I’m going to be cutting back on traveling and speaking in the future, and if you are one of the folks who got an email from me, declining an engagement--I’m sorry. I traveled a crazy amount in September, and put on @APIStrat in Chicago at the end of the month. I got sick during the downtime afterwards, and I just went to Stockholm to speak, where I got sick again—only just fully recovering as of yesterday.
I feel like my most important work, which is my research, and secondarily my story telling suffers greatly when I travel, and takes an even greater hit when I’m sick. When it comes to making an impact, and reaching the widest possible audience, I’d say my writing is the most important. I get only a handful of people who come up to me and say “great talk at that API event”, where I get a steady flow of people who thank me for my writing, and tell me about the impact it has made on them.
With this in mind, I'm going to dramatically cut back on accepting speaking engagements, and attending conferences. There are a handful of events I’m addicted to like Gluecon and Defrag that I don't think I will ever stop going to, and of course my own conference API Strategy & Practice will continue, but beyond that I’m going to need a damn good reason to go to an event.
I’m sorry for being kind of a jerk on this front, but the API space is moving really quickly, and I feel like I can’t afford to miss a beat when it comes to my monitoring, research, coding and writing. The ROI on traveling and speaking just isn't there, like it is with my writing—which is the most nourishing thing I have, when it comes to keep this crazy train moving forward.
