The Outbox – efficient collaboration without interruption

There are lots of ways to get team communication wrong, and I have been guilty of at least several of them!

Email too long. I’m reasonably good at thinking, I think, and reasonably good at writing, and thanks to dictation software, very efficient at turning thinking and writing into a torrent of words. Unfortunately, in a team, there is a considerable cost to creating words and consuming them. I’ve written too many words, too often.

Email too often. Some people are pretty good at juggling a long inbox where each message represents a separate chain of discussion. Many more people are not. I’ve often written many short emails which ignore the truth that humans mostly work in terms of a mostly-single conversation context with each correspondent.

Chat too often. Communicating via a chat tool avoids the many-simultaneous threads-problem, but it bumps into another rough edge of human communication. Even as we use tools which are technically asynchronous, we create distraction (or depending on the hour of the day annoyance). I have both witnessed and been the perpetrator of too-many-chats-too-often.

Long-term / short-term. Some of us have a knack toward thinking at both short-term and long-term levels concurrently all the time. Sometimes this pays off, but more often it is yet another anti-pattern in team communication. A team needs to mostly collaborate and coordinate to get done whatever is on the plate right now.

The Outbox

A few years ago, I stumbled upon a better communication pattern that avoids most of this. I’ve sometimes called it the outbox. An outbox is a place to keep short notes about things you need to communicate to various people; one note/page/file/whatever per person or group. It can be implemented as paper notes, a text file, in Apple Notes or Google Keep, whatever is most convenient. Each person’s output is independent and simple. Whenever some thought comes up, rather than immediately emailing or messaging the person it pertains to, jot a few notes in the outbox.

Then at some reasonable cadence (daily, twice a day, weekly, monthly, etc) discuss it all of it at once.

To keep these discussions sessions maximally helpful, divvy up your outbox between immediate/tactical and strategic ideas. This makes it easy to frequently collaborate on short-term matters, and then less often talk about strategic matters.

This pattern works well with both one-to-one and group communications. You’ll have something useful and planned to say if your team has a regular “stand-up” meeting. You’ll have something useful to talk about next time you have the opportunity to have a discussion with someone. You might even have something great in hand next time you bump into the CEO in an elevator (“great to see you, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about…”).

Even better, a bit of time to percolate in the outbox sometimes gives an idea the chance to go obsolete and be deleted. Maybe you wake up in the morning thinking, “I should talk with Anne about redesigning the company logo”. Should you email about it right now? Well, maybe, but this might be a distraction to Anne who is working on something much more relevant for today. Should you send a chat message to Anne right now? That’s even worse. Instead, jot it in the outbox… perhaps when you meet with Anne at the next interval, you may have realized in between that the logo redesign doesn’t make any sense to pursue tactically. So you discard the idea, never having created a distraction in the first place.

(I’m certainly not claiming this is a new invention. Thinking before you speak is a valuable idea going back forever!)

Nuphy Air75 v2 micro-review

After several years with a traditional full-height mechanical keyboard with clicky blue switches, I no longer want to annoy people in online meetings with the noise, and I missed the flatter profile of Apple’s keyboards. A brief perusal of popular recent reviews led me to the Nuphy Air75 V2 low-profile mechanical keyboard, with the “Moss” higher-spring-weight tactile switches. So far this is a big improvement for daily use. The feel is almost as nice but the sound is greatly reduced. It arrived already set up for Mac use, but with a handful of keycaps to swap out for PC use. It is VIA compatible, which I will use when I eventually get too annoyed with its incorrect layout of the rightmost column of keys. Overall, this is a great choice for a low profile mechanical keyboard at a middle price point.

“Personal News”

Do we still call it “personal news”?

After ~22 years, I’ve left the company I founded in 2001, and the other I cofounded more recently. I’m briefly retired (!), but likely back in the game in 2023.

My contact information at my old work… no longer works. Personal email shown in the ridiculous image below, to foil spammer-scrapers in text.

Tremendous thanks to everyone I’ve worked with in the last couple decades!

Reposurgeon, for high fidelity source control system migration

The best time to blog about something is when it happens. The second best time is when you remember years later that you should have blogged about it. That’s now.

I’ve worked on complex source control system migrations, moving between various systems, most commonly SVN to Git. There are hundreds or thousands of tools and scripts around the Internet suggested for every plausible migration pair; almost all of which don’t even attempt to solve the whole problem.

The closest I seem to solving the whole problem is reposurgeon:

reposurgeon’s web page

reposurgeon source code on Gitlab

The strength of this tool is that it is intended to be scripted. Rather than doing a single-shot conversion, the workflow is:

  1. Attempt the conversion
  2. Study the results
  3. Tweak the conversion script (which can perform extensive and complex changes to the source code history on its way through)
  4. Repeat until approximately perfect

Teams using an old system continue doing so while the migration is worked on. Only once the migration has been perfected, is it time to cut over.

By scripting, I don’t mean that you, the user, must write scripts to do the basics of source control system history migration; that is the job of the tool. Rather, script to patch up the ugly bits of history in an old system during the translation. For example, in a moment of desperation, did somebody once merge a giant change to the mainline, something like rolling back the last three months of development, to try to get a deployable old build? That’s an easy bit of the old history to leave out during a reposurgeon-powered migration.

During migration you can translate usernames, branch names, details buried inside commit messages, and any other aspect you might wish to clean up programmatically. Think of it as a multi-source code system compatible analog of git-rewrite-branch, except for an entire repository, not a branch.

One major downside, as of the last time I used reposurgeon: it operates in memory, so you’ll need enough RAM for the whole source code history. This can typically be accommodated, even on quite large code bases, by temporarily allocating an extremely large compute instance on your cloud provider.

A dip in the stream

After reading articles about the large and growing popularity of “streamers” on Twitch and YouTube, I wondered what all the hubbub was about. So over the last few weeks, I have dipped into several dozen streams. Mostly on twitch, a little on YouTube. I mostly look for software development/live coding streams, but also watched a few musicians, something that resembled a talk show, a broad category called “just chatting”, several gamers, and a streamer who streams about streaming. I clicked into some popular streams (thousands of viewers) and some with a single digit number of viewers.

Continue reading “A dip in the stream”