Phase 1: Exploration

Phase 1 is frictionless to enter. When an engineer first starts messing around with a technology they’re excited about, no permission-granting process or ceremony is needed. It probably happens dozens of times a day at Slack: someone reads about or invents something new, and commences fiddling around with it. Perhaps they have read a blog post about Elixir, or Cassandra, or WebAssembly, or TCR. They download some software, build it, poke around a little, work through some introductory material, and maybe take a stab at applying it to their day job.