Things have been a bit quiet on the blog, and there are a couple of reasons for that. The first is that I’m still ramping up in my new role at Cloudflare, and like all new roles that takes a ton of energy and life force! It’s been really good though, and I am enjoying building out the Data product team.

But the second reason is that most of my non-work, tinkering time have gone not into writing, but into making a new music side project site, now called Listen To More. So I wanted to talk about it a little bit.

About 18 months ago I wrote about the first iteration of this idea in Building a music mini-site with data from Last.fm, Discogs, and YouTube. The site evolved quite a bit from that initial post, up to the point where it got quite bloated and slow. In addition to that, it was built on Netlify, and as a Cloudflare employee, that was obviously not cool… I wanted an excuse to play with Cloudflare products anyway, so I decided to rewrite the whole thing.

Initially I planned for it to be a simpler version of the original site, but it ended up being so much fun that it is now essentially an ever-expanding artist and album database. For a bit of the nerdy detail, it’s a Next.js site hosted on Cloudflare Pages. I use Workers to manage all the API calls efficiently, and Workers KV for fast and reliable caching. I say this not just because I work there: these products are incredible. One of the reasons I’ve spent so much time on the site is that it is so easy and fun to create with these products.

So now that the site is in a pretty good place (of course, as with all side projects, it will never be done), I thought I’d share it a bit more broadly. So, give Listen To More a spin! Click around, search for stuff, enjoy. And if you run into issues (I am sure there are many bugs), I’d be forever grateful if you’d submit an Issue on GitHub.

I recently finished the book Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and thoroughly enjoyed it. There’s a little bit of a lull around the 60%–80% mark, but overall it’s a solid 4.5 stars for me. Mostly because the main character is a robot who isn’t sure if he has become self-aware or just imagining things, and he certainly isn’t sure if he even wants that. It is a wonderful premise (albeit clearly inspired by the Murderbot series), and Uncharles is probably my favorite robot character in a novel in a long time. The dude is just incredibly relatable—here are some things he says or thinks in the book:

I wish to report an error in the way that everything works.

The world, as I have witnessed it, is a place lacking in efficiency, rationality, and cleanliness. I am driven to find a place in it nonetheless.

He sat down because, having decided that there was absolutely no reason to do anything ever again, he would cause less damage to himself and his surroundings when he eventually toppled over from a seated position, rather than from standing.

I do not feel I have greatly profited from seeing the world.

I suggest that ‘kind and ordered’ is a better goal. It is possible that the world was once both kind and ordered. It is possible that it may be so again. Perhaps you will make it so.

I, for one, would like to sign up for helping to make this a “kind and ordered” world.

Anyway, it’s a wonderfully funny and delightfully poignant sci-fi story that is about robots but actually really about humans. What’s not to like.

Neil Perkin tackles some important leadership points in High-reaching informality (emphasis mine):

Overly formal environments are more likely to be low in psychological safety, and less likely to encourage people to speak up, contribute their ideas, and challenge assumptions or norms. Informality helps to break down barriers, reduces the toxicity and influence of internal politics, helps a team to get the best ideas and to be adaptive in delivery to arrive at better outcomes. […]

It’s useful to think of psychological safety as the bringing together of mutual trust and respect, and also comfort with dissent. Overly or inappropriately formal environments reduce trust down to a transactional relationship: I asked you to do this, so did you do it? Whilst dependability is important, trust is also built on competence, confidence, integrity, and empathy.

This relates to something that’s been on my mind quite a bit over the past few weeks: the question of what it means to be “boss”. The “transactional relationship” that Neil describes above is one I will always avoid with all my heart with my teams.

I was lucky early in my career. When I first joined eBay I had a fantastic manager. He was empathetic and people-first, and yet strongly business-driven. He coached me, corrected me, taught me how to speak the language of business, challenged me… but above all, it felt like he was on my side. I had someone in my corner, someone rooting for me, someone to help me navigate a gigantic organization while I really felt like I had no idea what I was doing. He didn’t react negatively to bad news or frustrated questions, he simply said, “tell me more about that.” I will be forever grateful to Christian for the way he set me up for long-term career success.

20 years later I know just how lucky I was. From my conversations with teams and candidates over the past year or so it has become clear to me that very few people have the privilege of working with a good manager early in their career—someone who is supportive yet determined for us to do the best work of our lives, together. This seems particularly acute in the middle management layer¹, where organizations spend very little time on training new leaders. From The Strengths, Weaknesses and Blind Spots of Managers:

Worldwide, the cost of poor management and lost productivity from not engaged or actively disengaged employees is $8.8 trillion, or 9% of global GDP. Changing how people are managed is perhaps the easiest way to boost productivity within organizations.

Yet, the majority of managers receive little feedback on how effectively they manage their team. Less than half of U.S. employees (42%) report having the opportunity to formally provide feedback to their manager, and fewer than one in four (24%) have formally rated their manager’s performance.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but I do think this is an important problem to call out and watch out for. Do you have transactional leaders in your company, or relational ones? The transactional leaders might initially appear to be more effective, but everything I’ve learned up to this point in my career has shown me that those benefits are short-lived, and almost always end up with disengaged, resentful team members. As leaders we are not here to tell people what to do. We are here to provide strategic direction and context, and coach our people—as part of the same team—on how to make the business and themselves successful for the long haul.

PS. If you’re looking for a book that covers these topics really well, give Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting for by Jonathan Raymond a go.

1. See Director means something for a devastating take on this ↩︎