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Making Remote Work Work

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Re: Making Remote Work Work

#61

Post by technomancy »

sneak wrote: post #37

Create another local user account on your computer for being at work. Change the desktop background to big work logos. Don't configure your personal instant messenger accounts and whatnot. Set up the email client to only check the "work" account so you don't fall down personal email item rabbit holes. Configure the WasteNoTime Safari extension appropriately (more strictly than your personal account's config, with sit…

I did this for compliance reasons (needed disk encryption and my CPU is too slow for full-disk), but it turned out to be really handy regardless. You can't turn off fast user switching using X on Linux systems, but it hasn't been a problem for me; I just close my personal mail client.

Re: Making Remote Work Work

#62

Post by BSousa »

mason240 wrote: post #15
AJ007 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like the article. Numerous tiny things I've never considered, like the switch between headphones and speakers. The weird thing is I started working in my bedroom a while back. Not only have I had the most productive year in my life (and I never had a computer in my bedroom, even as a child) I also have managed to completely eliminate my sleep disorders. The most important things I tell people, including my o…

That runs counter to alot of advice I've seen. Working in the same room as your bed has helped you sleep better?

I've gotten the advice of using the bedroom only for sleep and (well other very specific things) but I personally have no problem to fall asleep after using my computer in bed. Programming or watching a movie or surfing the web. I honestly think it helps me (I've tried to leave my laptop on a single dedicated room before, never taking it from there as a personal experience and I did notice I got more antsy, and had difficulty falling asleep).

But my wife is the opposite, if she uses her iPad or laptop in bed, she will go to sleep a couple hours later than usual. Different strokes and all ;)

Re: Making Remote Work Work

#64

Post by cookiecaper »

sneak wrote: post #37

Create another local user account on your computer for being at work. Change the desktop background to big work logos. Don't configure your personal instant messenger accounts and whatnot. Set up the email client to only check the "work" account so you don't fall down personal email item rabbit holes. Configure the WasteNoTime Safari extension appropriately (more strictly than your personal account's config, with sit…

An associate of mine takes this to a different extreme; he creates a different virtual machine for each client, and works only in that.

Re: Making Remote Work Work

#65

Post by ommunist »

Thank you for the nice article. Especially for the documents camera tip. I use phone cam, but this one is better. For remote work timekeeping per project is indispensable. I recommend Freckle. But pen'n paper with timespending cards is also ok.

Re: Making Remote Work Work

#66

Post by subway »

sneak wrote: post #37

Create another local user account on your computer for being at work. Change the desktop background to big work logos. Don't configure your personal instant messenger accounts and whatnot. Set up the email client to only check the "work" account so you don't fall down personal email item rabbit holes. Configure the WasteNoTime Safari extension appropriately (more strictly than your personal account's config, with sit…

I tend to keep completely separate physical machines. I have Thinkpad provided by work, and a personal Thinkpad. When the workday starts, the work machine goes in the dock, then at the end of the workday, I swap it out for the personal machine.

I'm a strong believer in using company hardware only for work, and never using personal hardware for work related tasks, if only because it makes things slightly less complicated with regard to who owns what IP.

EDIT: Correcting typos.

Re: Making Remote Work Work

#67

Post by technomancy »

rjzzleep wrote: post #2

since i spend a lot of time in the console i have a few very simple aliases, for the following and some other time zones i use frequently. cst='TZ=CST6CDT date' est='TZ=EST date' berlin='TZ=''Europe/Berlin'' date' then i can just convert times and needed. berlin -d '4:00pm EST'

I have my chat client set to timestamp in UTC; helps a lot.

Re: Making Remote Work Work

#68

Post by technomancy »

yawz wrote: post #32

Any remote-working developer who's pair-programming ? I'd love to hear about your experiences? I know there's been a few attempts at creating remote pair-programming tools but I'm not familiar with any particularly successful one.

I did this exclusively for about two years at my last gig; we just used shared tmux sessions with everyone's pubkeys and ssh hostnames in a git repo.

These days I'm not consistently pairing with the same set of people, so I created http://syme.herokuapp.com to make it easy to spin up a throw-away EC2 node preconfigured for a pairing session.

Re: Making Remote Work Work

#69

Post by technomancy »

mbillie1 wrote: post #18
eweise wrote: post #16

Wow. "you should be pair programming". Terrible advice. Isn't effective in the office. Tons worse when remote.

I wish he had left that out, only because it was obviously going to lead to lots of reactions like this. Pair programming, at least on HN/reddit, is a fairly polarizing issue. I'm in favor of it, but plenty of folks aren't, and it's really an orthogonal issue with respect to working remotely. (For the record: tmux/vim/skype has worked perfectly fine for me while remote pairing)

It depends what you're doing. If you're getting up to speed on a completely new system, you're going to waste a lot of time if you don't have someone who's familiar with the codebase helping you out. If two people have fairly similar levels of expertise in a given area, the benefit is going to be a lot lower.

Re: Making Remote Work Work

#70

Post by dhimes »

ommunist wrote: post #65

Thank you for the nice article. Especially for the documents camera tip. I use phone cam, but this one is better. For remote work timekeeping per project is indispensable. I recommend Freckle. But pen'n paper with timespending cards is also ok.

Does anyone know of one that works with Linux?
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