Git allows you to provide .gitignore files specifying intentionally untracked files that Git should ignore.

For anything I work on, I usually have two such files; a “repository .gitignore” in the repo root (which appears fairly common), and a “personal .gitignore”.

Why two? I see it as separation of concerns.

I wrote Always Be Closing and it spawned a conversation about what it means to be “done”, so here’s a Definition of Done I wrote a few months back.

“Done” means different things to different people. It’s important to be clear about what you mean when you say “Done”.

Some example definitions include (in roughly increasing order of “strength” / “thoroughness”):

People see a problem, they want to help, they want to offer their knowledge and experience.

This is lovely.

They have good intentions, but intent isn’t magic.

It sounds like it’s the latest Indiana Jones title, but the curse of knowledge is a pervasive problem you should know about:

The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when, in predicting others’ forecasts or behaviors, individuals are unable to ignore the knowledge they have that others do not have, or when they are unable to disregard information already processed.

(From Glengarry Glenn Ross, where Alec Baldwin’s character acts like a colossal asshole, but we’re all kinda cool with that because he’s a charming and successful colossal asshole. Warning: that’s how toxic environments happen.)

Close things. Finish things. See them through to the end.

I’m writing this for myself more than anyone else. Closure is important. Being able to mentally go “that’s done” and move on is vital.

My team is distributed; twelve people everywhere from Munich to Berlin, Rio, Nova Scotia, “somewhere north of Katowice”, Biggleswade and Berwick-upon-Tweed (among others!).

Accordingly, Slack acts as our office. We rent some office space in Munich, but Slack’s where the magic happens. We interview on Slack because that’s where the majority of our interactions occur. We have JIRA, we have GitHub, we have email, we have Hangouts, but by volume and frequency, Slack’s where it’s at.

We spent a long time on IRC but it took migrating to Slack before we really got the whole company on board; the mobile support, the ease of use, the easy integrations and the richness of the medium were all vital to this.

So here’s some things we learned along the way!

From http://www.total-knowledge.com/~ilya/mips/ugt.html

UGT […] states that it is always morning when person comes into a channel, and it is always late night when person leaves. Local time of any member of channel is irrelevant.

Great convention for groups of people who spend time travelling across timezones.

Unfortunately the habit sticks, and now I find myself having to explain an oddly-timed “good morning”!

All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection

I love a nice layer of abstraction.

Filesystems let me just put files on a drive without concerning myself with explicit allocation and disk geometry. TCP clients let me just make a request without concerning myself with packet retransmition, re-ordering, and on-wire representations. Logic gates let me think about digital circuitry without concerning myself with voltage levels and capacitance.

What these abstractions don’t do is explicitly deny the existence of what they abstract away.

If you spend much time in the kitchen, you’ll want these. If you’ve ever been for dinner at mine, I’ve probably enthused at you about them. I have a pair of “Kitchen Craft Master Class” silicone oven gauntlets, but there’s many similar varieties. They’ve been invaluable when I’m cooking.

Ever received a voicemail or text message that says nothing other than “call me”? You got a “naked ping” - a context-free request for response / attention / action.

From https://blogs.gnome.org/markmc/2014/02/20/naked-pings/:

The naked ping should be Considered Harmful, for at least two reasons. The first is that it conveys no information. The recipient of your ping, like you, is a Busy Person. They may be in the middle of something requiring intricate thought, and should not be interrupted for anything less than fire, flood, or six figures of revenue. Worse, you may forget why you pinged someone; when, four hours later, your victim gets back to IRC and responds to you, you will be disrupted in turn trying to remember what was on your mind in the first place.