Asynchronous Development for Hybrid Remote Teams w/ Ori Keren of LinearB

**Dan Lines** (0:03)
Welcome to Dev Interrupted. My name is Dan Lines, and this week we are talking about asynchronous development, a new software dev methodology for hybrid remote teams. I guess today is the creator of asynchronous development and my LinearB co-founder, Ori Keren.
Ori, thanks for joining us today. How's it going, man?

**Ori Keren** (0:21)
Going great. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Dan Lines** (0:24)
Awesome to have you on, looking good, feeling fresh.
So we do this thing for like the beginning of every pod here. I have to ask you this one question before we get started with the async dev conversation. I need to know what's interrupting you this week.

**Ori Keren** (0:45)
Yeah, I think that the main thing that's interrupting me this week is, to be honest, it's a good thing. We have a lot of action, a lot of business activity, a lot of customers, a lot of interest in LinearB.
I planned this week with a whole bunch of activities and for good reasons, shipped almost nothing out of them. We have customers and prospects knocking on our door. So I guess that's the big thing that's interrupting me this week, but I like these kind of interruptions.

**Dan Lines** (1:20)
Well, that's awesome. That's always happening to us this week has been especially exciting. All right, so not all of our listeners have heard of asynchronous development. I'm going to call it AsyncDev. I think it sounds cooler. AsyncDev.
Can you give me a basic overview of what this AsyncDev means?

**Ori Keren** (1:47)
Yeah, usually, I like to start and describe a situation in which basically the planet, but also Dev teams are in right now.
So this pandemic affected Dev teams and caused them to be in a situation that I like to call hybrid remote. We call it hybrid remote because it's not fully remote. Some companies went full remote, prepared for that, wrote the rules, they have experience in that. But most of the companies, to be honest, are somewhere between, I still have an operational, semi-operational headquarters or office, but most of the time people are working from home. And this was like a sudden thing. So this hybrid remote situation where a lot of activities and a lot of challenges that dev teams and developers had that they could solve with like a face to face conversation doesn't exist right now. So that's the new reality. To this new reality, we compiled a set of tenets and principles together into a component that we call async development. Some of them are things that will look natural. That's a good thing. Some of them are things that will look natural due to a lot of dev teams because they were operating to some extent in that way.
And some of them are new. But basically, async dev means that I need to understand and acknowledge that my peers are not near me. I cannot expect a synchronous answer the minute I ask a question.
They could be not even on the same time zone with me or not working now, even though I'm working. Because I don't know if they have their issues and they're working from home and they're working different hours.
And now there's a set of rules that come with this new situation. Up from simple things, how do you run the data meeting? It's the same exactly the same. To things more complex than that. And I think they kind of like combine them together.

**Dan Lines** (4:09)
So some of it has to do with like the ceremonies that we're doing every day. Some of it maybe has to do with, we're now in this remote situation, hybrid situation. We're both talking to a ton of different engineering leaders. Some of them are in office. Some of them are a mix, some of them are at home.
But let me ask you this.
How did you come up with the concept? Was it kind of like, hey, this pandemic hit, and now I'm seeing this big behavior change, and I got to like kind of brand this idea of async development? Or was it more like, I've had a bunch of ideas about asynchronous development that have been lingering in my mind for a while, then the world changes, and some of them have like more come to light, and I'm gonna like wrap this into some tenets. Like, how did you even come up with the idea?

**Ori Keren** (5:06)
It's a great question. Like we said in the beginning, we're speaking to a lot of developers, team leaders, the piece of engineering CTO every day, I think like at least between three to five people.