Shut up and Dribble

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 17:00:00 -0000

[!WARNING]

I'm writing about things happening with my personal career but don't read too deep into it. No racism or anything is happening. I'm simply thinking through things

It's wild how "Metro, Shut yo ho ass up and make some drums" created the amazing meme that became BBL Drizzy.

The phrase "Shut Up and Dribble" came from someone not worth telling Lebron James and Kevin Durant to stay out of political rhetoric and stick to sports. For me, I have always looked at this from a lens of "What I'm capable of" vs "What the <INSERT SOMETHING HERE> thinks I'm capable of".

Play the hits

Have you ever gone to a concert, and hoped that your favorite song would get played. While I haven't had this happen to me personally, I've watched many videos and been disappointed with they didn't play their biggest song. The thing I think about with this is that my "hits" are different based on who you ask. Ask a white person in the Python community and I'm going to have to talk about Black Python Devs. Ask someone that's followed my podcasts, it's down to earth ideas around productivity or mac apps that you can tweak and modify to become a power user. To those that are somewhat familiar, maybe I should write blog posts and speak on stage.

Hootie and the Blowfish

There's a Key and Peele skit about Darius Rucker performing at a conference and people chanting "Hootie! Hootie!". The video continues with Darius (played by Jordan Peele) not being Hootie. The argument ensures and eventually breaks down into Darius stage diving into the audience to fans chanting "Hootie! Hootie!" while crying "I am Hootie...".

I genuinely love building things. This is what brought me to DevRel. Honestly, that is my favorite part of development. Taking something from my mind and making it exist. I love the process of forming the incantation, which is probably why I don't like the idea of vibe-coding. I used to want to talk about all the things that I've created, but this was when I was eager for people to recognize that I was "one of us". I could dribble too!

I've never thought that DevRel was most useful writing blog posts! In fact, one thing I miss from the days of Microsoft was that they understood that. We were encouraged to write but more importantly we were encouraged to show (even if we have to wedge AI into everything we did).

Today, I'm learning so much all the time but what I'm learning isn't really worth putting up on the company blog. That said I'm so happy with what I'm learning and I want to learn more and more. I wish there was an avenue that I could show more about what I'm learning, but honestly I feel like I'm being told to "Shut up and Dribble" or "Play the hits" more and more in my day job. It doesn't matter that our blog posts never go viral... We're being told "That's because we aren't writing enough. Don't worry. Get more content out and it will turn around". More people have been reading my blog and letting me know that so perhaps they are right. That said, I'm not having fun shutting up and dribbling, and when I stop having fun, I start investing my time elsewhere.

I wish I could dive into things that are both engaging and also allow me to get more involved in the communities that our company hope for. If someone asked me, what we should be doing, it would be something to the affect of building fun and exciting things, diving deep into concepts, and sharing insights in the ways our communities love and expect from us. I've been trying to move into leadership because I think we can strike a beautiful balance of making art from our DevRel passions and playing the hits. But I've been doubting my DevRel abilities lately, so instead maybe I should shut up and dribble.