(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2018 European djangocon.)
He works in a company that has many remote workers. He is one of them. The core question for him: “how do I manage to work remotely in an effective way without much stress”.
There is a difference between a remote-friendly company and a remote-first company. Remote-friendly is a company that still has an office. But you’re allowed to work from home and you don’t have strict work hours. Remote-first changes the entire structure/culture.
Can agile help?
But… “agile” also says that teams that work face-to-face are more efficient in conveying information. But note that the agile manifesto is many years old now.
Face-to-face means proximity, but also truthfulness. So: no documents that can mean anything, but truthful conversation. Eh: we are now used to slack, skype, whatsapp. This is 99% of what face-to-face means. (You still miss body language, though, and the pleasure to be near to each other).
And, what is information? Discussion about the project, about code or design. Information about what moves forward: commits, tasks. Info about what moves backwards: bugs, regressions. All these things can be done online. Some of these can even be done better online.
The more you use these online communication channels, the more you become remote-first. Being in the office is almost accidental. The online channels become stronger if you have your machines post feedback there (“failed test!”). Perhaps even automate tasks that you can start via messages in your channel…
You need a shared repository that is accessible everywhere. A channel to communicate on. Automatic testing. CI. Etc.
Some comments:
Some tools they use:
(He mentioned an article by Lee Bryant about slack, I guess this is it, but I’m not sure).
Update: here is the correct link
Photo explanation: station signs on the way from Utrecht (NL) to Heidelberg (DE).
My name is Reinout van Rees and I work a lot with Python (programming language) and Django (website framework). I live in The Netherlands and I'm happily married to Annie van Rees-Kooiman.
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