Audience: Anyone leading or working on a distributed software development team keen to become more effective, motivated and fulfilled.

I’ve spent the last decade working full-time+ on a fully-remote healthcare startup, and stepping away of that particular mad plate-spinning exercise has been surreal. I originally joined the company straight from my own ed tech solo startup, so really, it’s been a very long time since I’ve been able to wake up in the morning without that threatening cloud of so many things to do!! 😱 looming over my head.

Untangling a hard problem triggers an urge to help others avoid it, and so I have scores of essays & articles that I’ve started over the years, but then set aside for more urgent tasks. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been taking time to read & reflect, firstly, and to revisit some of those notes.

Topics are all over the place, circling around remote software dev & management (my life for 17 years, now), branching off into other topics that interest me (technical or not).

But I’ll start with the most important one: building effective remote dev teams, founded on psychological safety & robust human feedback loops.

Why focus on psychological safety?