The undercover generalist (Friends)

The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Which is smarter: specializing in a particular tech or becoming more of a generalist? It depends! Which is why Jerod invited “undercover generalist” Adolfo Ochagavía on our “It Depends” series to weigh the pros & cons of each path.

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Sponsors:

• FireHydrant – The alerting and on-call tool designed for humans, not systems. Signals puts teams at the center, giving you ultimate control over rules, policies, and schedules. No need to configure your services or do wonky work-arounds. Signals filters out the noise, alerting you only on what matters. Manage coverage requests and on-call notifications effortlessly within Slack. But here’s the game-changer…Signals natively integrates with FireHydrant’s full incident management suite, so as soon as you’re alerted you can seamlessly kickoff and manage your entire incident inside a single platform. Learn more or switch today at firehydrant.com/signals
• Cloudflare – Cloudflare’s Developer Week is happening April 1-5, 2024. Also you can hang with Adam and the rest of the folks at Cloudflare at the Cloudflare offices in Austin, TX on Wednesday, April 3rd at 5:30pm — register here.
• Synadia – Take NATS to the next level via a global, multi-cloud, multi-geo and extensible service, fully managed by Synadia. They take care of all the infrastructure, management, monitoring, and maintenance for you so you can focus on building exceptional distributed applications.
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Featuring:

• Adolfo Ochagavía – GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

• More “It Depends” episodes
• The undercover generalist

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Kapitler

1. Let's talk! (00:00:00)

2. Sponsor: FireHydrant (00:00:38)

https://firehydrant.com/signals

3. Adolfo Depends (00:03:11)

4. Getting to know Adolfo (00:04:59)

5. Jerod's generalist background (00:07:06)

6. Specialize to generalize (00:09:09)

7. Solving problems vs getting stuck (00:12:11)

8. Specialized pay (00:13:22)

9. Sponsor: Cloudflare (00:16:11)

https://www.cloudflare.com/developerweek

10. Contract vs full time work (00:20:20)

11. Saying no is a privilege (00:23:54)

12. Early days of contracting (00:28:15)

13. The Rust breakthrough (00:29:15)

14. The actors' actor (00:31:58)

15. Asking for recommendations (00:32:59)

16. The value of writing (00:35:50)

17. Write with sincerity (00:41:51)

18. This is why we "It Depends" (00:45:48)

19. Sponsor: Synadia (00:48:50)

https://www.synadia.com/changelog

20. Backing the wrong tech (00:53:10)

21. Decision rubrik (01:04:44)

22. The allure of full-time work (01:07:11)

23. The AI Rescue Team (01:09:38)

24. Connect on LinkedIn... (01:11:22)

25. It's better! (01:12:22)

https://changelog.com/++

26. Coming up next (01:13:35)