After more than a decade of remote-first work and a lot of pull requests, the book is out.
Open and Async: The collaborative software development playbook for remote and distributed teams is now available in paperback and ebook.
👉 Get it: https://open-and-async.com
Working from home ≠ working remotely. Most companies survived the pandemic by shipping everyone a laptop, bolting Zoom onto the same approval chains, and calling it remote work. That's office work in sweatpants — same meetings, same status theater, just piped through a webcam.
This 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.
What's inside
- Treat meetings as escalation, not default — and reclaim the hours you lose to "quick syncs"
- Give every decision a URL, so context survives reorgs, departures, and Slack purges
- "Work loudly" so your impact is visible without performing busyness
- Measure impact over input
- Lead — whether or not you have direct reports — by showing your work
- Hire, onboard, and transition teams to remote-first without losing what made them work
For managers: build teams that ship without constant synchronous coordination, and retain your best people by respecting their time.
For individual contributors: become visible, effective, and promotable on the strength of your work — not the luck of your seating chart.
Why this repo?
This is the book's feedback repo. Found a typo, a broken claim, or a link that decays? Have a story where open and async worked (or didn't)? Open an issue. Errata land here, and reader feedback shapes future printings — this book was built in the open, and it stays that way.
Changelog
- Added: ~576 pages, 10 sections, paperback + EPUB, wide distribution (Amazon, Apple Books, Kobo, and more)
- Verified: six editing passes, EPUBCheck-clean, WCAG 2.1 AA accessible
- Known issues: the office isn't going to digitize itself. That's kind of the point.
Stop digitizing the office. Start building something better.
⭐ If it's useful, star the repo and tell one person who's stuck in back-to-back meetings.