Working With the Garage Door Up
Letting Others Take a Look Before You’re Ready
This talk is about working in the open in your day-to-day in a development team. Sharing early - whether it’s a rough idea, a half-written doc, or a messy prototype - can lead to fast feedback from people you might not expect, useful conversations, and even collaborators. We know the value of sharing early versions of products with customers to get feedback: we should bring that same spirit to our day-to-day technical work, too.
Have you ever crafted a detailed answer to a teammate's question and then buried it in your chat history? Or kept some half-baked solution thoughts to yourself only to discover that someone else has spent ages getting to the same result? We’ll look at how to make your work-in-progress visible to others without causing confusion, and why it’s worth the risk of looking stupid!
Follow-up links:
- Robin Sloane / Andy Matuschak: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes?stackedNotes=z21cgR9K3UcQ5a7yPsj2RUim3oM2TzdBByZu
- Cult of Done Manifesto: https://medium.com/@bre/the-cult-of-done-manifesto-724ca1c2ff13
- Clare Sudbery: Let's stop making each other feel stupid: https://insimpleterms.blog/lets-stop-making-each-other-feel-stupid
- `just` command runner: https://just.systems
- Tech radar talk at LeadDev 2024: Andra Blaj: https://leaddev.com/technical-direction/how-to-use-technology-radars-to-make-transparent-tech-decisions
- Thoughtworks tech radar: https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/faq
- AOE's tech radar tool: https://github.com/AOEpeople/aoe_technology_radar
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Andy Normington
Senior Embedded Software Engineer
Focusrite
I work across Focusrite and Novation. Embedded systems are my technical home, but much of my day job happens between teams: improving the tools and workflows that help engineers get products out of the door, shaping our shared engineering platform and helping teams get the most from it, and turning security and architecture challenges into practical ways forward. I enjoy joining the dots, sharing what works, and making the next team’s path a little less bumpy. I came to software engineering through music and audio, via electronics, and I’m still curious about what happens when software meets the real world, which has a habit of ignoring the diagram.