Today was another day of not coding but I got some practice in communicating on a distributed team. My pair's pull request for this week's story was reviewed and approved by the other team members and our product owner, Andrew.
There were a lot of slack messages and GitHub comments made today.
Nikema Prophet(she/her)@dev_nikema
Got to practice my communication and collaboration skills tonight with @mike_ramirez. I'm reminded that when it looks like there's space to misinterpret tone and intention, a quick zoom chat can do wonders. I'm still digging #TheCollabLabCohort304:55 AM - 04 Jan 2020
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I feel like I'm majorly leveling up in collaboration skills through this Collab Lab experience. In my coding school, we practiced the mechanics of pull reviews and teamwork, but in my opinion there wasn't enough guidance or oversight in build weeks to create good habits around these things.
Pull reviews were created daily but there wasn't a conversation about them. It was just the way you submitted that day's work.
Today we had to think about conflicts that can arise that aren't just based on code existing on the same line. It feels like a continuation of the lesson I learned last week. This work is nuanced. Fulfilling the acceptance criteria to the letter without considering the overall goal of the story is not the goal.
We're working asynchronously and separately on one project. If the work of one pair builds on the work of the other it might take a few extra check-ins to make sure we are all on the same page and doing compatible work.
As I referenced in the above tweet, the text-only communication today was starting to feel like it could be misinterpreted for tone or emotions. Mike and I were talking on Slack about how to handle the pull request review. Just a few minutes of face-to-face talking over Zoom cleared the air. Neither of us were angry or upset in any way but I could see how our Slack conversation could be interpreted as tense.
I'm still having a great time and glad to be working through these things in a low-stakes environment. The next time a similar situation comes up, I'll have experience to draw from. I'll have tools in my toolbox to reach for.
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