This page is in the form of Abby Falik's user guide and inspired by Dina Levitan's user guide.

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

1. Succinct: The more people who will read what I'm writing, the higher the cost/benefit of spending time honing it. For widespread pieces, 90% of my time is spent editing. More, even more
2. Trusting: Coordination is slow. Once we agree on a vision, it's 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.
3. Asynchronous: A 30-second interruption sets me back 30 minutes—it's just how my brain works. To minimize this I like to default conversations to async mediums like tickets, pull requests, and screen recordings. More
4. Ticket-associated: 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.
5. Customer-focused: Even if a solution "feels right" be prepared for me to ask what customer problem it solves.
6. Sometimes synchronous: Async communication has its limits. If things are getting heated, misunderstood, or blocked, throw a meeting on my calendar or pop in.
7. Feedback-heavy: I love unprompted feedback. As a person with autism I particularly value feedback that helps me improve socially. We all feel it's awkward to give feedback and I think that is dumb and you should help me break that norm.

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 the emotional burden that comes with it—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.