Communication

Project Discussions

We strive to have all discussions around design and implementation of BWE in GitHub Discussions or GitHub Issues. This has a number of advantages

• async by default enables better cross-timezone collaboration
• conversations are visible to stakeholders within our organization and across the ecosystem
• anyone with relevant knowledge is easily able to chime in
  • this has been especially effective in diminishing team boundaries within Pagoda
• Issues and Discussions serve as a permanent history of decisions we have made and factors which were considered
• GitHub's notifications page becomes a powerful tool for staying on top of various conversations and tasks

When should I use GitHub Discussions vs GitHub Issues? We do not have strong rules here, but we tend to talk in GitHub Discussions when we are still in the open-ended design stage and Issues for when work is more concretely defined. Discussions is nicer when considering various approaches to a problem because each top level response can serve as its own thread with comments addressing the benefits and disadvantages of that option.

Meta Discussions

GitHub does not remove the need for an internal, synchronous messaging tool. Any meta conversations about work, coordination, or Pagoda as an organization can occur in Slack.

e.g.

• letting your team know when you are OOO
• setting up meetings
• pinging teammates for action when time sensitive
• sharing updates about the project

If you are tempted to use Slack for a project discussion in order to get quicker responses, consider one of the following:

• start a thread on GitHub then send a Slack message with a link asking a teammate to hop into that thread and provide a response
• copy/paste a project conversation which has occurred in Slack into the relevant GitHub thread after the fact to preserve it

We will naturally find ourselves having some project discussion in Slack every once in a while and that's okay, just do your best 🙂