introduction

👋 oh hai! I'm Sean, professionally known as @seanfitz in a variety of forums. I'm a software person living in the Seattle area, raising a rather full house of mammals. I started writing weekly notes during my tenure at Stripe, and it became both a substantial outlet as well as a trove of historical information. I feel confident that I get more value out of my writing than any given reader, but writing in public keeps me honest, so I'll continue.

In my departing notes from Stripe, I answered a question I'd been asked a few times, but mostly that I asked myself regularly: Why do you write? It's non-trivial investment of time, and working in a time-intensive field with young children at home, it's not like I have a many minutes to spare. From those notes directly...

First, and probably most obviously (since they're on the to: line), is to keep @lisaj and @kenny informed of what I'm up to and what's on my mind. This is pretty effective, and I get regular feedback on these lines. The written record also helps me when pulling together my self-evals by providing both a rough timeline on things as well as context and my mental state. I also keep hand-written notes (to the best of my ability), and the overlap is both useful and occasionally entertaining.

Lisa and Kenny were my manager and skip-manager, respectively. Lisa always encouraged my writing (both the technical and less-so). I could tell that Kenny was reading, because he occasionally replied with 🥲.

Second, writing gives me the opportunity to collect my thoughts and polish my writing. Practice makes perfect, and review is how we learn. I've made the time once a year to go back and re-read all the published and hand-written notes, and a surprising number of ideas have come of that effort.

Of all the writing I do, the hand-written notes continue to be the most valuable. Like a lot of folks, things I write out by hand are far more likely to be remembered, and thus be a part of innovative links between disparate concepts. I truly wish I had a good solution for digitizing those notes, but nothing has come together just yet.

Lastly, I use my notes to go fishing across Stripe. Similar to how folks may ask a question on StackOverflow and follow it up with a close-but-not-quite answer in hopes that someone on the internet will take the bait, my notes strike up the most interesting conversations when I'm wrong.

This works! So much! One of my final projects at Stripe was to "find big rocks" to help against our efficiency goals, and while sharing areas of investigation, ideas from across the company poured in.

I've taken some time off from writing over the last 3 months. I needed time to decompress, catch up on sleep, and ramp up in my new role. I had hoped to get a leg up on writing-in-public during that time, but alas, rest took precedence. I don't have a concrete idea of what it is I want to write, or a target audience. This is, as they say, my party: I'll do as a I please. In leaving Stripe, I externally committed to publishing on Substack starting in August. With that as my anchor, I intend to publish something, at least every other week, for at least 6 months. That feels like an achievable pace, and I have a list of topics that will get me at least halfway there. To provide myself with some buffer, I'll always try to be one post ahead.

For stack, there have been a lot of changes in my home gadgets of late. I'm trying to simplify as much as possible, and pick the best tools available. I'm biased towards local-first, and the stack will trend that way over time.
Obsidian for drafting and linking, primarily in markdown.
Substack for publishing (Had I not already committed to an external substack link, I would likely be self-hosting Ghost.)
Excalidraw for sketching.
Pocket for reading-list tracking.
iCloud for cross-device sync.

Simple, lightweight, distraction-free. That's the goal. It's going great!*

Writing in this new medium hasn't been particularly fast so far -- I usually found time to write (and cite) during weekend evenings, however the citations portion was much simpler. I was referencing recent events, with browser history (or even open tabs) at the ready. Often, the topic of my notes would just be the last ridiculous thing I read, and the rest was the boilerplate of X 1:1s, Y interviews. As will all things, I expect to improve as the habit builds.