Writing scales, meetings don’t

Textile 2024 week 07 note

There are many ways to work, and even more ways to build software. Some times this is done with people all in the same place, and sometimes, like it is for Textile, it’s with people physically nowhere near each other. This situation means that not just communication and consensus building needs to be different. It means that how we think things together needs to be rethought as well.

There is an old axiom that writing is thinking. This is definitely the case when you’re not in the same place as someone and need another way of thinking out in the open. However, when you are in the same place, to think things out, you have a meeting. You can throw as much software as you want at this, but this is just how it is. People would rather have meetings than write it out. This is because writing is hard. It’s hard to construct a sentence that makes sense to someone when they read it tomorrow or next month. It’s hard to put together a paragraph that says what you’ve done and why it matters. But there is one distinct advantage of putting your thinking, whether alone or with others, out in writing, and that is that writing scales, conversations don’t. A well written sentence will do the job and keep people doing the right thing better most of the time better than a dozen meetings.