Tools of our (tech) trade ⚒️

This is the 17th petal snapshot of spring 2024, and today I want to talk about tooling. So working in tech, we get quite familiar with a certain range of tools that work for us. There's very popular ones. There's stuff that isn't quite niche maybe, but it made me realize yesterday how presumptuous we can be sometimes when you're talking to people outside of tech about stuff that are common knowledge to people like us. I was speaking to a friend at lunch about a little side project we've got going on. It's a musical podcast, so it's quite techy. It's been going on for nearly 19 years. This year, we're having a chat about what we want to try and do this year and how we can make little improvements along the way and what's going really well for us. Almost like a mini retro off the back of the conversation, I've made loads of notes, just like little things we talked about. And back in the WhatsApp chat I would got with the team, I was like, oh, let me just process this and get my thoughts together. And I literally just went into chatgbt, chucked all the content in there, refined the prompt a little bit to get lots of key takeaways, and posted it back, said, here you go. And they were like, what's this copilot thing? You know, they've never heard of it. They didn't know what it was. So I had to step back and go, well, actually, it's quite a common tool for, you know, what we use nowadays with AI and in tech, it's becoming that norm for us now. But for people, that was like the tech, completely new language and concept and all the jokes went around about Terminator, judgment day and all this sort of stuff. And again, it just made me realize, you know, you can't assume people know these tools that we are so familiar with when you're working in tech. Again, similarly, there were some actions that we wanted to kind of share between us. So I was like, has everyone got access to Trello? People like, watch Trello, I'll sign up. Wow. Again, it makes me realize these are my sort of generation. They've grown up with tech. They work in work environments, which probably uses some, but they don't necessarily know all the kind of intricate ways they're just used to office or the common tools out there. So just made me realize, when you're working with your teams, think about the tools that you are using and what's more relevant to who you're working with. I've got a WhatsApp chat for this group. It works. It's cool. That's what we want to use. They're quite popular on Facebook and Instagram, and we're in the meta network basically. But all the other tools, I can't just assume they know how to use them, and it's something I want to make sure I realize when I work with any other team. What tools do you use and how we're using them to our advantages. That's enough from today. I'll be back again tomorrow with another petals snapshot.