#42: Wrong About Pizza 🍕

⭐️ Give, Give, Give, Ask ⭐️

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My first attempt at a Sicilian square pizza. Topped with green peppers, red onion, black olives, and mushrooms. I’m trying again tonight - wish me luck :)

மாலை வணக்கம் (maalai vaNakkam), Buenas Noches, and Good Evening from New York City!

I’ll be sharing a thing I did, a tweet I liked, and a thought I had.

A Thing ✍🏾

I published an essay titled Detroit: Easiest Pizza To Make.

For 13.5 years, I only tried to make NYC style pizza. They were mediocre as fuck. After buying some dope pizza guides (unaffiliated links in essay), I realized I was playing pizzaiolo on hard mode.

Why not try easy mode first?

A Tweet 🐦

I’ve been learning so much from Adi Verma on Twitter about copywriting and storytelling. 100% worth a follow.

I used to think that creating content takes too much time.

In 2018, I started a cooking Youtube channel. I published fourteen episodes in three months. I spent up to six hours a day filming and editing.

I loved it.

Three months into my next job, I didn’t have enough time to continue making videos. For years, I longed to create but couldn’t find the time.

That feeling like there aren’t enough hours in a day. That’s the story of my life. I get it.

But I’ve been writing this newsletter weekly for over a year. I couldn’t have done it without the Newsletter Launchpad cohort I signed up for in May 2022.

I can now call myself a writer. I publish. Regularly.

The next

Newsletter Launchpad

cohort, run by

Louie Bacaj

and

Chris Wong

, runs from May 29 to June 15. I’m giving away a FREE seat in that cohort. A $245 value.

The first person to reply to this email with “I am a writer” gets the seat.

Let’s write together ♥️

A Thought 💭

Have you ever been on a software team that kept assigning you the same type of tickets?

Nobody else changes that one part of the API. That one UI widget. All streaming jobs that combine output from two or more upstream jobs. 

I’ve been there. Especially when the team is lean, it’s the fastest way to get things done.

It’s also the fastest way to get pigeonholed.

I recently spoke to an engineer that wanted to get promoted. They mentioned they kept getting the same type of tickets. Tough tickets only they could do.

They asked, “Next time I’m finished with my tickets early in the sprint, should I pick up more from the backlog to broaden my impact?

I said, “No, stop doing that.”

When they do that, they are not sharing their specialized knowledge. They are not giving opportunities for juniors to grow. They are pigeonholing themselves.

Instead, I told them to document the intricacies of doing that type of ticket. Link out to the code. Link out to the operating dashboards.

Write a post in the team’s public channel about what types of tickets these docs will help with.

It might inspire another dev who has never tried this type of ticket. Or maybe it’ll give them an idea for how to encapsulate some of the intricacies. Maybe it’ll free them up to mentor juniors or learn a new technology.

It will establish them as an expert in that space. As a generous giver. 

So when they ask for that promotion, it’ll be understood.

Writing down what you’re an expert in tends to do that.

With Love,
Janahan

P.S. In case you’re comment shy, you can reply to this email; I will respond.

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