Names & Faces built a visual directory so people could see who they worked with. I joined after a few years of consulting, just before the company went through Y Combinator.
In 2018 I spent three months in Silicon Valley with the team for YC. I’d wanted to see it for myself since reading The Launch Pad at fourteen.
Back in Cape Town I worked across the stack and on the design-system team. With two developers we could talk most things through. As the team grew, we had to find ways for people in other cities to follow those conversations and understand our decisions.
I wrote about pair programming, learning sessions, team discussions, documentation, and answering questions in public in 5 Communication Habits That Keep My Team Aligned. I also gave a DevConf talk on TypeScript, GraphQL, and React around then. During the pandemic I went back to consulting.
