Now that I’m home, I’m glad to be back to focusing on writing.
Motivating me further: I just finished the book The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, which has been recommended to me so many times in the past few months that I was surprised to learn it was originally published in 2002. Good if you have a creative or entrepreneurial project and need a strong push to get to work already.
Merging blog and newsletter
I’ve been debating whether or not to merge my newsletter and my blog. The fact that I feel like I should say “yes, I have both a newsletter and a blog for some reason, and they’re different,” is already a bad sign, isn’t it…
My newsletter was meant to be once-weekly content, delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribers only.
Meanwhile, my blog posts were whenever-I-felt-like-it content, delivered to whoever was watching on Substack or Medium, or checking out my website. In any given week, I might post once, a few times, or not at all. They didn’t come to you by email unless you had Substack or Medium send them to you.
But the lines between email and blog are blurry. What content belongs where? And my writing was split into two places, only one of which was hosted on my website.
I was spending a lot of extra time each week managing content distribution. I’d rather spend the time creating content.
It just makes sense for me to merge them.
Here’s the deal
Here’s how it will work going forward. I will publish all my long-form content on my website first. Starting with this post 🙂
My newsletter is set up to watch my blog for new content.
We’re going to find out what happens with photos when I include them. Photo by Edi Libedinsky on Unsplash
Current email subscribers will get a weekly digest on Thursday mornings, so it won’t look too different, although I’m still figuring out how to make the formatting look good by email. If you’d rather get email for every post instead, let me know (or check your newsletter preferences).
New email subscribers will get an email for every post, with the option to switch to the digest.
The content will be duplicated on LinkedIn, Substack, and Medium, and linked on Bluesky. (Facebook too, for now, but I’m not a fan and I may discontinue that at some point.)
Less time managing content distribution, more time to write.
Also, welcome to [checking current numbers…] 170 subscribers so far who signed up this week on LinkedIn. Glad you’re here!
And somewhere in there I also took a week-long vacation to Cape Cod, too. I was so tired when I got home from GHC…
Let’s talk about conferences!
Speakers
I found speakers (both mainstage and breakout sessions) inspiring at all three conferences.
But it’s hard to beat the legendary Gene Kim for industry connections. ETLS speakers, especially on the main stage, were jaw-droppingly good.
If I hadn’t been to the same conference in 2023 and 2024, I would have wondered after day one what the conference committee was thinking, putting all their best speakers on the same day. But no, they put their best speakers on every day of the conference.
But why go to a conference at all? You can watch great speakers online.
For me, it’s about those in-person interactions. Especially the longer and more meaningful conversations during workshops, in the hallway, and over meals.
Now, I gotta hand it to GHC for assembling 13,000+ women in tech in one space. That’s a feat.
But sheer size alone made it harder to connect. GHC employed something called Braindate, which would have addressed this problem so well if it hadn’t run into so many snags… the one Braindate session I attended at GHC was one of the highlights of my conference.
ETLS does a wonderful job of making it easy to find people over food – breakfast, lunch, and evening social events were all excellent opportunities to connect with attendees, vendors, and speakers.
And Jeff Gallimore encourages people: when you’re in a group, leave the circle a little open so new people can join. Be a croissant, not a donut!
LeadDev, by far, had the most inclusive and welcoming conference. Thought and care were given to attendees’ needs. And I love the idea of speaker office hours – way more friendly than a few rushed minutes at the end of a presentation to call out questions. I’m hoping I introduced the croissant to LeadDev!
GHC knocks it out of the park for speaker diversity, but LeadDev also did very well in that category.
Winners: ETLS and LeadDev, tied. I felt like I was joining a community of friends at both.
Gene Kim at ETLS. Photo from ITRevolution.com.
Venue and Food
This must be the third hardest problem in computer science, after cache invalidation and naming things.
ETLS: Good hotel, good conference space… but, ugh… Vegas. Not my favorite place. I walked 20 minutes to a drugstore to buy spring water because I won’t pay $8/bottle for it. But the conference provided breakfast and lunch daily, as well as “heavy appetizers” in the evenings. The food options, both at the conference itself and near the conference, were the best of the three. Maybe that’s why the tickets were so expensive…
LeadDev: Conference space seemed a bit small for the need, but the North Javits Center was probably the nicest space of the three. No hotel was close to the conference center, though. The speaker hotel gave me a room the size of a postage stamp, but it had a drugstore across the street, which was great. NYC is overwhelming. But at least it’s close to home for me? Lunch was provided, but otherwise, food options were on your own in NYC, with nothing especially near the conference center. I ate at the hotel diner more than I’d have liked.
GHC: I spent a minor fortune staying at the hotel onsite, but it was by far the best hotel of the three. Chicago’s my favorite city of the three, and it was easy enough for me to get to. But holy cannoli, enormous venue, and you can only get from floor to floor by escalator. They had spring water onsite, but food, and even coffee, was from the conference center vendors, and there was a line everywhere you went. This made it hard to connect with people over food or even to eat at all between sessions. At least I could get grocery delivery to my hotel, unlike Vegas. And the restaurant/bar at the hotel had good food for dinner.
Winner: Ehh. Nobody!
My resting heart rate is always a few bpm higher during a conference. Here’s last week, with Grace Hopper Celebration in the purple box.
What will I do next year?
If all three conferences overlap, which would I choose?
If I take speaking out of the picture, probably ETLS, although LeadDev would be very tough to pass up. Maybe I’ll stay at a different hotel for LeadDev.
If I speak… that puts GHC back in the running. GHC won’t put me on the main stage at this point in my speaking career, but I’d like to experience that conference as a speaker. That would help, I think, with making connections.
That said, the speaker experience was the best at LeadDev.
I’m just going to hope that they aren’t three conferences in one week next year!
And furthermore…
Also on my radar: Fast Flow Conf. Which overlapped with LeadDev this year, so I’m probably doomed for 2026…
What conferences do you go to? Why do you like going there in person?
I’m a writer at heart, so enjoying speaking at conferences is a bit of a surprise for me.
Speaking at LeadDev StaffPlus went even better than I was hoping, and it’s got me thinking about what works for me as a speaker.
This was a bigger audience than when I spoke at Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit in 2024, and I actually felt more comfortable.
I had some signs while I was speaking that the talk was landing, like a gasp from the audience when I revealed a surprise. And I got kind comments and great questions from people who approached me afterwards.
I know the cheerleading from the conference organizers and my fellow presenters helped. Such a supportive group!
Group photo with other StaffPlus speakers. Photo from LeadDev
I’m also starting to settle on an approach to speaking that works for me as a writer.
What to speak about
Deciding what to speak about is the first hard part. For me, it’s about identifying a story from my life that illustrates a point relevant to my audience.
Let me break that down:
A story – there are great presentations that don’t involve storytelling, but putting the story front and center helps me connect with the audience.
From my life – if I’m talking about my own experience, it’s easier for me to remember the details. And nobody in the audience will challenge me on the facts!
Illustrates a point – yes, but the point I wind up making may not be the point I originally planned. The process of crafting the talk often leads me to a new place.
Relevant to my audience – I’ve got plenty of stories, but not all of them are meaningful for that audience and context.
From there, I’ll start either with the end of the story or with the moment of transition.
Where do I want to end up?
If I start with the end, I have a few considerations:
What’s the main takeaway?
In the case of my LeadDev talk, I wanted people to have a sense of when a conflict might not be theirs to resolve and when it might be time to focus on something else.
How do I want them to feel after the talk?
I like my audience to feel seen. I want them to feel like the talk went to a deeper place than they might have been expecting.
That was especially true on the StaffPlus stage, because I was third on the program. I wanted to help create a sense of “this conference isn’t esoteric, it is relevant to me.”
Moment of transition
Stories are best, I think, when the storyteller emerges changed by the experience. Something like “this happened and now I see things differently” beats “this happened but otherwise everything’s still the same.”
The moment where things change is a great place to deep dive for a few seconds to make the moment more vivid. Add detail. Slow down a bit to let that moment play out. Bring the audience along for the transition.
When I got to this moment for LeadDev, I just let myself go off script and relive a little of the emotion. I let there be some unfinished sentences.
Where to start the story?
This is a Matthew Dicks storytelling tip: the story starts with the opposite of where it ends.
My story at StaffPlus ends with my realizing that the conflict I was describing was not mine to handle. Therefore, it starts in a moment where I was determined that I was going to handle it.
The first few lines (and the last few) are the only sentences I outright memorize. This is a Moth Radio Hour storytelling tip from their book How to Tell a Story.
I want my opening section to do several things:
Start strong. No “so” at the beginning.
Acknowledge my welcome. “Thank you” is good.
Get the attention of the audience. More on a “hook” shortly.
Introduce myself. Specifically, why should the audience listen to me. Quick recap of my credentials.
Bring people into a moment, with some details.
Introduce the stakes. Why should anyone care about this story?
Hook?
I heard a Rory Vaden podcast recently where he explores what a “hook” is.
People say you should do three things during a talk:
Tell people what you’re about to tell them
Tell them
Tell them what you just told them
I’ve also heard this called bad advice, and it might be, if you’re interpreting this as just repeating yourself three times. That’s not how I interpret it.
At the top of this section, I told you what I was about to tell you (“what a ‘hook’ is.”) I haven’t actually said what a hook is yet. I just told you what to expect from this section.
And that is the hook: it’s the first “tell people what you’re about to tell them.” You aren’t giving all the info away the first time. You’re just letting people know the plan.
I did this in my talk right here:
The hook.
Then you can execute the plan (“tell them”) and at the end, recap the takeaways (“tell them what you just told them”).
Once I saw how “tell them what you’re about to tell them” can be the hook, I can’t unsee it.
A map, and no notes
Once I know where I’m starting, my transition, and where I’m ending, I have a map of sorts for how I want to get there. What points do I want to visit along the way?
I don’t bother with speaker notes, for the most part.
I’ve got my opening line and closing line memorized.
I know my story path to get from A to B to C.
I’ve practiced enough to have learned some key phrases I will pull out along the way.
I don’t want it to sound like I’m reading. So I don’t read.
I practice to find out where I get lost. I also sneak clues into my slides to make sure I always know what’s next.
For example: I had several slides in a row with multiple bullet points. I needed to know when I was on the last bullet point, so that I could change my intonation to match. But the number of bullets varied from slide to slide. Solution: the last bullet on each slide starts with “and.”
The only speaker note I had at LeadDev was on one of the last slides: “If you have at least 2 minutes remaining, you’re on time.” It’s an early warning if I’m running over, and it lets me relax if I am on time.
Slides
I try to put as little text as possible on the slides. Text should be close to what I’m saying, but not necessarily exactly (I don’t want to read my slides to the audience). Text should reinforce key points.
I do a lot of animation, mostly making bullet points appear as I talk. Ideally, they appear just after I’ve said them.
I don’t want my audience reading ahead, so I don’t give them any way to do that. I want them curious and listening to me.
But it’s also good for them to have some info on the screen in case they space out for a moment. Notes let them get caught up.
This time, I also discovered the joy of the “replay” animation for drawing. I drew an org chart and then drew some annotations… The end result looked like this:
It all made sense with the narrative.
Closing
The closing section has several jobs:
End strong. No “anyway, so… that’s all I have, I guess…”
Recap the takeaway(s)
Call to action. What do I want them to do? At LeadDev, it was “find me here, and find me on beyond writing code dot com.”
Another thank you. Gratitude’s nice. It also lets the audience know the talk is over.
I used to put the “thank you” at the top of my last slide. Now I don’t, because I don’t want to signal that I’m done until I’ve said everything.
You might be able to get away without a signal that you’re done if you have a really strong and decisive ending, and you slow down a lot to deliver. Maybe something like this:
“And that… is why you should never… get into a pie-eating contest… with the Dalai Lama.”
Rehearsing
I practice standing up, out loud, with a “clicker” in my hand to advance the slides.
I listen for where I forget what’s next, where I stumble over the words, and where I get sidetracked. Places where I say “and—” only to switch slides and discover that the next slide needs a “but,” not an “and.”
After I rehearse, I think: what were the best moments of this talk as it stands now? Get rid of other moments as much as possible. Keep only those that are required to tell the story.
I make notes of any phrasing I like, and then I’ll try to rehearse using that phrasing.
Rehearsing for an audience is useful, even better if they can give me feedback about what was strong, what wasn’t, and how I can improve.
Presentation time
I did some walking shortly before I was due on stage. That helped me burn some excess nervous energy.
I gave myself a few presentation-time reminders:
Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. If I rush, I mess up, and messing up makes me slower.
Breathe. I practiced this while rehearsing, and noticed the difference it made.
Look out at people.
Don’t get clever. No improvising, adding content, or going off script.
Have some energy. Try to sound as if you were saying it all for the first time. Like you just now thought of it.
With this plan, I feel surprisingly comfortable on stage. Here I am, a writer enjoying speaking. Who knew?
I’ve used my writing skills to craft the story from start to finish. I have a story from my own life, so I know what I need to talk about. And I have the slides to help reinforce my points and keep me from getting stuck.
And that… is why you should never… get into a pie-eating contest… with the Dalai Lama.
The book isn’t out until October, but I have a few sample chapters of the ebook because I’m on IT Revolution’s mailing list. And I realized that, despite my current dread of all things AI-related, I should read those sample chapters before attending the seminar.
Wow, y’all. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt like I was hanging on every word of a book. This is one of those books.
I’ve already added it to my list of books I recommend. And I have a whole list of people, developers and non-developers alike, who I think would enjoy it. (I may be able to get you a discount. More about that later.)
Skeptical of vibe coding? I sure was, and to some extent still am. Gene and Steve were, too.
But they are clearly converts, and the book is getting me to rethink my initial impressions.
Addressing concerns
Yes, there are serious concerns about writing “real” production code with vibe coding, where you’re not really delving into the code output.
Is the coding process itself safe?
Is the code it generates secure, maintainable, and extendable?
If you don’t understand or even look at the code, how can you be sure there isn’t some terrible problem lurking that will cause major problems once it’s in production? Okay, you can never be sure of that, but it seems so much worse if you don’t fully understand the code.
It’s clear that the authors of this book are grappling with these same concerns. The chapters where they talk about how to approach vibe coding for better results are still ahead, and not part of the sneak preview! Argh, cliffhanger! 🙂
Magic and hope
One of my early takeaways isn’t directly related to vibe coding at all: I finally understood why, after 20 years as a developer, I just didn’t want to write code anymore. The tedious parts have started to outweigh the magic. If you’re feeling that way, too, you’re not alone.
Vibe coding may be a way for developers to rediscover that magic. It may also be an opportunity for people not trained as developers to discover it too, and to create new software directly.
The book also gives me hope that the role of the developer, even the junior developer, isn’t disappearing. Changing, yes, that’s inevitable. But they point to other historical moments where people feared the end of our profession, and those moments turned out to be times of growth.
Learning more
My thoughts these days are all about the role of humanity for software developers, so I’m interested to see what I’ll learn from Gene and Steve’s session and the conference itself. I’ll report back on my mailing list after the conference.
Does this Vibe Coding book sound like a good read to you, too? Want 15% off a paperback copy?
If there’s interest, I will coordinate a bulk order for 15% off for folks on my mailing list. Email me or message me on LinkedIn by 9/28 to let me know if you’re interested.
Join the mailing list below so you don’t miss a thing!
Posted just now about writer’s checklists – so let’s post about the developer’s checklists here too!
As a developer, I maintained a checklist of troubleshooting tips.
I would have conversations like this:
Me: Any thoughts on what I could do next?
Colleague: Have you tried [something they also recommended last time]?
Me, embarrassed: Uh… no. I’ll try that. Writing that down this time! Thanks.
And I’d add that to my checklist.
For reasons unknown, developers assume that we are the last person in our organization who will ever encounter a specific problem.
We’re the last person our team will ever onboard, so we don’t need to document lessons learned during onboarding.
This error message won’t happen again, so there’s no need to note the steps we took to address it.
Nobody else will install or configure this product, so we won’t bother writing down the process we went through.
“I’m surely the last person to ever go through this process.” Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash
And then we’re surprised when three days or weeks or months later, the same situation has come up again and we’re struggling to remember what we did last time.
Last page list
I kept my troubleshooting checklist starting on the back page of my notebook so I could always find it in a hurry.
The specific items on the checklist will vary from person to person, but they might include:
When did this code work last? Did it ever work?
What changed between when it last worked and now?
Can I reproduce the problem in another environment? How about another branch of my code?
What if I back out my last change?
Have I tried clearing the browser cache? (Ugh. I always forget.)
Did I push the change to the environment where I’m expecting it?
Am I getting an error? Search for the exact text of the error in the code, in Slack, on the web…
Some of the best writing tips I learned were from a summer class I took as a teenager. I’m still adding to my writer’s checklists, decades later.
However, I have mostly kept these checklists in my head. Whenever I realize that I have documentation stored in my head, I want to write it down.
First of all, the information in your brain is not searchable! Make it useful to others, and write. Part of why I’m writing a book, after all!
And second, the brain is a much better processing unit than it is a storage unit. Get all that excess knowledge out of your head and onto a more reliable “external drive” (like paper). Then you can free up mental space for things you can’t just go look up.
Here’s my basic checklist:
What’s sillier than putting “make to-do list” on a to-do list? This. Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash
Vary sentence beginnings. “She did this. She saw that. She said something. She blah blah blah.” Change it up!
Similar: vary sentence structure. Subject-verb, subject-verb, subject-verb… gets boring after a while.
Break up long sentences. If you’ve got more than one and/or/but, start to get suspicious that a sentence is perhaps too long.
However, it’s trendy these days to write entirely in short, choppy sentences, or even sentence fragments. I’m not a fan. Again, vary that sentence structure.
Avoid the passive voice. I don’t try to eliminate it entirely, but I often like my writing better in the active voice.
Use tenses deliberately. I tend to switch between the present and the past tenses, unintentionally. But people do that naturally, and it can invite the reader to relive a specific moment with you. It’s only a problem if I don’t like what I wrote.
Drop extra words. Instead of: “That is one of those things that I find myself doing a lot.” Try: “I do that a lot.” The tipoff: a group of words such as this, that, what, which, something, or one, hanging out together in a sentence. “This is one of those things which…”
Watch out for weak words. “Very” and “really” are rarely doing me any favors. I use them, but sparingly.
Clarify “this.” I learned this tip recently. Even if it’s pretty clear what you mean by “that” or “these,” it can be even clearer if you just say it. “That guideline is so useful,” vs. “That is so useful.” Or, “I learned this tip recently,” instead of “I learned this recently.”
Instead of “you should,” try “I learned.” Rather than telling people what to take away from my writing, I find it more helpful to share my takeaways and let readers draw their own conclusions.
A bulleted list helps break up blocks of text.
Read it out loud
I often read my writing out loud. If I can’t bring myself to read out loud for some reason, I’m reading silently, but imagining how it sounds. I think of this as reading something to myself loudly. 🙂
Here’s what I’m listening for as I read out loud:
Words I’ve repeated. “Oops, I say ‘unintentionally’ twice in this sentence…”
Does it sound like me?
Do I get lost, or bored? If I do, my reader will.
Do I trip over my words or have to start over mid-sentence? Red flag. Look for grammar errors, stray words, sentences you can break up, or unnatural phrasing.
How are the pieces fitting together? Does the flow from one idea to another make sense?
What’s my tone? If I’ve veered off into “smug” or “judging” that’s a warning flag for me.
Am I repeating myself? Does it serve my purpose to do so, if I am?
Did I say something other than what I wrote? If so, did I do that because it sounds more natural the way I said it? For example, I wrote “I do use them.” But when I read it aloud, I said “I use them” instead. It sounded better shorter. I changed it.
If you’re struggling to read something you wrote, or if you read it and have the fleeting thought: “huh, I have no idea what I just said,” that’s your brain trying to tell you there’s a problem.
I’m sure there are others that I’ve forgotten to list here! I might edit this as I think of more.
Was this helpful to you? Did you pick up something new?
Beware of the scams targeting job seekers. I’d say “it’s a new low” for scammers to target people who are looking for work, but no, unfortunately… the scammers seem to reside at those depths.
Scammers who aren’t who they claim to be
Beware these tactics for scammers trying to mask their true identity.
Text-only interviews (no video call).
AI-generated video. Some sophisticated scammers are using AI to make them look like someone they’re not.
LinkedIn profiles or other online content may be convincing fakes. Or hacked.
Scammers impersonating legitimate people. The name on the email is a real recruiter, but the actual sender is a scammer pretending to be the recruiter.
Photo from Getty Images on Unsplash.
Lookalike URLs, e.g., if the real site is companyname dot com, but the email is from companynameinc dot com.
Spoofed email.
Entirely fake companies.
Scammers after a job seeker’s money
Don’t share your bank account information until you’re hired at a company you’re 100% sure is legitimate and you’re ready to get that paycheck by direct deposit! Even something that seems like it couldn’t be a scam, like accepting a check from the company as payment for something, has the potential to be a problem.
Watch out for these scams:
Requests for payment or for your banking info, e.g. to cover “fees.” This includes payment for background checks or credit reports.
Exclusive paid content. Would you pay extra to have the inside scoop on how to get hired at Google? That exclusive content may not be anything other than publicly shared information.
Money launderers. Don’t take any jobs handling money for others unless you’re completely sure of their legitimacy. Scammers may be criminals trying to hide the trail of money they’ve stolen.
Being sent a check e.g., for equipment or training. Even after you’ve been “hired”.
You buy a laptop, they send you a check for the amount, you send them the laptop “to be configured,” the check bounces and they disappear.
They “overpay” you and ask you to send some back. You send it back, but then their check bounces.
Wait, wouldn’t it be okay to accept a check and only act on it after it clears? No, a cleared check isn’t proof that it hasn’t bounced. From the FTC site on fake check scams:
By law, banks have to make deposited funds available quickly. Even if you see the funds in your account, that doesn’t mean it’s a good check. Fake checks can take weeks to be discovered and untangled. By that time, the scammer has any money you sent, and you’re stuck paying the money back to the bank.
Other red flags
Sharing your personal information too early in the process (e.g., you shouldn’t need to share a social security number to start the conversation)
Anything unusual they ask you to run on your own machine: custom software, a project with a github repository. These can be malware designed to steal your personal information.
Job offers for roles you didn’t apply for.
Salaries much better than you’d expect for the position.
Be suspicious if you’re getting a lot of pressure from the company to do things quickly. They may be trying to keep you from doing proper research.
Trust your intuition if something feels “off” or seems too good to be true.
How to protect yourself
As a job seeker, what can you do to protect yourself from scams?
If this isn’t a company you’re familiar with, see what you can learn about them. Sites like LinkedIn and Glassdoor might help, but they aren’t alone proof of a legitimate company.
You could also ask friends if they are familiar with the company, or see if you have any second-degree contacts there on LinkedIn.
Look for the company name + “scam” or “complaint” online.
Verify via the company’s real website. Reach out to them rather than relying only on contact information given to you.
When possible, meet someone in person.
I’ve heard that, if you suspect AI-generated video, you can ask the person to put their hand in front of their face. Apparently, AI has a hard time handling that. I heard a story of one sketchy interviewer who refused to do this.
“I don’t know about this… put your paw in front of your face?” Photo from Getty Images on Unsplash.
Things you can do if scammed
What if a scammer contacted you? What if things went too far before you realized something was amiss?
Freeze your account at all three major credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian, TransUnion). Freezing is free.
Change your banking info, if you’ve given it out.
If the scammer impersonated a real company, contact them via their website to report it.
I try to avoid posting about AI, but today I found myself wondering: did I just chat with an AI?
Trying to decide which of several products to purchase online, I used the company’s website chatbot, which transferred me to “Vanessa” for further assistance.
Was Vanessa real? I found myself evaluating every line.
The overly-enthusiastic and strangely polished parts? That’s probably AI.
But what about…
The natural-sounding, competent, useful responses?
The grammatical errors?
The inability to remember bits of context from earlier in the conversation?
Delays where the “agent is typing” and I’m waiting…
…but then I get an “are you still there?” a minute later while I’m typing?
The occasional complete nonsense, sort of an on-topic word salad?
What’s wild to me is that I have experienced all of those things in the days before AI chat, when you could be reasonably certain you were talking to a human. So, on one hand, any of these could be a human behind the wheel.
As if AI chatbots had a physical incarnation with a hand
But then again, maybe AI would say: “How is you’re day so far?” If so, was the grammar error deliberately inserted, to make it sound more human? Or did AI just learn from a lot of grammatically incorrect training data?
Humans of yore
Once upon a time, you chatted (phone or text) with a human. They either knew how to help, or they would have you hold while they talked to someone else on your behalf. You could picture someone sitting in an office somewhere, spinning their office chair around to ask the senior person at the cubicle behind them.
Later, you chatted with a human who generally didn’t know how to help, but who could follow a flowchart of common questions. I worked in tech support, I get it. 90% of the calls are answered by the flowchart.
Unfortunately, those people would often not recognize when you were off the flowchart. I might say “step 3 of your instructions refers to a button that doesn’t exist,” and they’d just send me the link to the same instructions I was already following.
When they ran out of flowchart, they’d send you to tier 2. But even the flowchart person was still someone sitting in an office somewhere.
They might be following a script. But when it said “Agent is typing…” on the screen, they were at least assembling a reply from various bits of canned text with a little original text thrown in.
Where’s my person?
It was never clear to me how much “Vanessa” was controlled by a human operator. If at all.
I hope for the sake of that company that there was at least some human oversight to prevent inappropriate responses.
But, at best, I imagined someone monitoring multiple chats to make sure the AI responses weren’t going off the rails. Would they even need to know the product? Maybe their software could be doing some realtime sentiment rating to highlight if the user is getting frustrated.
The contrast was striking when, later in the day, I had a chat with “Julian” from Microsoft’s online sales chat feature. Aside from one overly enthusiastic greeting (on the order of “It’s an absolute delight to assist you today! How can I help you make your business more successful?”) the conversation… just felt normal.
The wording and grammar weren’t perfect. But they didn’t seem unprofessional, they just seemed human.
Microsoft likely has access to the best AI a company can get. If I had to pick a company that might have AI so good they could fake me out, they’d certainly be on my list of candidates.
But I feel like Vanessa’s response to “I honestly could not tell if I was talking to a real person or an AI” might have been something more… AI-sounding.
What would an AI say if asked that, anyway?
I couldn’t get claude.ai to be deceptive about it, even hypothetically. But I did get it to tell me what a human could say to reassure. I wanted an AI-generated example to contrast with Julian’s response above.
“Ha, I get that question sometimes! I do use assistance with my writing to make sure I’m being as helpful as possible, but there’s definitely a human behind these messages.”
Well done, Claude. No need to escalate to tier 2 support.
I’ve been listening to books on storytelling recently, including three I recommend highly.
Book 1: How to Tell a Story
First: How to Tell a Story is by the team from the Moth Radio Hour. Seek that show out, if you’re not familiar with it. Among the takeaways… strong stories have:
A change or transformation. Show how the events of the story changed things, changed you.
Stakes. Why should the listener care.
A strong start and ending. No “so, yeah” at the beginning. No “uh, well, that’s it I guess” at the end.
And when telling a story on stage, look for the sweet spot between memorizing and improvising. Know your story arc, what details you want to include or leave out, where you want to speed up or slow down.
But memorize only the opening and ending. Beyond that, memorizing can make you sound unnatural. And if you lose your place in something you memorized word for word, recovering is hard.
Second, Stories that Stick, by Kindra Hall, provides a framework for how to approach storytelling. Her tips:
have a recognizable character,
use vivid and relatable details to connect to your audience,
bring in genuine emotion,
and identify a turning point (the change or transformation mentioned above)
Stories that Stick then explains how most businesses have four main stories to tell: the value story (what’s the value of the product), the founder’s story (how did it all start), the purpose story (vision and values), and the customer story (testimonials). Each one serves different purposes.
Given how good those two books were, did I really need another five-star book about storytelling?
Yes, yes I did.
I found that the lessons from each book complement the lessons from the others. Combined, they made a powerful course in storytelling. And it sure doesn’t hurt that all three books feature engaging stories as examples.
But the third book I read, Storyworthy, by Matthew Dicks, might be my favorite.
Even better: itgave me a rule of thumb that I’m already putting into practice. (I thought I was already following it. I wasn’t.)
Book 3: Storyworthy
So many of us were taught to think of an academic style as “good writing.” It’s how we learned to write essays for school.
Problem is, it can be a little boring.
In the Book Academy, Luvvie Ajayi Jones encouraged students to ditch the scholarly tone. “Write like you talk,” Luvvie said.
And sure enough, whenever someone set aside their fancy word choices and just wrote as if they were speaking, their writing came alive.
I already have a pretty conversational style of writing, so I thought I had this covered. But, in Storyworthy, Matthew Dicks takes this a step further. He calls it the “dinner test.”
With the dinner test, you’re not just writing like you talk. You’re telling your story the way you’d tell it around the dinner table with friends.
So now, as I write, I keep going back to imagine saying all this to you. Does it sound like something I’d say? I’m surprised by how often the answer is no.
Storyworthy recommends another practice I plan to adopt. The author calls it “homework for life.”
Homework for life consists of pausing at the end of each day for ten minutes to identify any “story worthy” moments that happened during the day. Just jot down enough to remember what the story is. You can also make a note of anything that happened at another time but which you happened to remember in that moment.
This practice can build a list of stories worth telling, which is great. But even more than that, it can get you to pay more attention to small moments in your life that might be worth remembering.
Matthew Dicks suggests that since he’s been practicing this habit, he’s had a sense of life not passing him by so quickly. That alone makes it a worthwhile practice for me, even if I never use the resulting list as a source for stories.
Have you read any of these books about storytelling? Are you incorporating storytelling into your work or your life? What have you found useful when crafting your stories?
As I mentioned recently in my post about pressure and resistance, I’ve had a hard time getting started lately. I’ll sit down to work, and then I get distracted. At the end of the day, I’ve accomplished nothing on my to do list.
I feel like an engine that won’t “catch.” Turn the key, it makes the right sounds to indicate that the engine is surely starting. But as soon as you stop turning the key… silence.
Another piece of the resistance, in addition to rebelling against the pressure: I fear doing it wrong or not being able to finish.
I dread writing for a while on a blog post and then losing enthusiasm and giving up.
I’ll think about a section of my book proposal but then worry that it won’t go well or I won’t be able to complete it.
You know what guarantees that I will fail? Not starting.
It makes no sense. Not starting feels safer, even though it guarantees the outcome I don’t want. Why should it feel safer?
And yet, I’ve spent several days this month with the engine turning over but not catching.
Fortunately, yesterday was a good day. Got a (fairly long!) newsletter email written. Yay! And today has been good so far too. Taking the pressure off is helping.
Blank is easy, but not useful
I had to laugh when I saw this. Here are the search engine optimization (SEO) ratings from Yoast for a completely blank blog post:
I had to laugh. That post (or book!) you never write? Sure, as a blank page, it might be incredibly easy to read. And, not having any words, it is unlikely to offend.
But it’s not exactly going to be engaging to your readers. With driving, to get somewhere, you have to actually start the engine. In order to connect through the written word, you must start writing.
