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Comment by brilliantcode | Hacker News Reader

I keep hearing the word async come in these remote working threads, what does that mean exactly in this context?

What does this single source of truth look like? A google docs spec?

Synchronous methods of communication are phone calls, conference calls, in-person meetings, and anything else that requires that two or more people attend the same "event" at the same time.

Async is everything else: email, IM, leaving voicemail, blog posts, git comments, tickets, bug reports...

Async means reducing likelihood that your work will be blocked by someone else (e.g. waiting for response from someone) as it might cause big issues when someone is 10 hours away. If you can't get any work done because you are waiting for someone who is sleeping, that's really bad.

Single source of truth can be google doc, wiki, github issues/wiki, whatever. As long as it's single. The problem is when critical information is scattered in slack history, github issues and PRs, wiki and some odd google doc. It makes it hard to find information and you will end up finding contradictory information. Lack of single source of truth or not updating one will reduce the async property of the whole operation, among other things.

Synchronous communication happens when one participant says/sends something and then waits for the other participant to reply doing nothing else. Exactly the same as with synchronous function call: you order some operation and wait patiently for it to return the result.

Asynchronous communication is when one participant sends something and leaves things as that. For a reply, either another (asynchronous) message is sent, this time in the opposite order, or the sender checks if the reply arrived.

Real-time communication, like phone calls, video conferences, and various chats and communicators are synchronous by the very nature of the activity of conversation. Everything that you may postpone checking is asynchronous; e-mail, tickets/issues, and source code commits are like that.

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