Talofa reader,

I didn't plan on an "end of year" or 'wrap-up 2023' edition for the Uncommon Engineer.

That seemed like too "common" an idea 😉🥁

One of my younger brothers turned 40 today (Boxing Day), and all five of my brothers got together for lunch. We reminisced about life growing up together and all the life events that have happened from then until today.

So, I thought, why not review the year?

Why not cast my mind's eye back 12 months and play my life forward like a fast-forwarding VHS tape to see what's happened in my life this year.

I've been around the sun for 40+ years.

I've seen this Christmas and New Year combination so many times now, it's become a sort ofGroundhog Daydéjà vu. Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever wake up and it's the next day.

I've lived a semi-charmed life.

I wouldn't have thought so at any point in my life, but there's no denying, looking back, that a) I should be dead, given some of the stunts I've pulled and the trouble I've dealt with in my life, and b) I've done some pretty cool stuff that I can honestly say not a lot of people can say they've done.

Maybe that's why, once you've done most things at least once and you've done one thing for a long time, you find yourself doing something for the first time, several times, in one year.

This year was a year of firsts.

Talofa Reader,

I was listening to a podcast once, and the guest was explaining why there aren't as many "geniuses" and prodigies around now as there were in, say, Mozart's days.

The explanation was that historically, aristocracies often had exclusive access to the best education and intellectual resources. Children of aristocrats were frequently tutored by leading scholars, artists, and thinkers.

I sat on this and thought about my experiences growing up, my environment, my schools, my circle of friends, and my parents' friends. I looked at who was successful and who didn't quite come out on top.

Which led me to the following hypothesis:

The single factor, which paradoxically accounts for both the challenges and successes experienced by Pasifika, in my opinion, can be summed up in one central theme—

The limits to this access came in many forms:

environments that were hostile to learning things that would advance, and not hinder, us; whether that was at home, learning we needed to "play our role", or at school, where we were treated like we were too dumb to understand anything academically.

Teachers who weren't skilled in getting through to Pasifika kids; admittedly, were already hard-up against it, given theteaching industry's a bit shit(pay, class sizes etc), and then the Island kids are coming to school from stressed environments, hungry, wrong uniforms, etc.

If we got to school at all...

It wasn’t usually the best schools.

No offence to the teachers that made it to the schools I went to, but the rich schools got the best teachers, right?

Statistically, your parents either didn't finish school or can't really help you with your English and maths homework, and hiring a tutor is only what kids in the movies did.

So, poor communities, with poor schools, and poor teachers don't lead to a rich, knowledgeable learning outcome1.

Talofa reader,

PSA for all Pasifika: Stop Falling For AI, Crypto, NFTs and Blockchain Marketing.

New tech has always brought the promise of a better life, a better "me", a better world, etc.

So, it's definitely enticing.

Who doesn't want to only work 20 minutes a week and have an automated email campaign, “drop shipping” business automation AI, make them 48 million dollars a week in "passive income"?

But when you'reinthe tech game, you learn to be cynical,especiallyif you haveanyexperience building practical, real-world solutions with the so-called second-coming programming language, or API, or cloud service.

Because when the rubber meets the road, and you meet the rubber, it's usually not as shiny as the tech marketing makes it out to be.

We know this from experience (plus, it's our area of interest, so we tend to stay informed).

This is all fun and games for geeks and tech nerds alike; we'll give each other sh!t for our taste in Operating Systems or hardware (iPhone vs. Android will never die), and so the fun is pretty harmless.

Where it starts getting (dare I say it) "dangerous" is when the tech we're either frothing over or memeing gets out into the normal world, and those folks take it seriously.

It's like they're not in on the joke.

And the jokes stops being funny when the grifters

start influencing people who don't know any better about that tech - not usually in their best interests.

And it stops being funny altogether when folks in the industry, touted as "tech leaders", who look like us, end up being the people leading us astray.

Talofa reader,

Pasifika Have a "Technical Leadership" Issue.

Over the past few years, I've come face to face with a pretty obvious yet significant issue: the severe lack of Pasifika technical leadership in the technology sector.

And not just for making up the numbers so the business looks good and ticks the box, but for the community side of this equation that more often needs, essentially, an "ally" with technical skills to help navigate and mitigate the realities of all things technology.

Share## Pasifika Technical Leadership?

What do I mean by Pasifika technical leadership?

Pretty much what it says on the tin:

A Technical person, who happens to be Pasifika, in a Leadership position or capability.

The discourse over the last few years has been one of the following two:

1. Getting more "Pasifika into technology," a purely numbers game for bums on tech seats, OR

2. Getting Pasifika a*"Seat at the table,"*a long-tail strategy with organisations going after leadership power.

While these two things are important, I'm cognisant of a couple of things I've already seen happen.

Firstly, with the bum-rush of getting as many Pasifika hoisted over the fence into tech as possible, I've seen the casualties of the folks who could've been successful in transitioning had they been given the necessary support to succeed.

I'm seeing a new*"factory floor"*for Pasifika to get trapped in the tech industry, taking up the lower-skilled, lower-paid jobs that are cheaper to use Pasifika for than paying for LLM's on cloud.

Secondly, from the few Pasifika organisations I've seen make a play for being the spokespeople for Pasifika issues at the technology table, I'm loath to say I find some of the things I know about these organisations… unsettling?

Bar a small few, I don't have a lot of trust in the motivations of some of the forerunners in this space to be advocates for true technical leadership that will benefit Pasifika (more so than the organisation's brand power).

But we can't make everyone happy all the time, and something is better than nothing, I guess?

Anyway, back to the essay at hand.

Talofa reader,

Buckle up, this one’s a bit lengthy- but I promise it ends well.

So, What Happened?​

How come you never came back after you said the newsletter was going monthly?

My last sign-off saw me heading off into the “the newsletter is going monthly” sunset, with all intentions of finding that elusive time to sit down and write my thoughts out.

You’d think it was a forgone conclusion seeing as I actually journal most days—or at least I did at the time of my last newsletter.

Unfortunately, this practice met the same fate as the newsletter itself.

Am I here to give excuses? Of course not.

These are merelyexplanations😁

Talofa reader,

This is going to be my last weekly newsletter for now as I’m going to switch this to monthly.

Talofa reader,

I feel like the Wednesday morning newsletter post is becoming more consistent than the scheduled Tuesday one.

Talofa, Reader,

After a hectic period of work travel and exotic stress over the last several weeks, which resulted in a long post about burnout, I was fortunate enough to find the time (evenings, weekends, in airport lounges, and on crowded plane seats) to study for, and last week, pass, myAWS Certified Security - Specialtycertification.

Staying technical, even as an Architect, is important — not just to the role, in my opinion, but also to me personally.

And I don't mean "book" technical like "draw me a diagram".

I mean hands-on, build-the-thing-you're-talking-about, technical.

In an article she wrote earlier this year titled"Architects, Anti-Patterns, and Organizational Fuckery", the one & only Charity Majors laid down the gauntlet, stating that she believes "Architect" is a bullshit role.

For the most part, I agree with her.

Talofa reader,

It's been more than a few weeks since I've had the time - or more accurately, the energy - to carve out the space to sit down and write some thoughts for my newsletter.

Talofa reader,

Last week, I was on PTO (Paid Time Off aka Holiday) in Samoa for a quick break with my wife before the baby arrives in August.

This week I’m in Suva, Fiji for work.

As most of us highly-wired people know, it's hard to switch off when on holiday. Research shows that it takes about8 days to fully wind downand actually be on a "break."

It's a particularly busy period at work at the moment, different from other times of busyness in my career as an engineer.

As a solution architect, I move in a fluid space between customer interfacing engagement to work out the technical, organisational, and often economic and political challenges. And the technical and sometimes not-so-technical solutions that best help the customer solve their challenges.