Category Archives: oped

oped, remote work

Mini rant – Do not use the mic on your laptop!

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With Coronavirus forcing isolation, we are seeing a huge uptick in the number of remote interviews and broadcasts from home on TV. But please, people, do not use the cheap mic on your laptop and expect to have a good interview! I’ve seen many of these interviews where the boomy echo of the room is picked up by a mic attached to a laptop with an acoustically reflective screen and a built in fan. It’s like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. The latest I saw (not to get political) was from a Trump campaign social media expert criticizing the Biden campaign for taking so long to do online broadcasts, but Biden at least had enough setup to use real mics instead of a laptop mic as that guy was doing. 🙁

I need to do a longer post about acoustic and video setups at home and why some things are just never going to give a good experience.

oped, remote work, software engineering

Remote Work with Family Members who Aren’t at Work

I have kids. I love them all, but they can be distracting at times. Normal work days 2/3rds to 5/6ths of them are in school and the house is pretty quiet, with a few bumps from the preschoolers. But during summer, or holiday breaks, or global pandemics, there are times when my house is full of family members who aren’t at work like I am. So how do I handle it?

My first set of points about this:

1. Set some expectations that your are “at work” and can’t respond to every little request all day.

1a. Having a door on your office or room you work helps with that. I know that is a challenge for those working from home only temporarily, but look for other ways to formalize some distance. It helps with the “I’m at work” state to have a physical indication.

2. Take breaks to interact with the family, like at lunch or afternoon walks.

3. Some music or controlled noise helps drown out background distractions.

4. Keep a list (at least mentally) of the things you wish you could do with them during the day so you can find other times to help with art projects or math problems.

It takes a bit of reinforcement and some consistency, so don’t give up if the first day has a lot of interruptions.

Also, everyone should agree that ‘working from home’ is not a substitute for good child care. You won’t be doing your job honestly if you claim to be working but spend all your day doing stuff for the family.  Flexibility to watch your kids for a bit while your spouse runs to the store or an appointment is great, but don’t abuse it and expect to be successful.

I’m sure we will see lots of posts about this in the next few weeks, and here is a good one to keep from going crazy.

oped, remote work, software engineering

Link refresh: remote vs co-located

A while ago I linked to this article – http://martinfowler.com/articles/remote-or-co-located.html – about remote vs co-located teams and which are more effective. I think it still holds up as a good article for guiding thoughts about how to make your team more useful whether co-located or remote or some blend of the two.

Most of the teams I’ve worked with in the last 10+ years have been a mix, with some chunk of the team located at one or two sites and a few more scattered around the world. In those cases, it has helped to get the office-located teams to think about “remote first” modes of communication. Sometimes that becomes “lowest common denominator” communication, where if any one person is on the phone then everyone does the meeting from the phone at their desk. That does help level the field, but when possible it is better to bring everyone up to a higher level with video conferencing or collaborative document editing.

It also helps for the Scrum Master or manager or leads to coach the team about how to communicate with everyone in a way that each team member is not left out or marginalized. That is a great topic of discussion in retrospective meetings.

oped, OpenStack, software engineering

OpEd: OpenStack wishes for Monasca

This is my first attempt at an editorial post for my blog. I usually just sprinkle in my opinion in whatever I’m writing, but you can see on this site I don’t blog much anyway. But this subject was prompted by a conversation in the Monasca IRC meeting this week (http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/monasca/2018/monasca.2018-09-05-15.00.log.html) so I thought I’d take a stab at it.

In some ways, this is my wishlist for Monasca and how I would like to see the project get better.  In some ways, it is a bit of a gripe about Telemetry.

Summary: better advertizing of ‘official’ projects, small but active projects can still be useful, and project consolidation.

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oped

Internet ages (and LEGO)

The internet is aging again.  “All of this has happened before and it will all happen again.” (as heard in http://lyrics.wikia.com/wiki/Information_Society:Seek_200) Some of the previous ages have been the shift from MySpace to Facebook or from custom web sites to blogs.

What I’m noticing in the last year or so is that sites I used to read regularly are slowly losing out. Some to larger aggregation sites, some to life. This week there were a pair of posts on FBTB.net from two of the authors about why they haven’t been posting lately. At least they aren’t quiting completely, like how reallifecomics.com or candyblog.net just went quiet a year or so ago.

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