TL;DR Remote work key-points from GitLab handbook

I'm trying to understand how to make my work more async and started reading about it from companies that seem to be working this way for a while now.

These are the keypoints from Gitlab's thorough handbook - it's my interpretation of the key concepts behind the handbook.

  • Communicate with the intent for one reply, meaning that the sent message should contain all of the necessary information for the recipient to act upon it without back and forth questions.
  • Unblocking yourself - Always have multiple tasks in the pipeline so when you get stuck waiting for one task to be reviewed, you can work on another.
  • Refrain from using Slack because of it's instant-messaging like figure.
  • Choose the correct medium for the job. sometimes a recorded short video is better than a wall of text.
  • One source of truth (for gitlab it's gitlab) - I don't agree with that because different systems can organize data in different ways.
  • Strong documentations
  • Communicate your work preferences - Todo lists/jira tickets
Possible bottleneck in code reviews - The main caveat that I spot with this type of work is that more often than not, I'm working on a big change but it requires lots of small pull requests that form a chain of dependencies (and thought). Waiting a long (>1hour) time for a review will motivate developers to make bigger pull requests which in turn make the code worse. 

My action item for the next week - record one short video and send it over slack instead of calling a huddle!



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