Cool gear, New Goats, Kubernetes, and Price’s Law

As things return toward a new normal, we've been busy launching a few new websites, optimizing an IT service system and chasing some savy goats who escaped during a conference call. We've had a lot of interesting discussions that I've shared below, some of our favorite things, and some interesting projects.

Quote of the Week

Most people struggle to be present. People go sit in ashrams for 20 years in India trying to be present. Do yoga. Meditate. Trying to get here. Now. Most people live in fear because we project the past into the future. Michael’s a mystic. He was never anywhere else. … His gift was not that he could jump high, run fast, shoot a basketball. His gift was that he was completely present. And that was the separator.

— Mark Vancil, author of “Rare Air,” discussing Michael Jordan’s psyche during Episode 10 of the ESPN Films documentary series “The Last Dance”

Who is Derek J. de Solla Price ?

Price's square root law or Price's law pertains to the relationship between the literature on a subject and the number of authors in the subject area, stating that half of the publications come from the square root of all contributors. Thus, if 100 papers are written by 25 authors, five authors will have contributed 50 papers. (from Wikipedia).

It's important as we maximize efficiency within teams and as key employees look elsewhere for jobs. According to Prices Law, in a company with 50 employees, approximately 7 are responsible for 50% of the productive output. The key question then is what happens if you loose 3 of these people under the circumstances of the economy now. Furthermore, how do you increase the productivity, buy-in, and execution for the 43 employees responsible for the other half of productive output?

A Great Book on the Experience of Being an Emergency Physician

Given the focus on our hero medical providers around the globe, I HIGHLY recommend a new book by Dr. Shannon Sovendal called Fragile: Beauty in Chaos, Grace in Tragedy, and the Hope That Lives in Between. I'm almost done and never have a I read a book that so eloquently describes the internal dialogue and raw emotion of emergency medicine. It's free on Amazon Kindle Unlimited right now.

#ALONETOGETHER

Every week we meet on a video call and spend an hour hanging out. Our #alonetogether slack channel is filled with everything from great quotes, good books, recipes, and pictures of dogs, kids, squirrels, goats, and chickens..

Here's what what's trending with the team:

• If you only had one cookbook in your kitchen, Barnabas and I believe it should be The Silver Spoon Classic. It's a collection of 175 mostly simple but delicious recipes collected in 1950 from the various regions of Italy and organized by ingredient. As the owner of 50+ cookbooks, I agree that it's my go to for day to day filled with amazing recipes that have withstood the test of time.
• Sometimes you have to measure small things in 1/1000th of an inch. For some reason, I end up measuring lots of things for building, welding, and electronics. Here is my favorite tool for that, called an anvil micrometer - plus it's a beautiful tool made in Japan and really accurate for measuring thicknesses of things like pipes and metal.
• It got cold here in Idaho this week, and I've been living in my Equilibrium Jacket from Triple Aught Design which is my favorite insulating layer I've owned, and I've gone through quite a few.
• Need some workout direction at home with limited equipment, follow Corey @Real_Life_Strength for daily workouts. Corey and I have known each other for a long time, he's an amazing coach and person.

More Goats

Andrew adopted three goats this week, Nigerian Dwarf Goats specifically. Pretty hard to have a bad day when baby goats are climbing on you. If you want to see hard work, watch a 50lb mom goat, Marilyn, take care of her babies. She has become the alpha of our farm.

What Are We Working On?

We've been cranking this week on a couple interesting projects:

• Helping a company bring foreign manufacturing back to their own facilities here.
• Building a lean inventory and manufacturing process with a client experiencing over 100% growth YTD over last year.
• Barnabas has been working on an open source GraphQL package for GoLang which we needed for a project.
• Mihai and Kristina finalized and delivered a entire branding and design system for an exciting startup.
• Built out a RabbitMQ messaging system and setup Kubernetes to speed up and scale a client's internal software.
• Building a serverless function to create Github Issues from inside an application - essentially allowing our client's employees to press a button and suggest an idea, enhancement, or process improvement and have it tracked. It also emails the person who submitted as notes are added and status' changed using a webhook.