Sam Bleckley

SEEKING WORK | Remote (happy to travel for kickoff, though) | Michigan, USA

I'm Sam Bleckley, a full stack engineer with 2 decades of successful outcomes consulting across dozens of industries. I can help with:

- Technical challenges ("We know the feature we want, but we don't have the expertise or the time to get it built")

- Process challenges ("We keep missing deadlines," "We're deploying too many bugs," or "The team has no motivation")

- Product design challenges ("We believe this solves our users' problems, but they aren't using it they way we expect")

I also offer fixed-bid development of small prototypes and MVPs, if you need to prove an idea, or have a new project hit the ground running.

If you're looking for experience in a specific tech stack, here are some of the technologies I'm comfortable using:

```AngularJS, Angular, AWS (S3, Lambda, RDS, &c.), C, CSS, Creative Cloud, Flask, git, Glamor, GCS, HTML, Javascript/ECMAscript, Lisps of many varieties, Next.js, Node, Photoshop, Python, Ruby on Rails, React, Ruby, SASS, SCSS, Svelte, Swift, Typescript, Vue, whatever legacy DSL you've got ```

If you want to know more about me, the services I provide, or my approach to software, check out https://sambleckley.com, or reach out to sam@sambleckley.com

Related - The Church of Interruption [1].

> When people are interrupting each other - when they're constantly tugging the conversation back and forth between their preferred directions - then the conversation itself is just a battle of wills. But when people just put in one thing at a time, and trust their fellows to only say things that relate to the thing that came right before - at least, until there's a very long pause - then you start to see genuine collaboration.

I think that's the meat of the collaborative conversational spirit. Interruption/waiting is one axis, another nearly orthogonal axis is continuation/abandonment of the current topic which correlates more strongly with actual listening rather than politeness.

In terms of [1], I've definitely encountered "civil barkers", who will never interrupt you verbally (but usually offer increasingly strong nonverbal cues that they want their turn), then very weakly link into a new topic. That is to say, waiting isn't a sufficient (nor I'd say necessary) condition for constructive conversation. E.g. the Trump/Hillary debate, when asked to say something nice about each other, Hillary immediately pivoted into talking about her platform.

[1] https://sambleckley.com/writing/church-of-interruption.html

On the topic of "interruption", I think that "it depends".

Sam Bleckley wrote a really good essay on this behavior[0] that pretty much explains how my wife and I interact with each other. We interrupt each other constantly to move the conversation along faster and to express our current state of understanding. I have learned that this often comes across as "rude", but I feel like it's perhaps a difference of style between east coast (and maybe just NY/NJ) and the rest of the US.

The Holy Creedo of The Church of Interruption:

1. Thou shalt interrupt when thou understand’st. 2. Thou shalt speak until I interrupt. 3. Thou shalt use physical cues to indicate when I ought continue talking. > “I’m talking about how you behave when we’re talking. When you understand whatever it is I’m trying to say, you don’t wait around for me to finish my sentence, you—” > “Interrupt. Sure. It’s the easiest way to make sure I understand what you mean.” > “That’s very insightful. You’re right; if you finish my statement in a way I agree with, I know that you understand. And, if I accept your summary, we both know you’ve got it. It’s very efficient.” [0] https://sambleckley.com/writing/church-of-interruption.html

Well put.
Big fan of the "Commercial illustrators will keep their jobs, but will mostly need to learn to use AI as a part of their workflow to maintain a higher pace of work" part.

I'm a sometimes-illustrator (but my style is pretty far from what Generative AI is doing), and I recently published a 1.1 of a game manual which uses Midjourney images. I'm currently investing in a "proper" illustrator because the MDJ images lack character, but it's also true that in a few months from now this might change: I'll stick with the illustrator to have more consistency in the images, but probably the AI could do a fancier job there.

Besides, the "things will change in 2 months" point is a good one, but it's been used since a year and a half and things haven't changed yet. Sure, the quality of the produced images improved, but not in a qualitative scale.

Side note: the link civitai to leads to https://sambleckley.com/writing/civitai.com/images which is a dead link.

Two other concepts that fit with this:

To listen well, get curious: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/hFom77cBBnnbNLzzm/p/4K5pJnKBGkqqTbyxx Summary: take care with pop-psy advice to repeat what people say - without deep engagement it is just yuk.

The church of interruption: https://sambleckley.com/writing/church-of-interruption.html Summary: some people are polite listeners and some people are polite interrupters - each of those two social ecologies works great but they mix poorly.

The article also implies caring, non-judgmental conversation. Many conversations are competitive status signalling which shuts down friendly communication. When meeting new people the default first few sentences are usually about status: it is insidious and often unavoidable.