Throughout my career, I have served on numerous globally distributed software engineering projects. This talk draws directly from those experiences, offering a candid look at recurring and often surprising challenges that arise when development efforts are separated by distance and disparate cultures.

We will analyze real-world friction points I encountered in communication, cross-site synchronization, and maintaining team cohesion. Crucially, I will share specific lessons learned regarding profound truth of Conway's Law, illustrating how my teams' geographical boundaries frequently and unforgivingly dictated module dependencies and complexity of resulting software architecture.

I will present a practical, experience-tested playbook for mitigating "distributed decay" that results, covering:
- Strategies to optimize communication tools for asynchronous global work
- Techniques for intentionally defining architectural boundaries to align with—and benefit from—team separation
- best practices for fostering a unified culture learned through direct trial and error.

Join this session for an honest and tactical breakdown of how to transform geographical separation from a crippling constraint into your team's most powerful organizational asset.