retweets for things you’re interested in or support, and then have your regular stream of tweets, links, and other content.
Use emoticons, use pictures, and definitely blurt memes out there. Aim to have fun with Twitter.
Examples of good Twitterers that really provide high value to followers, but also back to the Twitterer themselves in the way of speaking opportunities and all sorts of other things:
Goal:Â Build an extensive professional network and return value to the LinkedIn Network of connections you have.
Don’t!
Don’t use LinkedIn like Facebook. This is obvious but for some reason much the world doesn’t seem to get this, so it feels like it needs stated for the LOL’s. i.e. Don’t hit on people, don’t ask people out on dates, just talk business. Ideally leave politics out of it too.
Ideally, don’t send droves of InMail messages to people unless that’s specifically the game being played on LinkedIn. For more grassroots and non-marketing community focus, just interact with people directly, that you know, and don’t arbitrary chase down people you do NOT actually know. This is another thing that decreases authenticity, and makes an individual – even if not – appear like they’re shilling for something.
Do!
Post content regularly about what you’re working on, provide links, and provide respective researched content for other mediums you might have like Medium, a blog, Twitter, and all that jazz.
Talk about your professional achievements and whatever else that might come up related to your work, hobbies (pending some business relation or something you do/did professional, i.e. like the music you play, or other hobby of sorts). Sometimes hobbies count too, so put that content into rotation now and again too. But do remember, if it fits better on Facebook than LinkedIn, just don’t post it on LinkedIn.
Reach out if there is legitimate business that you are both involved in. Start that as a simple conversation, not a sale, not something pushy, just simple, friendly, curious conversation.
Examples of good LinkedIn Accounts, that use their accounts for benefit for themselves but also provide benefit directly or indirectly for all of us:
Twitch
Goal: Grow our follower count and increase our collective content and work material to show, teach, work, and hang out with viewers to build tomorrow’s best, most kick ass, wicked awesome applications, data science analysis, and more!
Don’t!
Not a whole lot here yet. Twitch is kind of wide open and not a lot of no no’s here. Don’t do illegal things is all I’ve got at the moment.
Do!
Setup your OBS or streaming process so that you have chat on screen, chat somewhere you can monitor it, code is clear and fonts are readable, you add all the interaction content you can for new follows (alerts), subscribes (alerts), and whatever else comes up.
When on stream, take your time, interact with people that follow, subscribe, or chat/whisper with you.
Don’t worry about making mistakes, just work through them, let the audience help if they offer it. Even if you know that they’re wrong, work through things with them and let them get involved. Then lead into the correct fix, etc. This is a great way to teach and build involvement on stream so that everybody gets a win, and you get an advocate to your own advocacy.
If you’re going to heavily curse or do anything even slightly liberal/conservative/religious/ideological etc it’s probably best to mark one’s stream as 13 or older (I think that’s the setting).
Some excellent Twitch streamers to reference for their involvement, OBS setup, configuration, and general awesomeness in the community.
In an effort to throw you some wild curve balls, here’s some wild options for Monday. Again a brash way to awaken and take on the world!
First, this is a real curve ball, not exactly my cup of tea I’m looking for, but I’ve thrown some lemon into the cup and it’s actually a pretty sweet flavor of tunes. This band Dream State I’ve known about for some time and they keep sneaking back into my playlist. This is one of their newer tunes In This Hell.
This next band is one of the forerunners of, I’d say, melodic death metal. Discover At The Gates.
This next carcass, they’ve been in the mix for a long while now for me. Ever since rolling upon the flanged wheel into New York City and my buddy Mike picking up one of their albums, their first album Heartwork to be specific, at random. We then spent the next 20 hours on the train riding back to NOLA listening to Carcass and our other finds from New York City.
Alright, this one is going to throw your head into a vice for those really dedicated into the metal head realm. However, if you also like some of that EDM, techno craziness thrown in with some Lada Gaga on your metal then this one is going to twist that gray matter into a new part of your skull. Enjoy a little Rage of Light. Also, Judas is a pretty groovy song, awkwardness and all.
Now, to calm the darkened soul and get back into some coding or something, there’s always Apocalypse Orchestra to set you back upright.
To wrap up this trigonous set of angles, here’s some tranquility in darkness, with Dark Tranquility.
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