Software Development Blog

Weekly Newsletter Friday 5th Dec 2025 - The Developer’s Natural Predator: The Unexpected Slack Message

Hi there, Rob here…

Developers have many challenges: tricky bugs, unclear requirements, legacy code that looks like it summoned itself into existence. But none of these compare to their true natural predator. Not time, not deadlines, not Jira. The real threat is the unexpected Slack message. The “quick question mate” that arrives precisely ten seconds after they finally get their head into the problem they have been wrestling with all morning.

The thing about developers is that deep work is their superpower. When they focus, they disappear into the code and hold an entire mental map in their heads. But that mental map is fragile. One unexpected ping and it all collapses like a house of cards in a light breeze. By the time they switch context, answer the question, and try to rebuild everything they were thinking about, the afternoon has evaporated.

And it is never the big questions that do it. It is the tiny ones. The “where is that file again?” The “is the server meant to be down?” The “what is the admin login?” The sort of questions that feel harmless to ask but cost the other person thirty minutes of restarting their mental engine. Context switching is brutal like that. It punishes interruptions far more than people realise.

The solution is rarely to stop talking to each other. Communication matters. But there is a world of difference between interrupting someone instantly and letting them respond when they surface for air. Asynchronous messages, shared documentation, and a little patience go a long way. Teams move faster when interruptions are intentional rather than accidental.

So next time you are about to fire off a quick “mate, got a sec?”, ask yourself one thing. Do you want progress, or do you want chaos? Because the fastest way to derail a developer is still the simplest: send them a message they were not expecting.

👉 Deep work is precious. Protect it and everything speeds up.

Rob & Jason
Dev Partners

PS. We are Dev Partners, helping founders and teams work better so their software actually gets finished.