Annual Review 2018

Why the first Annual Review?

Writing is hard. I never really know who I’m writing to, and thus, never start unless I’m complaining about people complaining about serverless. I’ve also learned over the years that I need separation between work and everything else, and this makes it difficult to find inspiration since one can only talk about serverless so much.

But as you, astute unidentified reader, might have guessed, a new year comes filled with both reflection AND optimism and so optimistic Chad says if I write and share more publicly, then I’ll settle into a rhythm that interests me and maybe if I’m lucky, others. At the very least I’ll write for myself.

If you know me you’ll know I’m not big on news or social or really any input sources other than direct conversation and books. I get most “news” from Money Stuff, Huckberry, a few running emails, a once/week hacker news perusal, and recently added James Clear’s newsletter, the last of which inspired the following simple annual review format — what went well, what didn’t, and what I learned. So without further ado.

What Went Well

Family and Friends
First and most importantly, Sarah and I are expecting a daughter in April, so something there went well. Fingers crossed that 2019 brings a healthy girl. At that point, 2018/2019 will be in the money and I can wrap this post up and skip the next. But for writings sake I’ll continue.

We were able to spend quite a bit of time together as I’m working from home more, and many of our friends and immediate family members are nearby (Seattle/Bay Area) so this makes for consistent quality time with the small circle of people that really knows us. This is pretty much the raison d’etre we live in the Bay Area despite the astronomical prices. It’s our social and community tax. I’m thankful for this group of close friends and family, and I hope I can keep writing the same boring “What Went Well” in upcoming years.

Serverless at Oracle
My day job is to bring serverless to Oracle after the acquisition of my 7-year startup Iron.io. Aside from expected big-company re-org stuff, that’s gone fairly well. We launched the open source Fn Project at JavaOne a year and change ago, and now Oracle has an incredibly talented serverless engineering org that recently launched a globally-available FaaS offering powered by Fn. I stepped aside from running the org which was very time consuming in an ever-changing political environment (all big orgs are like this), to focus more on speaking, writing, partnerships, strategy, etc. I consider this all a success.

Speaking and Traveling
Since joining Oracle and the launch of Fn, I’ve traveled around the world talking about serverless computing — a list of most of those talks can be found at chadarimura.com. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to speak to small meetup crowds of 50 to large keynote crowds of thousands, and everything in between. Here are some of my trips from the year:

1. Seattle, WA (3x)
2. Paris, France
3. Hamburg, Germany
4. Austin, TX
5. Copenhagen, Denmark
6. Tokyo, Japan
7. Berlin, Germany
8. London and Bristol, UK (2x)
9. Madrid/Barcelona, Spain

I had a fair amount of speaking experience from my Iron days, but 2018 ramped that up significantly where I was able to actually think about speaking style and strategy and have a bit more fun. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still totally nerve wracking to be in front of a large crowd so I over-compensate with preparation and practice, but “just doing it” helps a lot, and the year was truly outstanding in this regard. Also Sarah was able to travel with me on many of these trips and we had a blast visiting so many countries.

Elimination of Social Noise
Not that I was ever that into social media, but I pretty much eliminated Facebook. I can count on two hands how many times I used it over the course of the year. I’ll probably delete it soon. I’ve also never had Snap or Insta, and probably never will. It feels liberating to force real-world interaction in order to stay connected. I do, however, use Twitter from time to time, but interest is waning.

Music
Music has always been an important part of my life — both listening and playing. I grew up playing piano, then becoming a DJ, then joining a cover band, then picking up guitar. I put music in the success bucket because I’ve been fairly consistent playing 30–45 minutes every day for a decent portion of the year and want to continue into 2019. My goal first is for music to be a part of my family life, then friends, then if I’m fortunate enough to perform again this year, that’d be cool too.

What Didn’t Go Well

Writing
Hands down I under-performed as it comes to writing. I did very little. I just didn’t make time. This year I plan on replacing most of my speaking hours with writing hours. Writing and speaking are obviously very different, but overall I feel like writing is the speed I’m going for this year. It can be more consistent and help synthesize thoughts on a regular basis. It’s more meditative. Best of all, it can reach larger and more diverse audiences without traveling.

Coding
I really wanted to write more code in 2018. No agenda, mostly just to keep building. I’ve been coding, albeit not consistently, for 20 years now. Similar to writing, it’s meditative in a way. Imagination can become reality. But most importantly the act allows me to actually use the languages, tools, and cloud offerings available today, which reminds me just how complex the world has become and just how important the serverless mindset actually is. It’s what inspires me to make better products for developers. For better or worse, Iron.io was entirely built out of our need as developers, and this is what made our brand authentic. Same goes for the Fn Project.

Speed of OSS Fn
We accomplished a lot in the 12 months since open source launch, not least of which is the globally-available commercial service Oracle Functions, powered by the open source bits. This really was a huge accomplishment. But outside of the core needs of the service team, we could have made more progress with the open source project — from code commits, to community depth/breadth, to ecosystem around the project, to supported cloud platforms. I wanted to be much further along than we are now. That’s my startup mentality bumping up against big company inertia.

That said, the serverless ecosystem as a whole is way behind where it should be. If you are “all in” on AWS or Microsoft, you might feel sort of OK with the experience of building serverless apps, but outside of this, forget it. So I guess these are my conflated thoughts on both Fn and the open source stack as a whole. Kubernetes is probably to blame here. But before you get your k8s-is-the-new-cloud-operating-system-quote-generator out and Tweet me angrily, I’ll make sure to provide you with better material in a follow up post.

What I Learned this Year?

That Life is Short
Cliche, I know, but staring down the barrel at 40 with a pending child ideally coming to replace me is the realization of my own mortality. Priorities evolve and I find myself wondering if I’ve got another company in me or if I’d rather buy some not-bay-area land and just ride into the sunset.

Vision Settles Disputes
At Iron, as the CEO I was able to set a vision and beat the drum over and over. Of course there were disputes, but they usually worked themselves out and only sometimes surfaced to me for executive decision. At a big company, I quickly realized that there are lots of stakeholders trying to establish their visions and this is confusing for the team, making effective decision-making harder and disputes often unresolved.

Technology’s Dark Side is Growing
The industry I’ve loved my entire life and and that has given me so much over the years continues to demonstrate powerful often-unintended consequences resulting in isolation, anger, depression, monopoly, and oppression. From the Facebook data shenanigans, to mobile device addiction, to social bullying, to Amazon’s monopoly on our lives, to China’s Social Credit System, we’re increasingly living in a Black Mirror episode. Go enjoy some nature, and leave your phone at home.

Wherever You Go, There You Are
Whether you think this quote is Buddhist, or from Naughty by Nature, after so much travel this year, it started to make sense to me. Cities are rich with history, and fascinating to see, and I still have places to check off my list (China, Africa, Australia), but no matter where I went, after a bit of time I just wanted to come home, go to Wholefoods (see above re: monopoly), and hang out with my family and friends.

Creativity Comes in Uninterrupted Bursts
When I was younger my “in the zone” hours were from 11pm to 3am, usually coding, totally distraction free. I look back fondly on these nights and grew heaps as a developer. I still need this zone for anything deep thinking — writing, presentation creation, coding, etc., but I now find that this window is around 6am to 10am. The rest of the day can be casual communication, reading, meetings, etc. I continue to learn that this creative time is essential to both maker and manager roles, and that anything from email to Slack can interrupt this critical time. So I close all of it.

And that’s it. Looking forward to an exciting year and doing this again!

Chad