Engineering leadership, open source, and showing your work
What makes a remote engineering team work isn't where people sit—it's how they communicate. A conversation on the Overcommitted podcast about async-first culture, decision durability, and the ideas behind Open and Async.
Open and Async is the practical playbook for making remote and distributed work actually work—two habits, working in the open and communicating asynchronously, drawn from a decade of remote-first lessons at GitHub.
In an office, some of your visibility is free. Go remote and it drops to zero. Working loudly makes your impact visible as you do it—not after the fact in a status update nobody reads.
In thirteen years at GitHub I was part of 25 reorgs—almost one every six months. Reorgs are a constant in tech, not a crisis. Here's how to navigate them.
AI-augmented program management is the natural evolution of async-first and engineering-inspired workflows — amplifying human judgment, not replacing it.
Most 1:1s waste your team's only protected synchronous time on status updates. Here's how to run ones worth showing up for.
Why you need a running record of your wins—and how to keep one without dying of embarrassment
Announcing noagendanomeeting.net — a single-page site advocating that every meeting deserves an agenda, and most meetings deserve to be a document instead.
AI coding agents aren't replacing developers — they're extending the transparency, code review, and collaboration patterns behind open source.
When I joined GitHub in 2013, I found a company that had rethought how work happens. Thirteen years later, those lessons are more relevant than ever.
Set up LanguageTool as a free, open-source Grammarly alternative that runs locally on your Mac. No subscription required.
Silencing dissent erodes trust, invites negativity, and stifles learning. The best leaders embrace transparency instead.
What if we applied open source's cathedral vs. bazaar metaphor to management? Cathedral managers control; bazaar managers empower.
How GitHub turned its guiding communication principles into prescriptive practices to manage internal signal-to-noise ratio.
Like Toyota's andon cord, transparent collaboration lets anyone stop the line when they spot a problem in knowledge work.
Async communication is like gzip compression for humans—more upfront processing, but greater throughput with fewer packets.
Small scheduling choices — writing dates unambiguously, including time zones, and building in breaks — make distributed teams feel included.
Pull requests capture not just what changed, but who, why, and what alternatives were considered. Treat every PR as a time capsule for future contributors.
Most meetings are just information downloads that could've been a doc. Treat them as an escalation based on complexity, not the default starting point.
GitHub isn't just for developers. A practical guide for non-technical roles to follow along, collaborate, and track work with confidence.