I joined Sketchin almost ten years ago. It has been the most exciting ride in my career. Many things have happened during these years, but the common trait has been change. Every single year something has dramatically changed.

We are now approaching that point where we will need to consider the following year. Strategy, positioning, sales strategy, and budget are some of the things we are starting to evaluate these days.

The last few years have been challenging.

The acquisition from Business Integration Partners, the pandemic, and the war, to name a few things, have highly impacted our business. 

It requires plenty of capabilities to survive, thrive, and keep our culture intact. This is not an easy goal to achieve.

I see the design ecosystem changing. All of the most prominent design studios have been acquired over time, and we have also been acquired. There is a vast difference between our acquisition and most of the others. We have been able to maintain our independence.

Most of the other big studios have not. They are now part of an extensive ecosystem where design is just a tiny part, often sacrificed to favor the big picture of the company they belong to. This isn’t good.

At the very same time, I see a lot of boutique studios flourishing. This is good.

And then there is Sketchin, who continues to be a strange beast. We are not as big (yet) as the most famous studios, but we are growing. 

I think we are going to face some significant changes shortly, even if I am not yet able to see clearly what is going to happen. It is like being on a narrow path surrounded by fog. The fog is slowly clearing, but I can’t yet see the final destination.

It is exciting and scary at the same time.

I am approaching my tenth anniversary in Sketchin. This is my longest tenure in a company. Usually, I get bored quickly. This is not happening in Sketchin. The constant changes we have faced over the years have made this job incredibly exciting, and I think the best is yet to come if we can adapt to changes as fast as we have done in the past.

We are big now, and we need to be able to steer at the same speed we had in the past. The company’s kinetic energy is much larger now than in the past. Our decisions take a little longer to show their effects, requiring much more attention than before. I think this is my biggest challenge for the next year: making the right decisions without impacting the company’s speed and wellness.

Am I going to post something about poo? I guess so.

Traveling with Buzz is a lot of fun. Sometimes you need to face some incidents mostly related to his needs. I have heard terrible stories about dogs traveling. Some of them don’t like a long trip in a car; some miss their home environment, some bark at everything they don’t know, and, sometimes, you need to deal with the poo incident.

We were traveling on a hot day. Not a very long trip. Less than three hours. We did not find a good park close to our house, so we had to walk for a bit with Buzz and all of the luggage we had for the weekend.

I was planning to bring Buzz to do his stuff close to our home. As you can imagine, we didn’t make it.

Exactly in downtown, a critical ‘poo episode’ went by. I have tons of bags in case of need, but it couldn’t work. I had to clean up in the worse possible scenario. Buzz is almost 40 Kg, and you can imagine what he can produce as waste. Ok, I had some towels and started cleaning the street under local shop owners’ surveillance. I entered a bar and bought two water bottles to clean the road.

As I was cleaning, a butcher looked at me without saying anything but with the explicit intention of judging the quality of my work. 

After a few minutes, a fishmonger came out of his store and handed me a large amount of paper to help clean the street. I warmly thanked the fishmonger and apologized to them for what happened.

All the rest of the people were looking at the scene, and someone was laughing.

Three different approaches to someone who was in distress.

I think this is the perfect representation of people’s behavior these days. This is why poo is relevant to this argument.

I am sure you already know which is the one who will get my money in the future.

Sometimes happens, I am not able to focus as I should. Today is one of those days. Since morning it was clear it was one of those days. I take it easy if I do not have any urgent thing to do.

I go through my to-do list, and I take the first item on the list. I write it on a piece of paper and split it into microtasks. Smaller chunks of work I can easily do without losing focus. 

Four microtasks for each 25-minute pomodoros.

This is my recipe.

Following the latest Apple product announcements, I must confess I have wanted to reach for my credit card and buy a MacBook Air M2.

For the records, I didn’t buy one.

Before configuring my new MacBook, I wanted to check how much my old MacBook Air M2 was worth with the Apple trade-in program. I went through all the required steps to get a quote, and finally, Apple confirmed that they could give me 400 Euros. No, Apple. I am sorry, but I don’t get this quote. My machine is less than one year old and in pristine condition. It is worth more than what you are offering me. I am also thinking about you selling this machine, that will be refurbished, for much more than that amount of money.

At the very same time, I questioned myself about this purchase. Is it something that I need? Right now?

You know the answer. It was a big, sounding no.

My MacBook Air M1 is perfect. It has all that I need. His 16 Gb RAM and 512 Gb SDD, and incredibly long battery life, make it the ideal machine for my needs.

I use this MacBook to develop all of my personal projects, I use it for writing, and it is my primary content consumption device. I never felt the need for more power or storage.

One negative thing is that it cannot run the Unity IDE decently, but I have to say that my work computer, a 32 Gb Intel 16″ MacBook Pro, sucks at that. The new MacBook Air M2 would not be any better with Unity.

Once upon a time, I would not have resisted. I would have bought the new machine and sold separately the old one. That’s no more the case.

For no apparent reason, I have entered a new phase where I am less keen on spending money on new gadgets. It happened during the pandemic, and it happened without me noticing until recent days.

Again. I do not have any reason to move to the new hardware apart from the great feeling about the new industrial design. The new design is superb, and the new colors are also fantastic. Not enough to trigger a purchase. Shelling out more than 2.500 euros is not something I am willing to do.

Apple, we will catch up at the next round.

I bought my first 3D printer a few months ago and started looking at mechanical watches. I was thinking about printing an escapement mechanism as one of my first experiments.

I think it would have been an interesting personal project. It would need some understanding of the printing process and knowledge of the printer to be successful. Apart from the mechanical aspect, the math behind the escapement mechanism was fascinating.

I bought a few books about mechanical clocks, and I am actively reading them. The main concepts have been the same for ages, and most books have been written in the past. This is fascinating to me. The pictures are hand drawn, and the style is quite different from what we are used to reading today. Mechanical clocks have evolved over time, and you can find some art pieces in this world—just Google for the Richard Mille RM UP-01 to understand the complication we have reached. 

I moved to YouTube to find some inspiration on the subject, and, as always happens, I found an entire universe. I looked at so many videos. People 3D printing tourbillions, people were taking apart watches to fix them and enabling me to understand the basic architecture of a mechanical watch, people were building gears for their watches from scratch, and an infinite number of artisans were creating unique watches.

I discovered a fascinating world, even if highly complicated for a hobbyist.

You can easily buy basic tools to work on a mechanical watch. If everything in the watch is ok, you don’t need a lot.

If the watch is a “no-runner, ” you must play a different ball game. Every single problem that the look has may require a dedicated tool to fix it. There is a tool for everything. These tools are high precision and high quality, and for this reason, they can be costly. Depending on the complexity, you can range from a hundred bucks to thousands. A professional cleaning machine could cost up to five thousand euros. 

I feel like it is something I would like to explore deeper.

Even if I usually wear an Apple Watch, mechanical watches have always been one of my interests. 

I also tried to approach a couple of forums, but they are not immune to the problems on other forums. It always seems that newbies are not welcome.

Buying a “non-runner” pocket watch on eBay, trying to fix it, and bringing it to new life is fascinating. If you look at some of those watch repair videos, you will notice that you need patience, attention to detail, and care. I am sure I could love the experience and the excitement. Moreover, the idea of bringing back to life something that was headed to the trashcan is essential to me. Fix other than buy a new object. 

As I said, it is not a simple hobby, and maybe, the complexity makes me feel like I have to dig deeper to understand it.

I cannot easily remember where I read this quote from a conversation:

– Why do you always choose the most uphill road?

– Because in the end, the view is better.

I think it’s just that.

Maybe some of my eleven readers are already having fun and will be able to give me some helpful direction. Sometimes even the advice not to start is good.

I have come back from the holidays intending to revise my digital ecosystem. I may call it digital minimalism if you will. 

I want to reduce my time on things I don’t need and services I don’t use anymore. 

I started by disabling every automatic renewal on the services I am currently using. When they expire, I will decide if I need them again or if it is time to dismiss them.

At the same time, I unsubscribed from every marketing mailing list I currently receive. Usually, I go into my inbox and delete those messages without reading them. That’s a waste of time and aggression to my time.

The funny thing is that most unsubscribe pages tell me something like, “We are sorry to see you go.” 

That’s a big lie.

That wording is something that you say to a friend, not a customer. If I have bought something from you, that doesn’t mean we have become closer. We did not become friends. You are just trying to put your hands in my purse again. 

I think this behavior has to stop, which is why I am taking action.

I am sure I will miss something I can care about, but I trust the Internet serendipity, and sooner or later, I will find it somewhere sooner or later.

Yes, design is care.

It is caring about the people who will use your product, and it is caring about the people who will make that product run. To make a great design, you must take care of the two sides of the coin.

You need to care about design to make great design. If you don’t come from the design world but, for whatever reason, you find yourself managing a design team, you need to care about design first and business later. 

If you are a designer, you need to care about the implications of your design. Ethical, emotional, political, and business implications.

To design just for beauty is not design, art, maybe.

I see too many companies and designers that are careless. They want to get money from their users, and I hate that behavior.

I have used the same personal e-mail address since Google released Gmail. I never changed it.

Recently I was thinking about opting out of Google for my personal stuff. I am a little tired of feeding these tech giants with my data while getting very few rewards.

Running an e-mail server is not a big deal—the hosting where CorrenteDebole is hosted offers that service by default. It would take no more than five minutes to set up a new e-mail address and start switching my communication from Google to my server. Technically is a no-brainer.

Before taking action, I investigated the implications of that choice. 

Sadly, as I suspected, that would not work at all. Technically, it would work as a charm, but in the real world, there is a massive risk that my mail messages will never be delivered.

I am hosting Corrente Debole with a very well-respected hosting company. They gave me a static IP address for my host; in the last fifteen years, I did not have any issues with them.

The problem is that many big e-mail providers have blocklists to prevent spam. A few companies are maintaining these lists, which I discovered are not public and very often contain IP address ranges. I don’t know what other services are running on IP addresses close to mine. The risk of being already on a blocklist is quite high.

There is no way out.

You can’t solve this problem in any way. The only way to have a relative guarantee that your mail messages will be delivered is to have your e-mail on one of these giants.

Frustrating.

The excellent idea of having spammers cut out of your inbox has paved the path to an oligopoly.

Anyway, it seems I am in good company, and these guys ended up with my conclusion: a personal e-mail server will never work in 2022.

I can’t find the link to the first I read on the subject, but here’s what Cory Doctorow is saying about this issue: Dead Letters

Quite sad.

In our company, we heavily rely on APIs. We connect to Harvest, Expensify, Salesforce, and other systems to collect data and move the data to Qlik Sense for the creation of analysis tools and dashboards.

Unfortunately, inherited from our shareholders, our current ERP system does not expose any API. Someone has to export the data in Excel format every few days, push it to Google Drive, and let Qlik Sense make his magic.

That’s not effective at all. I have tried to get APIs from that bloody system for the last four years. No luck.

I think that technology adoption is critical for business growth. 

If I can save people time daily by automating processes and data reporting, people will spend that time on business-critical actions. 

Calling a client, refining a presentation, calling it a day early, and so on.

Smooth integration between systems is based on great connectors. Great connectors rely on APIs.

Every minute someone jumps from one system to another to replicate the same data is a lost minute in productivity. It’s simply dumb. You will need to authenticate to the other system and copy data from one system to the other. It is not just dumb, and it is prone to errors.

Those errors tend to propagate among other automated systems, and that’s a big issue. We are not a big company where you may have ‘slaves’ dealing with data entry. Every second of each person in the company is valuable and needs to be protected as much as possible.

This is why we need APIs. And, eventually, you need them too. No matter how big you are.

I hate the narrative about “do what you love.”

It is a big lie. If you think doing what you love will make your professional life easier, you are lying to yourself.

When I saw this sentence in the mission of a company I used to work for, I instantly knew I had made a mistake accepting that position. It was true.

I do not argue that your professional life should be centered around your inner passion. I am just saying that doing what you love makes your job harder, not easier.

I love what I do. I spend every second of my working day doing what I love in the best way possible. 

That’s the problem.

If you are doing what you love, you spend everything you have trying to make it perfect. You will not accept anything below the standards you set for yourself. You will never be happy about what you deliver. You will continuously try to improve it, make it better, and get close to what you consider the best you can do.

This drives you to an endless loop of dissatisfaction.

You indeed need to do what you love. More important is being able to let it go at some point in time. 

There is another crucial point to make. Doing what you love leads you to think that your discipline is vital to the company you are working for. That’s a big issue. 

That may be true if you are a cardiovascular surgeon, but how many of you are surgeons? Very few.

Your job alone is worthless. You, and your company, can survive only by being part of an ecosystem.

Even the guys cleaning your offices overnight are critical to the success of your endeavors.

After my holidays, Medium started to think I needed help with being more focused and productive. And the endless count of articles on productivity has begun to appear on my suggested reading list. I don’t understand how the recommendation engine is working here, but that is what is happening.

I read a few of those articles, and I was sure that this behavior would have increased the number of articles suggested in the upcoming days.

Nevertheless, I was curious.

None of them were beneficial.

Every single article misses the most important point: every human is different.

It is impossible to write a recipe that will work for everybody. I started to push the “show less like this” button.

When I want, I can be productive. I doubt the methods and tools I use to be productive will work for someone else. They are built around the way my brain and body work. They are strictly tailored to me, and they fit my behavior.

In the few articles I have read, I haven’t found any suggestions that could improve my productivity. Most are just a list of common sense advice like “Sit in a quiet room if you want things done.”

Come on.

A few days ago, I was going few some old links I had saved in the past. In my browser, there is a dedicated bookmark folder for those links. Its name is “Old stuff.”

I found something I completely forgot about: Nine traits of the veteran Unix admin.

I was a Unix admin more than thirty years ago. As I wrote yesterday, I am sure I would not be able to do that job today, but it was amusing.

Those years had an incredible impact on the way I approach problem-solving. Without any doubt, I can say that what I am today is possible because of those early years of my career.

I reread the article. I found it as attractive as it was the first time I read it.

I found one of the traits so true: We prefer elegant solutions.

I live that principle every single day.

There are a few cardboard boxes I haven’t opened since I moved to my new house, which was over three years ago. They contain work stuff from the past. Notebooks, documents, media, and papers. I was looking for some old notes that I knew were in there.

It was a sort of flashback.

While emptying the box searching, I found a print dump of something I wrote in 1993. I could not remember I had written something like that.

You find out you are old when you find your source code printed on old printer paper. I don’t how many of you can remember that kind of printer paper. Dot matrix printers that used hole-punched paper with alternating colors for each line. Old stuff.

I forgot what I was looking for and started reading the content. I remembered when I wrote that piece of code in a few seconds.

One of our clients asked to customize their Unix System V computer default printer spooler. For some reason, they wanted to have the ability to give priority to some print jobs. This is a functionality that the default printer spooler did not offer out of the box. I wrote something like one thousand lines of bash script to mangle the print queue according to their specifications.

I went through the source code, and I was surprised. Did I have this command of bash back in 1993? I read the print and confessed I did not understand some of the code. It took me some time to understand what was going on clearly.

I would not be able to do the job I was doing when I wrote that code.

It was a flashback.

Guess what? I’m back in the trenches.

Holidays are over, and it’s time to get back to work and head to the end of this year.

Almost a month has passed since my last update on this blog, and it’s time to start writing again.

A few highlights:

• I didn’t even turn on my personal computer while I was on vacation. It might not have been the smartest choice, but I managed to completely zone out from the world of work and just focus on family and friends. It felt great.
• I was able to connect with my children easier than before. I felt less need to be “right” and more able to listen. Most of my conversations went deeper and were more interesting than previous conversations.
• I read 17 books, each representing a different genre, and none were business related.
• The best things I got from this vacation could not be paid for with money. The sand under my feet was rust-colored and smelled of salt and seaweed. The wind crashed against my face, cold and smelling of the sea. Wisps of clouds flitted past the peaks of the Dolomiti mountains. The sun shone on them, turning them golden-yellow. My children laughed as they ran ahead of me, footsteps sounding on the stony path up to the house. I laughed together as I chased after them. And then we stopped, sitting on a bench outside our hotel, watching them breathe. We talked about everything – about the school, our interests, and what we wanted for the future.
• I never used cash. Every place had a POS, finally. I guess I was just lucky, but it was great.
• I have a million new ideas that are popping up in my head, and I will need to make time to write them down. I will need to find a way to put my thoughts into words and nudge them, at first gently and then with a plan and then with a deadline, but I am excited about the prospect of going on this adventure and creating something new. I would love to take on this challenge.
• Each day, I read at least two newspapers. Truth said, it was highly depressing.
• I filled my Paper Republic notebook with story after story. I drew pictures of characters in the pages’ margins, flowers, birds, and boats. I wrote a lot, but only in my Paper Republic notebook; using pen and paper helps me remember stories.
• Doing nothing was an art, and you could not improvise. It had to be cultivated like a garden over the course of years. Doing nothing was a skill. You could get better at it. I had mastered it during these dreary holidays, in which I did nothing.

I can say this was an analog vacation, and I enjoyed it very much. Digital only came to a place to stay in touch with people I care (a lot) about. Nothing else.

The next few months will be challenging, and I will need to work hard to close this year with flying colors. I feel we will need to take a step forward with the organization. I am ready to take on the challenge.

And now, it’s about time to open my work inbox and see what happened.

A hot summer sun beat down on the city. Just a few days and I will be on holiday. In that time, the only thing I will have to do is talk with the people I care about.

I have been thinking about what I would do next on this blog. I thought I would write some more for a while. I would write about how the grass felt like a fine shower of rain on my body and how the sounds of insects, animals, and the wind never startled me. I would write about how I learned to speak the language and how to negotiate trades with the owners of the shops and taverns. I would write about growing food or gathering it from the bushes that lined the river. I would write about making friends who changed as often as the wind in the trees. I will not do those things, though.

A few weeks ago, I found that I do not want to write on it for some time.

I will take a break from writing for a while.

I will crawl into bed with the covers pulled up to my chin. The weight of my book will comfort me as I read, and only when sleep comes over me will I lay it down, my hands aching from holding it open. I will listen to the rain falling on the roof and lull me to sleep. It will be as if the rain is describing a world outside this one, where we never face our fears or the pain of our actions and never understand that we do the best we can given what we have.

Finally, I need some fresh air. I don’t like what I read in newspapers, LinkedIn, or other sources. Everything has become so convoluted and, sometimes, inexplicable to me. I need to step back for a while and go back to the basics.

I think it is about time to stand up with more strength, personally and professionally. I can do it, but I need some distance for a while.

I will see you in September.