What My Dad Taught Me About Context (and Why I Keep Jira in My Repo)

After college, I spent a year working with my dad at Labco Welding, where he finished his career as a precision sheet metal mechanic. Before that he had worked at Pratt & Whitney and New Britain Machine — so by the time I showed up, he had decades …


This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Jesse Piaścik

After college, I spent a year working with my dad at Labco Welding, where he finished his career as a precision sheet metal mechanic. Before that he had worked at Pratt & Whitney and New Britain Machine — so by the time I showed up, he had decades of experience in precision work.

Here’s what stuck with me:

  • His tools were always within reach.
  • His plans were taped to the bench, not tucked in an office.
  • If something didn’t match the drawing, he updated the schematic on the spot so nobody repeated the same mistake.

At the time, I thought that was just “shop discipline.” Years later, as a software developer, I realized it’s a principle we constantly ignore.

We leave our “plans” (tickets, tasks, decisions) in Jira, Trello, or some detached system. The code lives here, the context lives there — and we lose flow jumping between them.

That’s why I’ve been working on something I call Context Driven Development (CDD).

  • Keep the tasks with the code.
  • Update the “schematic” (task, doc, or note) right where the work happens.
  • Make it so the next person — whether it’s a teammate or AI like Copilot — has the real context, not just the theory.

I’ve been building Imdone to help with exactly this. It lets you sync Jira issues into your project folder as markdown files, so developers can update them right in their IDE, side-by-side with the code. Comments and attachments stay in sync too.

For me, it’s like taping the plan to the bench the way my dad did — context is never out of reach.

💬 I’m curious: how do you and your team keep context close at hand? Do you update docs/tasks in the repo, or does everything live in Jira?


This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Jesse Piaścik


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