Talofa reader,

Last week, I gave a talk to my ‘Pasifika Tech Network’, which I mentioned in my previous newsletter.

Talofa reader,

This past week, I've been working on a talk to give at"The Pasifika Tech Network"meetup this Thursday.

I wasn't sure what I was going to talk about when I organised and set the date (May 18th), but after a deep and pretty vulnerable discussion on our Discord server about salaries and careers, I knew I had to talk about how to navigate a tech career and share the lessons and advice I've gathered from my 20-year tech career.

I really felt for the people in my network who shared their experiences and the challenges they face with current salary negotiations, family responsibilities, and pressures at work.

Getting into tech isn’t easy, especially as a Pasifika person and a minority in the industry. It's not an industry familiar to our community, and we lack role models whose paths we can follow. We don't have the alumni network of Computer Science from the University of Auckland (at least I didn’t) to provide guidance on the tech career road-map. On top of that, being young and inexperienced, without guidance from people we trusted, and now you’re stacking a bunch of already “hard things” on top of each other.

And even once you're in, you’re still the odd one out.

Talofa reader,

Last week was the tenth consecutive week of writing this damn newsletter, lol. I’m not going to say every week it landed on time, but every week, for the last ten weeks, I sat down, wrote some things, read some things, and then edited my writing until it made some kind of sense, and then out it went. Sometimes late on a Monday night, but more often than not, at 3 am on Wednesday mornings.

Sure, ten newsletters in a row are not a lot to write home about, but I think this is a good time to step back and review what the actual hell I’m doing and whether I’m headed in the right direction or need to make an adjustment before carrying on.

I started this newsletter as a mechanism for consolidating my thoughts across the many things I would think about on any given week. Anything I had learned that week, experiences I had that taught me something, I would draw on them and write it out in a weekly newsletter. I wouldn’t be short of content, surely? Now, writing is a great tool for organizing your thoughts. A lot of the great thinkers of our time were writers - Plato, Marcus Aurelius (I’m sure there were others), and that’s something I wanted for myself too. That’s the whole point of this newsletter - to write regularly, using it as a weekly opportunity to corral and organize my thoughts and develop the art of writing.

So, how well am I doing?

I’m a pretty harsh critic, especially of myself, but I also like to think I’m fair.

*Me to me: “Hey, your writing sucks. But it’s okay. You’re just not talented in that way.”*😂

But seriously, on reviewing these last ten weeks of writing a newsletter, I can think of two key areas where changes can be made for the better.

Talofa reader,

I’m hitting the late Wednesday publishing mark so often I might as well make it official. Apologies to myself, and you the reader for missing our Tuesday slot.

This week I think I may actually write a non essay-length edition and just speak on what was top of mind for me this last week. As you’re probably aware Amazon have been going through their latest round oflayoffsthis past couple weeks, so it’s been a tough space for folks at work.

I was one of the lucky ones.

Talofa reader,

Over the last few weeks, I've had things either in my periphery or right in front of me that all looked like different things, but I could thread the same theme through each of them.

I've read stories of layoffs in Silicon Valley and Big Tech, newsletters analysing these events, motivations of these companies, and the historical events that preceded them. I've seen local companies decimate whole teams and watched green "opentowork" rings popping up frequently on social media. In the last week, I've had friends made redundant from their remote U.S. roles, and other friends' roles disestablished in big insurance companies in the current economic climate.

The theme I would thread through all these events, zoomed right out, could be described as*"how the world works."*None of what is happening is necessarily shocking or surprising to people who see the world, and the things in it, a particular way and expect these kinds of outcomes.

In this weeks newsletter, I'm not quite digging into the bigger picture of*"how the world works", but into the smaller"how companies work"*and how I think about them, in this or any other economic climate, and what has served me in navigating my professional career.

Talofa reader,

This week, I have been thinking about communities, specifically online communities, and the concept of "community building." I had never heard of this term until 2017 when I heard it on the Indie Hackers Podcast. They used the term to describe a group of people who would engage and congregate around a product. They talked about it as a type of growth "hack" or other product-growing exercise.

Initially, this seemed strange to me, as it made sense in terms of manipulating and using human behavior to your advantage, i.e., for profit. However, I understood what they were trying to do. I found it peculiar that it included the word "community" and treated it as something that you actively worked on (which I read as "manipulated," because I'm jaded, lol).

To me, community was always something that just "was." They were naturally occurring things in the wild and usually formed around shared culture, a sport, or a common interest. This was obviously naive of me because "community" is something that takes deliberate work and effort to build, grow, and maintain.

Now that I'm building a couple of communities with my charity team and a few helping hands, I have learned a few things, about myself mostly, but also a lot about what it takes to do this work of building communities (especially online) in the community.

These are some of the things I have learned...

Talofa reader,

I’m taking the Easter weekend holidays into consideration for this weeks late newsletter edition 😁🙏🏽.

This week, there's been more AI-related content in the reading list. Contrary to previous newsletters, I don't aim to make these reads too long. A week is not enough time to really dive deep into any one thing - I actually named this section in my template*"Top of Mind"*to be just whatever stood out to me - an idea, a quote, a thought - that I wanted to sit down and write out and think on a bit more deeply, and maybe look up a few readings. As it turns out, that's how these things blow out and turn into essays.

This week, I've had one*"Top of Mind"*thought strong enough to lead me to blurt out ablog postto capture my thoughts on it as they came to me on the treadmill.

Talofa reader,

It’s been a busy several days, so apologies for the late edition.

Last week, I looked at the state of the Pasifika community in terms of the picture painted by the latest census data. I also examined a specific "solution" to one of those problems, considering possible second and third-order effects that could lead to positive outcomes for my community.

I was viewing these topics from a third-person perspective, standing outside and observing both aspects. This made me think about how these subjects come together in the present context which intersects quite conveniently with the role I currently hold in the Pacific Islands for a big tech company.

(I thought a series of questions would organise my train of thought better, hence the following interview of myself 😂 — enjoy.)

Talofa reader,

This last week, I haven't read anything super interesting. My newsletter and RSS feeds provided the usual tech industry topics, such as systems design, big data, and more ChatGPT. However, the most interesting topic that stood out this week for me was from the Pasifika Tech Network Discord, and it wasn't me asking the questions this time!

One of our members asked a simple question:"What is your why? And what are you passionate about?"

I thought on it for a bit - I have different why's for different things - but the “why” I chose to respond to was “why I use my free time to help Pasifika learn more about and see themselves in Big Tech”?

Note: this week’s edition is a lot less “reading astutely” and more shooting from the hip 😂.

Talofa reader,

There's been a lot more AI activity this past week after the announcement ofGPT4by OpenAI. There's been a lot of discussion and activity in my Pasifika Tech Network discord as well as the developers have been playing with creating slack and discord bots that use the OpenAI API.

But there's one topic that I can't recall how it came to my attention this week; it crossed my mind early one morning after studying for my AWS certification - Data Sovereignty. It's a topic I frequently deal with, given that I work at AWS and my job involves discussing cloud technology with all sovereign nations in the Pacific. Since it's a pretty important topic in the Pacific, I wondered what my network's understanding of it was, so I asked in the channel.

"Morning team- this is always an interesting question when I come across it at work (in NZ and in the Islands) so keen to hear everyone's thoughts - What do you know/understand about Data Sovereignty? And what do you think about the issue of where our (Pasifika/Indigenous) data is stored?"

I got back some really thoughtful answers, and interesting to note was that the people that responded were all senior level technical folks. They mentioned things like physical location of the data and the governance and applicable laws of that location i.e. country. It was interesting to also see talk about trust between allied countries and data residency agreements and what they mean for NZ for people working specifically with NZ data.

Now, no surprises here - I’m not an expert on this topic by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve just done some reading, and combined that knowledge with my experience and understanding of the topic gained over the last 8 months of working in the field.

I will leave links to all readings and resources I read to understand any of this, below.

Disclaimer​

Obviously, I'm going to have some bias on this subject. I work at Amazon Web Services as a Solution Architect, and most of the data relevant to the work I do resides on AWS infrastructure. However, I believe the crux of this entire topic is that the geographical location of the data and the ownership of the infrastructure are only the beginning of what this subject is effectively about. For the record, I do not speak for or on behalf of my employer. All opinions expressed here are my own.