Hi. It’s been like 9 months since I last posted. Two young kids, one with special needs, will do that to you. But thanks to recent bed time routine changes, I have some enforced time out of the apartment and in front of a computer every night for the foreseeable future. So what am I going to do with that time? Navel-gaze. First, lets go meta, in an unnecessarily long and winding way, as is my style.
The worst thing about ADHD for me is my incessant need to learn. No, that’s not right. It’s my incessant need to go deep in interest areas that is beyond reason for a neurotypical person. Not only do I like niches – I LOVE the overlap of niches, a good deal of that interest owing to the possibility of discovering something new, to gain novel insight simply because I’m examining well-worn paths through new lenses.
Football finance and Watford FC? I can never hope to achieve the level of expertises as true experts in those areas, but when you slap two circles together of folks who are interested in each, the overlap you get will be tiny. And that’s where you’ll find me. Hi: I’m your Venn diagram intersection.
This is perhaps why I do what I do for work. How well do I know Android? Decently well in some areas, passable in others. Experimentation and data analysis? I know enough to get by. Mobile app performance? OK, THERE I can claim some specialized domain knowledge. What about collecting perf and stability telemetry on mobile devices in production? Well, that’s just I’ve been doing for the last 9 year for money.
Well. If each of those related topics are a circle, I’m at the centre of that overlap, and overlap that has its own name: mobile app observability. To say that my work experience and domain knowledge makes me suitable for the field is a given. Whether I’m good at it is up for debate. I think I am pretty OK, but I’m a bit biased.
What’s not up for debate is that spending time exploring this niche of niches is so absolutely my jam. Measuring and improving mobile app performance in the aggregate, whole-user-base level, and deriving insights from that, is such a challenging, fascinating, and impactful problem to solve. To me anyway. Not only that, it gives me the opportunity to go DEEP in a subject area, something that, due to life circumstances, I’m generally not able to do for fun these days. So what do I do to scratch that itch to deeper than deep? Work. I’m sure my employers don’t mind.
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