Asynchronous communication through high-fidelity mediums like issues and chat eliminate the endemic “you had to be there” aspect of most corporate workflows, and reduces the need for a dedicated management class to capture, collect, and shuttle information back and forth between business units.| Ben Balter
How to set up a free and open-source grammar, style, and spell checker that can be run locally on your machine without sending data to a third-party services like Grammarly, preserving the privacy of what you type.| Ben Balter
Leaders often face push back when they make tough decisions. Trying to “control the narrative” by ignoring or shutting down dissent is a bad idea. It erodes trust, invites negativity, and stifles learning. A better approach is to be transparent, open, and accountable. This builds trust, invites positivity, and fosters learning.| Ben Balter
The cathedral and the bazaar are two contrasting styles of people management, inspired by the open source movement. The cathedral style is more hierarchical, controlled, and standardized, while the bazaar style is more decentralized, autonomous, and collaborative.| Ben Balter
Redirecting…| ben.balter.com
How the andon principle from lean manufacturing can help you spot and solve critical issues early on and foster a culture of transparency and collaboration within the software development process by encouraging anyone to “stop the line” when necessary.| Ben Balter
Remote work requires communicating more, less frequently, because asynchronous communication involves less frequent, but richer communication, meaning there is less time talking about the work and more time doing it, allowing the system to optimize for throughput and flow.| Ben Balter
When working as a distributed team, be mindful of cultural differences, time zones, encouraging breaks between meetings, and connecting as humans.| Ben Balter
When authoring a pull request, use the body as an opportunity to document the proposed change, especially the “why”, and cross link any related issues or other PRs to create a trail of breadcrumbs for future contributors.| Ben Balter
GitHub isn’t just for software developers. If you’re in a non-technical role, you can use GitHub to follow along, collaborate with your team, track your work, and share information. This brief guide includes everything you need to know to get started confidently with GitHub.| Ben Balter
Default to transferring context asynchronously. Hold colleagues accountable for being async first. If you receive a meeting invite without context, an agenda, or a read-ahead doc, consider politely declining.| Ben Balter