Tips for Communicating

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Syntax. This is the podcast with the tastiest tips for communication.

Today, we've got an episode on communication. How do you communicate good with the people that are on your team, rid. People that you're emailing with clients, you name it. We're gonna go through a bunch of tips on emailing, code review, rid. In person meetings, Zoom calls, and then we, of course, we reached out to the old Twitter machine and asked for people much smarter than us. We got a whole bunch of tips At the end that we're gonna run through as well. So some good nuggets. You definitely want to listen to this one, if you want to get better at communicating.

Today, we're sponsored by 3 awesome companies. Sentry does error exception and performance tracking. Sanity rid. Is the structured content CMS and Auth0 easy way for developers to add authentication to secure their applications? Talk about all of them partway through the episode. How you doing today, mister Scott Cholinski?

Hey. I'm doing good, man.

I was I was telling you a couple days ago, I was feeling like West Boss because I was Smoking some meats. I was smoking some some wings. Yeah. And then I rewired my furnace to to get our our thermostat working. Like, I rid That like, I actually had to, you know, totally get the board board off of the the furnace and and swap out some wires and stuff because We had some proprietary thing, and I wanted to use an ecobee.

I was doing

electronics. I was doing smoking weed. Impressed. Yeah. It was a very rid. Very West Bossy kind of day. The wire stuff is always a little bit scary because you let you let the smoke out if you put the wrong wires in the wrong spot. I So did you I I have a question about that. So Scott replaced, are you did you have to take a board out of the furnace

and just go directly to it, or how did that work? So the board is like, the board itself, there was, like, a proprietary controller for the furnace. And the proprietary controller, rid. Was like a multistage thing, but our our our AC unit our whole system did not even support multistage anyways.

So he was using this, like, fancier this multistage board, and it had a proprietary like, the wiring was 4 wires, And the 4 wires were going into their proprietary well, I forget the company who makes this thing, but it's stupid.

Linux. That's who it is. And That's okay. Yeah. So is there, like, proprietary 4 cable thing where it's like a plus minus and a p or who knows what the the numbers were on these things? So, basically, I had to since I already had the wiring for a 4 cable system, I just moved those 4 wires over to whatever the The four wire setup would be, and then you use Yeah. Ecobee's transformer to to give you the correct wiring for that. That's interesting because,

rid. I just bought a ecobee off marketplace, and the lady is like a 6 month old ecobee.

And she had 3 of those room sensors, which are there. It's $100 for 2 extra sensors.

And I bought paid $100 for everything. And I was like, wait. Like, what are you getting rid of this for? That's rid She said we love it, but we just got a new Lenox furnace.

And they told me we can't use we have to use the proprietary one, and I'm kinda mad about that. And I was like, rid. That's probably exactly what Scott had. But Exactly. Yeah. Scott is smarter, and he was able to rewire it. Well, it's so funny because so we had, like, this weird Linux rid box that we had been,

we had at the old house that was like a fancy one. And what happened actually is the thermostat itself, the touch Screen on it just went. And it could've gone from, you know, a power outage that we had or who knows why this thing went. But I I kinda troubleshooted it down to the fact that the furnace, There's no air lights on the furnace. Everything was getting powered correctly. But the screen would just turn on, and then it would scramble and then shut off. And I was like, alright. It definitely feels like this is the rid. Green specifically.

So we had an AC guy come over and he was, like, confirmed that it was the screen that was broken. And we have this other Linux one then It was also fancy, and he was like, honestly, this thing is gonna be a giant pain to install, this fancier Linux one.

And there this thing will be a much harder thing to install than it would because we'd have to replace the whole board at that point. Yeah. This would be way harder to install than It would be to just swap these wires to your other board and just use the ecobee.

So we went out and got the latest ecobee which has, rid. HomeKit support baked in. The sensors the new, like, room sensors are pretty nice and stuff. So because we had to leave our last ecobee at the old house because we left it up for the we left it up when they bought the house. It was kind of like, oh, shoot. We can't take this thing down. Yeah. You kinda have to. I wrote it into I wrote our ecobee into the offer

or or when we're selling, but then I wrote out our smart switches because I was like, I want those. Yeah. Right?

I really like the ecobee. So, yeah, we went we went and got the new one, and it is really awesome. So, yeah, it was a it It was a fun, fun little project. Cool. The new ecobee looks sick. I like

we have the very first one or ecobee 2 at the cottage. And The screen on that is starting to get very faded.

So I'm a little worried about that. But then we had the eco. Well, I don't

rid I don't even know the name the numbers of them anymore, but we have one here, and we love it. And that that gets goes with the house. So now we're trying to And the new house comes with those old school ones. So now we're trying to get new ones for for the new house. Yeah. Interesting stuff. HVAC hour with Scott and West. HVAC hour. Alright. So let's actually take this into away from HVAC hour into tips for communicating here. So we have this broken up into a few different sections, whether that's email or code reviews or in person or Zoom or meetings, these types of things. Then we have some Twitter tips as well. Email.

What are your what is what is your number one tip for email communication?

Yeah. Yeah. We we had a whole episode on how to email busy people because I get tons of email. And there's certain people that when they email me, I'm just like, come on. Like you're not doing yourself any favors and trying to get a response from me. Yeah. And then I also feel like I email a lot of people and I'm like, they're busy and they they They don't have a lot of time. So I always say number your asks. So if you have, things that you want to ask people, rid. Like, I was emailing somebody with the real estate the other day, and I had a couple questions.

And I was like like, how much is this? Oh, yeah. So I was buying a new desktop and I was like, how much is it? Is it still in stock? And when can I can it be delivered? Those are 3 questions I had, And I sillily just type them all in a paragraph. And I was like, I didn't use my own my own tips there.

And they only answered one of them. Why? Because it's hard to parse out a list of questions. So then I emailed back and I said I put them as bullet points 1, 2, 3. Rid. And then the email that came back, they copy paste it. They reply right underneath each of them. So if you have in more than 1 ask, ideally, you don't ask as much rid because you're overwhelming the person. But if you have to ask more than one thing, put numbers on them. That's very clear what it is that you're asking the person.

Yeah. Me, personally, as somebody who has a hard time reading in general, I I think that that helps me not only, like you said, parse the email, but it does ensure that I'm not going to miss anything. I I, as an email responder, always appreciate a good numbered list.

Yeah.

Next one you have here is bold, the important part.

You know what? I actually don't do this. So I'm I'm interested in hearing you you bold, And you say underlining seems sketchy. So can you, can you give it to that a little bit? Yeah. So,

if you if there is is an ask or whatever, bolding the most important part again makes it very easy to ask. I can think of Many times people say, can you come on the podcast? And then they have to give a little bit of context for what the podcast is, a little bit of context for who they are, a little bit of context for How much they love the stuff that I do.

And I don't know. It's 3 or 4, 5, 6 sentences.

And if I just blur my eyes, I can see. Okay, Bold. Rid. Will you be willing to come on the podcast? And just by putting that 1 bull ask in bold, some people say they don't necessarily like that. Maybe it seems aggressive, rid. But I very much appreciate that type of thing is, especially when you're doing, like, a cold email to somebody. Maybe not necessary when you're going back and forth with A client or people that are on your team. But if it's a cold email, I think that's really important. Someone said underline.

I have a bit of an adversion to underlines and default colors in emails, And I feel like those are because, like, I often get a lot of junk mail. And if there's an underline in it, I feel like you just copy and paste that from Microsoft Word. I don't know why I feel that way, but anytime I see an underline in email, I'm just like, this is probably rid. Some sort of prewritten spam email that I get a 1000 times over, and I'm not gonna continue going. But I don't know if that The underlying thing is just personal, but the bold thing, I think, is is actually legitimate.

You know, it's funny because I I always, like, often default to you for emails, Especially for writing, like, a joint email or we're sending an email that is coming from both of us. I'm always like, if I'm writing it, I'm gonna send it to you first for edits because, you have such a a skill at emailing. So, that's a that's an interesting one. I I would never have thought about using bolding at all or underline for that matter, but bolding it on. Yeah. Yeah. I've done that for my sister as well. My sister's a wedding photographer

and she had a bride that kept changing dates on her.

And at a certain point, she couldn't change it anymore. She was fully booked up. So she keeps the nonrefundable deposit And she's like, how do I tell this person you backed out of the deal? You changed the date. I can no longer do that.

How How do I how do I tell them that I'm keeping your money? Yeah.

And I like so I whipped up something really quickly for her and it worked right. So, It can be a little bit tricky, but getting good. I attribute a lot to I took a lot of rid. Communications and, like, managerial classes in university. And, like, that's, like, probably the one thing that I really got out of university is being able to rid. Communicate effectively. That's interesting.

Another one would be used paragraphs.

This kind of goes along with the the first one. And I used to this all the time on on online poster, like, Reddit or any of those places. People, like, write this big, long, just tome, And then don't use anything to break it up, and it makes it impossible to read.

It just makes it impossible to Just parse or or get through or know where you're at. And, you know, like, I personally, I lose track of where I am when I'm reading stuff like that. So if you're if you're writing a lot Or even if you're writing any any amount, you know, it doesn't have to be that much. If you're you're having separate ideas or or rid. Separate parts that need to be broken up. Man, paragraphs are free. You can use them. Yeah. It's it's amazing how rid. You can tell that somebody is unhinged

when they do not put paragraphs into something where they just keep typing and typing. You see it on Facebook as well. People are people are just going off and it's like, clearly you something's wrong here where you don't know how to use a paragraph. Right? I think it's just a red flag right from the get go. People not using paragraphs. And I don't know if that's necessarily an age thing or whatever. Like, do Gen z's use paragraphs? But, please, people, when you have a new thought, put a paragraph. And Scott has down here. Don't use like when you are writing things

and you just like you

write something write something it's the same people on Slack. Rid. You you write something and then hit enter and then keep thinking and write some more stuff and hit enter. And, like, don't make me sit here and watch you formulate your ideas.

Get it together, type it up, and then send it to me. I don't need to wait through that entire thing. And those people listening to podcast meeting, like, oh, I do that.

So yeah. The dot dot dot thing is weird because I I personally used to do that, and then I started reading things that people rid. With the and just thinking about, like, how it sounded when I read it. Like, oh, I'm just thinking of this thing that of that. Like, it's just like, oh, it just makes it really difficult and annoying to read, to be honest. So, next one, I I would say, would be to on the side of friendly. You know, too oftentimes, you you people can be very business, and they can be very you can be straightforward and still be friendly. And and funny because My wife is an exquisite writer. I mean, she writes for her career, but she's a very technical writer. So she'll send me her emails and be like, Hey. Can you make this sound a little bit more friendly? Can you make this sound a little bit nicer? Like, it's not that like, it it's just like that. That is a thing where if you can make it sound like you're smiling and you're having a conversation or whatever while you're doing this thing, you're really good at this actually, Wes. That's one of your your really your best skills is, like, you when you email people, it feels like a friend is emailing you, you know, or when I'm reading some of the stuff you write. And so,

Yeah. Don't be don't be afraid to be friendly in your emails. Yeah, it's just. And you don't have to go overly friendly. Yeah. Like 1 exclamation mark, not 3.

And like maybe not a smiley, but, I don't know. I just wish that we could, like, somehow quantify that rid the right amount of friendliness.

But, yeah, just having a good tone of professional but a little bit friendly, because sometimes if you're just spit and straight facts.

It will come off as very terse, especially if the facts are bad.

Rid. Like, go back to this example. I was trying to buy a desk.

I went in. They told me a price. I emailed them. They told me a different price.

Rid. And the girl says, I emailed her, hey, like, what's up? I was in on on the thing. I love love the desk.

Really hoping that I can buy it. Can you please confirm the price? And she did. I said, Hey, like, that's a different price than I got in person. Like, is there any different? And she says, the price I told you is the correct price, period.

And I was just like, oh, like, big, big, like, especially like here, the customer trying to give you money and, like, guarantee she was not trying to be rude or terse or anything like that, but totally missed the mark in terms of rid. Delivering the bad news to me that something got mixed up along the way. And even if it is bad news for me, at least try to Padded a little bit more friendly. Unfortunately, that is the price. Not sure what happened. I'll look into it. You know? Yeah. It is. It's because right. You can't get tone From an email. And you decide, oh, that is the price. You know, that's different than that is the price. You know, the the tone is very different, and You can't get that from the straight up email.

Exactly.

Next one we have here is recognize a big ask on people.

So part of my job often is reaching out to people and asking for something where they may or not be able to do it.

And when I do that, it's very it's kind of it's kind of hard.

I'll give you an example here. The Syntax website, it was on a sponsored plan from Vercel for, I don't know, 2 years. Vercel pays the bill.

And for the syntax website, just as a thing to do for the web development community in general.

And they shuffled around some plans. And somewhere in that, the syntax website rid. We lost our, like, sponsored plan. Not not malicious or anything like that, just because that was in the in the shuffle.

So I reached out to Lee, who works at Vercel. And I was like, hey, like, I know this is a bit of a big ask. Do you think we could get back on that? And then and then like that's a ask because can I have something for free? You know, like, that's very that's a big ask to somebody. So you always have to, like, give them an out, like, if not totally understand. Happy to pay for it as well.

And you just have to give them an out and not a nervous nervous out. Sometimes you get rid. You get asked from people. They're like, or whatever. LOL. You know, you always yes.

Or this is the biggest ask of my life or not to. Not to is fine, you know? But if it's in a professional context, you have to give them some sort of rid. A way to to back out from it so it's not awkward on them because you're you're asking them to stick their neck out likely in their job for something. So I I think that's you're asking for a favor. Right? Exactly. Yeah.

Another one here is mind the cc's.

And we're not talking about credit cards. We're talking about CCs and BCCs and those types of things where, man, you could could not like, that was the one thing I don't miss about working in a Office where people would just cc everybody on everything