This page is in the form of Abby Falik's user guide and inspired by Dina Levitan's user guide.
The Ben Carlsson User Guide
This page describes things I value at work. This is descriptive of me, not prescriptive to you; treat it as a set of FYIs, not requirements. Use or ignore at your discretion, and share your own guide with me!
Communication Style
- Succinct: The more people expected to read what I'm writing, the higher the cost/benefit of spending time honing it. For widespread pieces, 90% of my time is editing. More, even more
- Trusting: Coordination is slow. Everything is easier if we trust and authorize each other to make decisions in motion, rather than blocking on consensus. We can continue to share progress in nonblocking ways. More
- Asynchronous by default: A 30-second interruption sets my brain back 30 minutes. I wish it didn't, but it does. To minimize this I like to have conversations in async mediums like tickets, pull requests, and screen recordings. More, even more
- Ticket-centric: As a forgetful person I love single-origin paper trails. I practice inbox zero so pinging me in a ticket is a more reliable way to reach me than Slack.
- Customer-focused: Even if a solution "feels right" be prepared for me to ask what customer problem it solves.
Warnings
- My brain is all backburners. I can't immediately answer complex questions. I can temporarily get past this by asking a barrage of questions about the question. This means I'm excited about the problem, but sometimes stresses people out; tell me if so and I can avoid doing that with you.
- I go rogue. Sometimes I care so much about fixing or building something that I'll do it without tracking it, because the overhead—or its emotional burden—is bigger than the job itself. Some adored features have come out of having the freedom to do this; see #2 above :D
- I work weird hours. Motivation strikes me randomly—sometimes during a workday but sometimes on a Sunday or at 4 AM or for 16 hours straight. To counterbalance, I shorten my workdays and the math roughly works out. So if you see emails or commits from me with unhealthy-feeling timestamps, keep in mind my default workday is at ~70% capacity.