Weeknotes 2024 W03: Open channels

January 15​–​21, 2024
1300 words

Quick bits:

I’ve been continuing my journey of learning Swift and the SwiftUI framework. Boy, have I missed doing macOS development. The maturity of this language and framework blows all the Electron stuff out of the water.

I feel like I never want to touch JavaScript-based frontend frameworks for GUI development ever again. They require so much work to get going and to maintain over time, and they continually fill me with a sense of dread.

Case in point: I’ve been working on and off on a budgeting app prototype. I never really make the progress that I need; I inevitably end up at the point where I give up, over and over again.

The JavaScript frameworks I’ve used don’t come with batteries included. So much stuff has to be reinvented and reimplemented. There is so much boilerplate. I never really got to the point where I was working on the product itself; I kept working on the infrastructure needed to get the development of the product going.

With Swift, the situation couldn’t be more different. Stuff that took me weeks to figure out and implement in the JavaScript world took mere minutes with SwiftUI. I keep asking myself one question: why did I not look into SwiftUI sooner?

Still, it is not all roses. Distributing Mac apps requires a $99 developer license from Apple. The Swift/SwiftUI documentation can be rather spotty at times. SwiftUI is not as mature and powerful as AppKit (or UIKit, which I’ve never used). And, of course, I’m limited to a single platform: I couldn’t build anything for Windows or Linux with it.

Here is something that many workplaces mistakenly don’t do:2 keep internal communication channels open.

Here’s what to do: Keep all resources accessible internally by everyone, and make them easy to discover. This concerns JIRA boards, Slack channels, mailing lists, Word documents, Figma sketches, GitHub projects, and everything else.

There will be exceptions. There will be sensitive information, like what HR and Legal typically deal with. But those are the exception. Unless there is a solid reason to keep something private: make it internally available to everyone.

With open communication channels, you, as an employee, can tune yourself into the signals that are relevant to you, without having to explicitly ask to be included. Asking to be included is troublesome, because it is tiresome to justify needing access, and more importantly, you cannot ask to be given access to things that you don’t know exist in the first place. Needing to hunt for information kills productivity.

Working in the open encourages early and continuous alignment. Alignment meetings aren’t nearly as useful anymore.3 It also helps in finding the right stakeholders: in alignment meetings, there inevitably will be people who aren’t really stakeholders, and there inevitably will be people who should’ve been part of the meeting but were omitted, usually by accident.

Working in the open creates opportunities for collaboration, too. It is for the good of everyone if I’m able to serendipitously help someone out,4 and the reverse is true as well: if I’m struggling with something, getting help from a random person who just happened to be following what I was doing, and had the right information or skillset to provide assistance, is enormously useful.

You might think that working in the open sounds risky because it’d attract all sorts of unwanted feedback, and create so much trouble that it slows down the work to a crawl. But, in my experience, the opposite is true: keeping stakeholders continuously in the loop leads to a much better outcome and much less wasted time.

It is hard to explain in words how wonderful such an open environment can be. It is a mystical energy field of synergy and collaboration and alignment that suffuses everything.

This combines well with radiating intent, too: Get people on board with (breaking) changes by radiating intent.

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that I like working in the open, given that I’ve been write these week­notes consistently since 2021, and my notes collection is growing as well.

The remaining question, then, is how to foster an environment where communication is open by default. This is the hard part, and I’m not at all great at figuring out how to drive organizational change. It takes guts to work in the open, and it requires mutual trust. I usually lead by example, but that is not enough to transform the entire organization.

Entertainment:

Links:

Tech links:

  1. I got them after Xe Iaso’s Wicked Cushions review. ↩︎

  2. In my experience, at least, but that goes without saying. I’ve worked at enough places that I can give a good general idea of how things work — or don’t work. ↩︎

  3. Alignment meetings aren’t great to begin with. They provide too little, too late. ↩︎

  4. At Shopify, I once fixed a bug in a custom-built MySQL lexer. Not only did I help someone out from an entirely different part of the company, but I got to use my lexing/parsing skills, which I never before had to apply in a professional context. So satisfying, and everyone benefitted. ↩︎

  5. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, written by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone and Alexander Dinelaris (New Regency Productions, M Productions, Grisbi Productions, Le, 2014). ↩︎

  6. Memoria, written and directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (185 Films, Anna Sanders Films, Beijing Contemporary Art foundation, 2021). ↩︎

  7. Mandy, directed by Panos Cosmatos, written by Panos Cosmatos, Aaron Stewart-Ahn and Casper Kelly (SpectreVision, Umedia, Legion M, 2018). ↩︎

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Weeknotes 2024 W04: End of work
Weeknotes 2024 W16: Why
Weeknotes 2024 W31: Solitary envy