DevDiscuss
DevDiscuss
S1:E2 - How to make remote work, work
More companies are considering going fully distributed, and with the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more people are experiencing working remote for the first time. Although there are a lot of benefits to remote work, it's not all flowers and sunshine. We speak with Sophie DeBenedetto, senior software engineer at GitHub, and Mac Siri, senior software engineer at DEV, about how to make being distributed work for you.
Show Notes
- Fastly (sponsor)
- Heroku (sponsor)
- Commerce.js (sponsor)
- DigitalOcean (sponsor)
- GitHub
- My Long Distance Relationship With GitHub Transitioning to Remote, Async Work
- Flatiron School
- GitHub Insights
- Zoom
- Parks and Recreation
- WeWork
- Trello
- Pivotal
- RemoteRetro
- Stickies.io
- Slack
- Notion
- Dynalist
Sophie DeBenedetto
Sophie is an engineer at GitHub where she works with a super talented group of people to build the tools that power the development cycles of teams around the world. She is a former graduate of and teacher at The Flatiron School and has a passion for coding education. That passion, plus her love of Elixir, has also led her to become a maintainer of Elixir School, a free, open-source Elixir curriculum. Historically she is a cat person but will admit to owning a dog.
Mac Siri
Mac Siri is a Senior Software Engineer/Open source maintainer at DEV Community. He enjoys maintaining, improving, and expanding DEV's Editor experience and functionality.
Thank you for having this discussion.
I've worked in 'Work From Home' businesses, 'Remote Friendly' business and 'Multiple Timezone' businesses, and a lot of the pain points you all bought up here are ones that I have either experienced myself, or clearly seen in people around me.
Mac, my commute is really important to me too. I've avoided driving a commute where at all possible and have always either cycled or taken the train or a combination of both. That time really anchors me. It clearly separates work from home, and without it I feel really lost. I've mentioned this in the past to a few people who I don't think understood the appeal of 40 minutes alone on a train and 20 minutes on a bike in winter, but to hear it coming from someone independent of myself is really validating. I was really curious about the time tracking tool you use as well. What was it? If it's listed in one of the ones above please forgive me but I couldn't spot it.
I've used PomoDone in the past when we were a trello based business, but we moved over to Notion a while back as well, pretty heavily. The one thing I miss from that transition was the one thing that only I used, which was PomoDone. I've had a few interactions with the Notion team, and am really interested to see how they support the API they are potentially making/going to make.
Hello Dave! sorry I just noticed this comment.
Glad to hear I'm not the only one that love commuting for the alone time. I use Rescuetime for time-tracking.
No sweat, thanks for the tip. Love Fosters Home for Imaginary Freinds as well :)
Amazing episode and so helpful. I can totally relate. Also the tools mentioned are wonderful i didn't even know they existed. Trello for example has been a life saver in my work. Keep going it's an excellent work.
Really great podcast series on Work from home or the remote work. Amazing interaction by Sophie DeBenedetto about her journey throughout of transition to remote work. I really like the intro to new platforms they discussed, as I haven't heard about some of those. learned something new today. Well Done Dev
Thank you for all the information Sophie!
Actually there are a lot of new tools and it is important to highlight the "pipeline" we can create for 'Work From Home' businesses related to communication, contribution and project management.
Hope to hear more podcasts like this! It is so interesting how software developers are adopting new "work-style" habits.
Is there any way to download the podcast episode?
That's a good idea. We should add that link.
What I got via Dev Tools. Could help you right now :)
dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/media...
Listening to this in 2021, and amazed at how fully remote work is now a thing.
And I can relate to the overworking, waking up and starting working and finishing late at night, especially since I stay alone and there really is no one to drag me away from it.
Really nice episode, thanks. I just finished reading "Remote" from Basecamp, this episode perfectly complements it. Keep doing.
Awesome episode! I've been reading Ben's posts for a while, really cool to hear him in a podcast!
This was a really amazing podcast, outlines the crucks of working remotely and the alternative solutions which most of us have developed over time.
It was really insightful!
Amazing talk. I am just beginner at work and never heard of those tools. Thanks to the podcast I now know about them. Keep it up.