Dave Taylor, Software Engineer

Dave Taylor

Meeting Matthias Endler and Opening Up My Calendar

2nd Dec 2022

Meeting Matthias Endler and Opening Up My Calendar

I really enjoyed meeting Matthias Endler yesterday. I stumbled on his website while researching wasm based full-text search options. He writes in Your First Business Should be a Spreadsheet:

One of the best decisions I made in 2020 was to open my calendar to everyone. People book appointments to chat about open-source projects, content creation, and business ideas.

This reminded me that I have wanted to do the same thing for a while. So I have opened up my calendar as well, and booked a chat on his.

What I learned from Matthias

Matthias lives in Germany, he is an open-source maintainer and a Rust Consultant. We initially talked a lot about his experience opening up his calendar. He said it has been one of the best decisions he has made. He has met some interesting people and it has opened up opportunities to collaborate on projects.

I have put off opening up my calendar for years now. For me, there have been two main barriers. The first is thinking that no one will be interested in chatting with me. The second is being able to remind people to book a chat without seeming arrogant or self-important. Matthias said he also had similar feelings. He suggested posting messages like "I've got a few slots available next week, anyone fancy a quick chat?" or suggesting a short chat around a particular topic like "Anyone fancy a 15-minute chat about using Rust and WebAssembly?".

Matthias also encouraged me to document my experiences learning Rust. He said "you never get back that mindset once you have learnt it" and "it would be really valuable to see what developers coming from another language struggle with".

The Composability Problem

During our chat, Matthias happened to start talking about a meeting he had the day before. They were discussing the various headless services the group needed to integrate together. Someone joked that we need a headless, headless managing system ... I told him, yeah, that is Uniform 😆

Finally

So, all in all, a big thank you to Matthias for opening up his calendar. I am excited about doing the same. I hope we will collaborate more in the future.

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