My first few articles in this series have been focused on the messages we send to others – mostly our written messages. This time I am focusing on Listening as key skills when communicating with others.
Listening is a skill. In general in our lives we are expected to know how to listen, even though most teaching is informal.
If you aren’t listening to your colleagues and clients (friends, family, etc.), which can include reading carefully the materials they write, how can you communicate back to them clearly? And when they can tell you didn’t listen closely, why should they listen to you carefully?
Listening when other people speak, or reading their words when they send you an email or chat message, is how we learn about other people’s needs. As developers and consultants we need to understand the needs of our users and clients. If we don’t understand what they need, we will provide the wrong thing.
Listening is not a passive activity. If you are simply allowing someone’s words to wash over you, but not engaged with their meaning you are missing critical details of what’s being communicated.
Active Listening is a skill you can teach yourself and improve on over time.
When we speak we communicate with more than words. Our body language, tone, pace of speaking, and a host of other details go into how we communicate our message. When we actively listen, we are absorbing all those details to make sure we’re getting the whole message.
Active Listening involves also reflecting back that you’re paying attention to the speaker. You can use your own body language to send none verbal cues that you’re paying attention. You can also make affirming noises, and other auditory markers that you’re following along. And when you start to speak you can paraphrase their comments to demonstrate you understood the previous person’s contributions.
Most materials you’ll find on Active Listening focus on in-person discussions. That’s in part because people have been talking about Active Listening for decades and the technology is still playing catchup.
But you can bring Active Listening skills to video meetings — most easily if you have your camera on.
While affirming noises and other auditory responses can cause audio filters to struggle – clipping one speaker’s audio to provide your supportive sounds – there are still ways to make sure people know you’re listening. When you camera is on, looking at the screen closest to your camera, nodding or shaking your head, making (work place appropriate) hand gestures, and other visual cues can be helpful. Using the reactions features of most systems to give thumbs up, applause, and other indicators can also help send the message that you’re paying attention.
The hardest talk I ever had to give was an online conference early in the Covid Pandemic. I had no real-time feedback from the audience at all. I was not told how many people were listening; I could not see any chat messages: no input at all. It was just me, staring at my slides, trying to maintain good energy. Eventually I got questions read to me at the end that suggested at least someone was watching – but for most of my talk I felt like I was talking to an empty room.
Give people input whenever you can without being distracting. Helping them understand they are being heard will make it easier for them to communicate with you.
Truly listening to another person is a marker of respect. You are demonstrating that the other person is worth your time and energy. If that’s not obvious to you already, think about the difference between a friend who is looking at you while you’re talking vs that same friend looking at their phone; which makes it clear your friend cares about you?
At work the same is true with colleagues. If you are looking at your phone, reading email, looking at social media, or any number of other activities that pull your attention away you are communicating the person isn’t as important to you as all those distractions.
We all are guilty of this from time to time. I have been pushing myself recently to admit it to other people because it gets me to stop.
For example, the other day just as I as starting a call, I got a message from someone else that I found very frustrating – and was time sensitive. I started to reply while also starting the call. I wasn’t really respecting my colleague’s time. So I apologized to my colleague, asked for a moment to reply to the message explaining it was both time sensitive and distracting, and then I focused on our call. I was both more focused on our conversation two minutes later, and I avoided annoying her by constantly looking away at the other message. Because she listened to me, it also meant we could restart our conversation by commiserating about distracting messages that pull our attention away from meetings.
Communicating well requires full engagement in the work, but in the messages you send and in making sure you receive messages as well.
As I said in my first post on this topic, communications skills for developers and consultants is an enormous topic. The plan for this series is evolving as I go. If you have suggestions or requests feel free to leave me a message.
The post Writing for Developers and Consultants: Listening appeared first on Spinning Code.
Experience Builder (XB) allows crafting an experience using components. A tree of components. Except that until now, the XB field type does not yet support storing a tree — we had to start somewhere! Ted “tedbow” Bowman landed #3455728: FieldType: Support storing component trees instead of lists. Next up on this front: before we start actually storing trees, we need thorough validation — Ted’s tackling that next. This will allow us to confidently store trees of components (by putting components in other components’ slots), and then finally put to good use the oldest MR the XB project currently has: Kyle “ctrlADel” Einecker’s MR that adds representative set of Single-Directory Components.
An important XB config management piece landed this week: #3452397: Allow specifying default props values when opting an SDC in for XB, started by Feliksas “f.mazeikis” Mazeikis, finished by me because it blocked next steps and Felix was temporarily reallocated to work on something other than XB — #3460232: Support props defaults that have content dependencies: avoid File content entity dependencies is the next step and is the first thing Felix will work on upon his return.
Thanks to Lee “larowlan” Rowlands finding the time to review #3453152: Centralize & standardize logic for constructing PropSource objects + kernel test coverage, now that landed at last, which doesn’t set everything straight, but is a massive improvement compared to the PoC-y origins of PropSource. In the short term, the most urgent next step is #3461490: Document the current JSON-based data model, and describe in an ADR.
On the front end side, Jesse “jessebaker” Baker contributed a diagram to visualize how he envisions the UI will work:
Initial version of a diagram of the UI’s architecture as envisioned by Jesse Baker. We’ll update this along the way.
And Harumi “hooroomoo” Jang landed the initial implementation of the top bar, a week after the design was available:
The top bar’s mid-fidelity design. Going forward, every issue changing the UI will have to include a screenshot of the updated UI — that will make it easier for anybody to follow along!
To make UI work like Harumi’s go faster, I made CI faster for people working only on the UI: no need to run PHP-related CI jobs then, and after Ben “bnjmnm” Mullins pointed it out, I added an explicit CI job to flag when npm run build fails — because until now only the Cypress CI job would fail, which seemed to suggest that is where the problem was — oops!
That was all that landed this week, but there’s a lot of things in progress. Here are the most notable ones:
cypress E2E + cypress unit CI jobs waaaaay back, on June 5! I started pushing that forward to help the people focused on the front end (Jesse, Ben & Harumi) go faster — didn’t land yet, but was getting close. It’s now tantalizingly close.Missed a prior week? See all posts tagged Experience Builder.
Goal: make it possible to follow high-level progress by reading ~5 minutes/week. I hope this empowers more people to contribute when their unique skills can best be put to use!
For more detail, join the #experience-builder Slack channel. Check out the pinned items at the top!
Finally, the design locomotive is now going full steam ahead:
In closing, catch asked a few very good fundamental questions — these are the kinds of questions that we all need to try to articulate: not about implementation details, but about potential gaps/oversights in the product requirements.
Thanks to Ben and Lauri for reviewing this!
This theme engine was built by Ben, Harumi and Alex “effulgentsia” Bronstein long before XB even was in the picture! ↩︎
Recently, there has been a flurry of activity as the Drupal community has scrambled to mitigate a vulnerability caused when the company that bought polyfill(.io) started injecting malware into the scripts returned by the service, referred to as a supply-chain attack. If you own or manage a Drupal site and you haven’t heard about this, ... Making the polyfill.io vulnerability a thing of the past for Drupal
Explore the standout innovations of Drupal 10, from improved theming to enhanced performance, that affirm Drupal as the ultimate platform for building digital experiences.
Read moreWork in Progress (WIP) is a well-known concept for optimising efficiency in various business processes. It is straightforward to understand and apply. In this article, we will show you how, and give examples how we apply it with a team of around 100 colleagues.
Here's what I've been working on for my Drupal contributions this week. Thanks to Code Enigma for sponsoring the time to work on these.
