Open and Async: The collaborative software development playbook for remote and distributed teams

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Working from home ≠ working remotely.

Your company shipped everyone a laptop, bolted Zoom onto the same approval chains, and called it remote work. It wasn't. It was office work in sweatpants—same meetings, same status theater, same hallway politics, just piped through a webcam.

There's a world of difference between being forced to work from home and intentionally building a distributed, async culture. This book is about that difference.

Drawn from more than a decade at GitHub—remote-first before it was fashionable—Open and Async is the opinionated, practical playbook for the two practices that make distributed work actually work: working in the open and communicating asynchronously. Async is the operating system; remote is the hardware.

Inside, you'll learn to treat meetings as escalation rather than default, give every decision a URL so context survives reorgs and departures, "work loudly" so your impact is visible without performing busyness, and run 1:1s, weekly reports, and career conversations that aren't a tax on everyone's time.

For managers: build teams that ship without constant synchronous coordination. For individual contributors: become visible, effective, and promotable on the strength of your work—not the luck of your seating chart.

Stop digitizing the office. Start building something better.

A note on narration: Written entirely by a human (me); read by a synthetic one. Shipping the version that's actually feasible beats waiting on the ideal one—so here's the audiobook, in an AI voice, today. A human narrator, maybe, down the line.