DEV Community: Angelique

Unfriending Facebook, Instagram and Goodreads

Angelique — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

On the last day of 2021, I deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts. Two days later, I also deleted my Goodreads account. Not exactly a new year’s resolution, but more like a decision to not bring those things with me into my new year.

This decision was something I saw as an eventuality. Even as I continued to use the services — running a Facebook group, liking photos on Instagram — I knew I was bound to give them up. And, as I shared that I was leaving those platforms, I really didn’t have to explain or justify this move to anyone¹ — I think folx are pretty used to the idea — and, instead, mostly had to come to terms with how long I had existed in this state of knowing I’d leave, planning to leave, but still not completing the action.

Why did it take so long to leave?

I think FOMO pretty accurately describes my answer. Those networks are where my friends and family are. Through Facebook, I see my nieces and nephew growing up, I stay connected to a larger pool of people across the globe, and am made aware of local social events. Instagram let me see friends’ families, holidays and creations and also benefit from insights from authors and others I respect. Goodreads introduced me to new books and let me bond with friends over shared reads.

Leaving those platforms makes me feel disconnected from all that, and that’s no small thing.

It’s not great to think I’ll miss out on a friend’s party or birth announcement because I’m not on the platform where that info gets shared. This let me continue on, even as the news and implications about Facebook/Meta got more and more dire.

Over the last year, hearing about friends who are struggling with family members deep into conspiracy theories, watching Facebook fumble decisions around the January 6th insurrection (and then attempt to minimize their impact) all had their toll. And then came Frances Haugen’s testimony and the documents she released — learning that Facebook had put in place changes to decrease the promotion of inflammatory content leading up to the election and then chose to undo those changes really did me in. That was the proverbial straw on this camel’s back.

“Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money.”

–Frances Haugen

Maybe it’s because of my own experience as a software engineer, but I really felt I understood the process to specifically undo those changes; I understood that there were meetings and Jira tickets enabling this. And yet it still happened. Something about that just made Facebook irredeemable in my eyes.

I’ve mostly talked about Meta’s products here, and they were definitely the focus of this specific effort. Since I also have made the choice to use less of Amazon’s services (like cancelling my Prime membership), Goodreads got lumped into this effort as a last-minute, “Oh, yeah, them, too.”²

Speaking of process

Leaving all three platforms was, in terms of process, pretty straightforward. I began by downloading my data from each platform: Facebook and Instagram gives you options about which data to download and what format (HTML or JSON) you wish to receive your data, and Goodreads provides a CSV of all your read or tagged books. The Facebook and Instagram downloads are not instantaneous; you must first request the download, await an email confirming it’s done, then log in to actually download the file.

After I was in possession of my data, I could then delete my accounts. Again, Facebook and Instagram don’t do this immediately — instead, you get a notice that you have 30 days to prevent or undo the full deletion of your account.

Despite only posting to Instagram twice last year, I still actively browsed my Instagram feed and used the app in other ways. Unexpectedly³, it felt harder to leave than the other two services. Before deleting my account, I opted to review each person and account I was following and actually unfollow them. This is a wholly unnecessary and even pointless step, but seeing each name and reflecting even a moment on what I got out of viewing their photos and posts was helpful to me. It gave me the opportunity to acknowledge the good I was experiencing from the individuals on the platform — the ways they inspired my creativity, the things they taught me about antiracism, the insights into their lives — even as I was deleting my account. (Only afterward, as I was describing my actions to a friends, did I see the resemblance to “letting go with gratitude” in the KonMari method.)

Helpful links

If you’re looking to do this yourself, this gist provides links to instructions for both Facebook and Instagram. 👍🏻

I also was inspired and informed by Jess Gartner’s three-part description of how she, too, left and replaced Facebook:

What’s next?

Some of the services I’ve left I hope to replace in pretty straightforward ways, while in other cases, I’m going to get more creative.

When I posted that I was leaving Facebook, one of the surprising and delightful things I heard was that folx were going to miss seeing my drawings and the other things I’m making. So, rather than replacing Facebook with another service, I instead collected some addresses and am in the process of sending out my first round of mail art. I’ll be connecting with fewer people, but hope there will be more delight in our interactions.

For Instagram, I’m taking a beat to consider what I want to get out of sharing photos online. If it’s connection, I may sign up for a fediverse network like Pixelfed. If it’s instead the ability to share and view my own photos, I may opt instead to build something with Eleventy and create a subdomain of this blog.⁴

Goodreads was the most straightforward to replace — I had already signed up for The StoryGraph to explore its options and recommendations, so I simply imported my Goodreads data to their service.

Well, almost all my data.

In another fit of new year energy, I opted to not import the books I’d tagged to read and start my StoryGraph account with a clean slate.⁵

In addition to The StoryGraph, there are several other Goodreads alternatives, like BookWyrm (which is also a fediverse network) and Literal (which I heard of via Jason Becker). I may dig into those, too, depending on my motivation and how I find The StoryGraph.

Final thoughts

I don’t have any epiphanies to share in this post-Facebook life nor do I really expect to. Mostly, I’m sharing this because I was motivated by other people’s stories and can only hope to pay that forward. Maybe you, too, have existed for awhile in the space of knowing you’d like to quit Facebook/Instagram/EnterServiceHere. Maybe you, too, know how not doing the thing can drag at your momentum to ever do the thing. No judgement — this whole post is pretty much me owning up to existing in that space for years.

A love letter to LFTM

Angelique — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Exactly three years ago, I made my own private copy of Coraline’s lftm and pushed my first commit. Unbelievably, I have kept it up, almost every workday, since then.

LFTM stands for low-friction task management system, and I’ve mentioned it before here.

LFTM introduction

The README in Coraline’s repo really spells out the simplicity of this system:

The system consists of a number of folders, each containing a specific kind of text file.

It’s a repo with folders and files. There’s some structure provided by the folders, but that’s it.

And, hot damn, if it doesn’t just work. Coraline outlines the benefits she’s experienced like so:

Answers the question of ‘what do I do next?’, which is the ultimate productivity killer.

Keeps my working memory uncluttered.

Keeps me from um’ing during my daily standups. I always know what I worked on yesterday.

Is a handy record of accomplishments that I can reference when it’s time for my review, I want to ask for a raise, or I’m updating my resume.

Provides a reminder that I do, in fact, get things done and that I don’t, in fact, suck at my job.

Also, because it’s text, it’s so very searchable. Because it’s local text, searching is also fast and customizable – I can search using the tools in my text editor or the command line.

My mods

I’ve made some changes to the LFTM system over my years of use. Right away, I converted the text files to Markdown because I appreciated the just enough formatting it provides, including some syntax highlighting in my editor for things like headings and checkboxes.

I also updated things like the 1:1 and meeting notes to be in reverse chronological order; this way, whenever I open a file, the most recent information is at the top.

I created my own reusable templates for the weekly journal and projects. The project template is specifically inspired by the questions and prompts in Sarah Doody’s post on documenting UX work.

Coraline’s system includes prompts for a weekly retrospective which I found helpful, but was inconsistent in using. This summer, I attended a handful of Meaghan Warner’s Mondaze Motivation calls and discovered I was far more successful and doing some Monday morning reflection and planning than I was at accomplishing the same things on a Friday afternoon. As a result, I’ve incorporated Meaghan’s prompts into my own weekly kickoff template

Finally, I added a wee bit of automation to the process, including a Ruby script to create a weekly template with the current date and another that uses the Google Calendar API to list yesterday’s and today’s calendar events.

How I LFTM

Every Monday, I start my week by running the new-week script and spend 20-30 minutes reflecting on the previous week and planning for the current one. (I haven’t really been saving individual copies of the kickoff file, though its iterations exist in git history. I may change how I’m doing this in the future. 🤷🏻‍♀️)

Each work day morning, I run the today script. I copy the calendar events from the generated today.md file over to the current day, which gives me an opportunity to review what’s ahead of me.

I keep the weekly file open in my text editor throughout the day, marking off meetings and tasks as I move through them. I use a system inspired by bullet journaling, where meetings are identified by parentheses and tasks use square brackets:

- (x) Past event
- ( ) Upcoming event
- [ ] Incomplete task
- [x] Completed task

Meeting notes get added to their respective files, with action items regularly copied over to the weekly journal. While I have shared 1:1 documents with each of my direct reports, the notes in my LFTM folder allow me to keep private notes, too, including things like favorite treats or pets’ names.

Since I have a pretty clicky keyboard, I often take meeting notes by hand and then, in the space between meetings, figure out what’s helpful to move into an LFTM doc. While this seems like an unnecessary duplication of effort, I find it’s helpful to separate my note-taking activity from organizing those notes or establishing what I’ll want to remember later.

Benefits

While I’ve adequately explained how I add to and track things in LFTM, where the system really shines is when I almost very nearly remember something…and then search and voilà! have the information I’m looking for immediately at hand. Similarly, I also use my LFTM notes to review things – before 1:1s, before reviews, before meetings. In general, the system makes me feel like I always have the proper context for something and rarely am the person in a meeting who can’t remember our goals or action items.

Combined with the Monday kickoff, the system allows me to organize tasks, take notes and to reflect on things. Together, it lets me be a person who has her shit together and gets shit done.

Real talk

I’ve always been an avid note taker, so I shouldn’t be surprised that this system works for me. Mostly it harnesses something I do automatically and make it more meaningful and long lasting.

Also, it allows me to take notes and create tasks where I already am – in a text editor. There’s no app version of this system, so if I’m not immediately in front of my laptop, I absolutely have to rely on a secondary system (like a notebook) until such time as I’m back at my computer. I know for many folks this would be a dealbreaker, but as someone who works from home and uses this system mainly for work tasks, it’s actually perfect.

While there isn’t an app, by saving my notes to a private repo, I do have a cloud backup of my notes and am able to use them on multiple machines. Again, for me, this is enough.

Finally, as I’ve said before, I mostly use this system for work tasks–both my day job and teaching. I haven’t been as successful using it for personal tasks, which end up mostly living on my calendar, or personal reflection, which I still do mostly by hand. Sometimes I even give into the lure of fancier bullet journaling.

While I’ve started up a pen-and-paper (and markers! and washi tape! and stamps!) bullet journal on several occasions, I’ve never kept it going longer than three months and certainly not three years. I hope the longevity of me maintaining and getting benefit out of LFTM inspires you to check it out to, if organization is something you struggle with.

I’ve made a fork of Coraline’s template, which you can use to further explore my changes or can click “Use This Template” to create a version for your own use.

Skill building as a dev

Angelique — Fri, 16 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a fair amount of angst about how much there is to learn in web development (and often front-end dev specifically).¹ As someone who wrote her first HTML 25 years ago, I get it. It’s a lot, and it keeps growing. Which is why, especially when hiring devs, I care way more about how you learn than what you currently know. If you don’t have a flexible and strategic learning system, I recommend building and refining one. This post outlines what I currently do, including some shared resources and templates, so you can use or adapt this technique yourself.

This post is not a list of skills to learn to become a front-end developer in 2021 (there’s lots of content about this already) or really even how to learn things (for that, see Ayu Adiati’s series on efficient learning). Instead, it’s about grappling with what to learn when you feel overwhelmed by all there is to learn. This technique has served me in a variety of situations—learning totally new-to-me frameworks, as well as advancing existing skills. Additionally, while I’m writing here about tech skills, I will also admit that this has proven just as useful in my hobbies (e.g., drawing with ink, weaving). Finally, the ranking system described below also helps me accept that I don’t actually need to learn all the things; not all skills or knowledge are equally valuable to me, personally or professionally. Having a system to establish that is immensely helpful in conquering any growing sense of anxiety about all there is to learn.

Step one

Start with a brain dump of skills. This can be a typed list, written by hand or using a brainstorm/mindmapping tool. At this point, the goal is just to generate the list and not do a lot of curating or refinement. Additionally, I recommend include skills you already have; it’s very grounding to acknowledge you already know things and these skills will provide some helpful references/ideas in later steps.

🤔 Getting stuck? Are there skills you’ve seen listed in job descriptions that have made you feel inadequate? Add it to the list. Is there an online course or workshop you want to take—or have signed up for and never completed? Definitely add it to the list. Is there a project on your team you’d like to get involved in, but you lack experience with part of the stack? Add it to the list. Also, keep in mind, this list isn’t one and done; you’ll definitely be adding to it over time.

Step two

At this point, it’s helpful to go digital and put all the skills in a format that you’ll later be able to easily filter and sort. I use Airtable, but a spreadsheet would work, too. After adding each of the skills in its own row, add two new columns:

Status/Level. How well do you currently know this thing? I keep things simple here, opting for three rankings: New to me, Some knowledge, Strong knowledge. For the purposes of the rest of this guide, I’m going to refer specifically to the rankings I use. You may want to word these differently, but I encourage you to keep this as simple as is useful. For example, I don’t think it’s helpful to rank in percentages; that feels like too much granularity for no real clear benefit.
Evidence. In this column, I describe how I can or will prove that I know a thing. If you struggle with this, it may be helpful to first answer for the skills you’ve ranked yourself as having “strong knowledge” of. How can you demonstrate that knowledge to yourself and others?

After both columns are filled in, I recommend reviewing the list with fresh eyes. It’s entirely possible, having now considered how you can demonstrate knowledge, that you may have ranked your current knowledge too low. Or, perhaps you find yourself thinking, “I know X really well except for this specific bit” (e.g., “I’m confident with my React skills, but need to dive deeper into Redux” or “I’m pretty good at writing accessible markup, but could have stronger skills at using NVDA’s screen reader software”). That’s a good sign that you should break those skills apart, both acknowledging more fully your current skill in the first thing and making it more obvious where you should spend your time growing skills.

💡 Getting stuck? Remember to keep your statuses as simple as is useful; you should be able to easily say, “Yeah, I know this a bit” or “I’ve really only read a post about this thing, I definitely haven’t learned it.” If your statuses are still pretty simple and you’re struggling, maybe the thing you’re trying to evaluate is too big (e.g., all of JavaScript vs something specific like the filter function).

Step three

Up to this point, you’ve been working with the full list of skills, including those you already are pretty competent in. Now it’s time to drill in to any of the skills you’ve ranked as “New to me” or “Some knowledge.” Add four more columns and fill those in for this subset of skills:

Motivation. Why do you want to learn this thing? Be specific about how and why this knowledge or skill will help you.
Impact/Value. Using a high, medium, low ranking, estimate the impact to you of learning this thing.
Resources. What will help you learn this thing and get to the point you described in evidence? This is a great place to either directly link to books or tutorials or point to existing lists of resources you may use on your path to gaining this skill. If you don’t have such links, that’s okay! You’ll find them when you’re ready to pursue this thing; don’t go down the rabbit hole of trying to find all the courses/tutorials in this one go.
Effort. Again with the high, medium or low ranking, but now estimating the effort needed to learn this specific thing. For this ranking, you should consider both the time (e.g., 10 hours of video) as well as the complexity (i.e., how different is this from other things you’ve learned).

👉🏻 Getting stuck? If you’re stuck on your motivation, maybe it’s a sign to move the topic to something more like an “idle curiosity” list or straight up delete it. Don’t push through this, as it’s counterproductive to have your list cluttered up with things you’re not actually motivated to pursue. Also, don’t get stuck overanalyzing your rankings; this is a living document and you’ll be able to reevaluate.

Using this list

At this point, your list is set and ready to use. Using the list is a matter of sorting and filtering to determine what to work on next and maintaining and updating the list.

What to work on next

Before deciding your next learning journey, I recommend that you take a breath and assess your current bandwidth. Be real about what’s already taking up your attention and effort, otherwise you’re not setting yourself up for success. If you have a bazillion projects in the air, some personal stress and an upcoming trip…now is not the time to start a high effort learning task. Look for something that’s high value, but low effort. On the other hand, if you have a strong appetite for learning right now, sort your list by things that are high value and high effort.

Maintaining your list

In general, I add to my list on an ongoing basis. If a GraphQL project comes up at work, onto the list that goes. If I read a post about Web Components and want to experiment, it gets added to the list. For these individual additions, I fill out the whole row for each item in one go (in comparison to the step-by-step process described above). I find it’s especially helpful to capture my motivation in that moment, as that may later impact whether or not the skill is still relevant to learn.

Every two or three months, I revisit the whole list from top to bottom. I pay special attention to these columns:

Status/Level. If I’ve been using the skill, it may be time to re-evaluate my ranking.
Impact/Value. Depending on what I’m working on or see coming on the horizon, this rating may be adjusted (e.g., if that GraphQL project evaporated, I’ll drop the rating for that skill).
Effort. Even if I haven’t made progress on this specific skill, sometimes the work I’ve put in on other areas can effect this ranking. Or maybe someone has recently launched a workshop for a skill that I previously lacked a solid resource for; this could make it feel more within my reach.

This review also makes it clear why it’s worthwhile to keep skills currently rated as low value in your list; that ranking is not set in stone and can change based on your needs.

Finally, if you find your list is a bit unwieldy even after sorting and filtering, consider these options:

Adding categories for your skills. In my example, these would be very broad, like tech skills vs crafty skills, just enough categorization so I can see like with like.
Adding a checkbox column for the skills you’re currently focusing on, those you’re actively taking a class on or building in some other way. This helps elevate them above all others and also makes it clear if you’re putting too much on your plate (i.e., it’s probably not realistic to learn five new things at once).

Template and example

If this system seems useful to you, I’ve created a shared Airtable template.

The Airtable has two tables:

Template. This is a blank version of the system for you to use.
Example. This is the template but filled in with some example data (see above). I’ve added some comments to my data and this table also lets you see how the filtering and sorting works.

Helpful accessibility resources for all

Angelique — Thu, 20 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), an opportunity to share and spread knowledge about digital accessibility and inclusion.

Building awareness remains an important goal for web accessibility, as many folks who are building for the web are unfamiliar with web accessibility, both what it means to users and how to implement it in their digital products (though I will admit I look forward to when, instead, we can celebrate GAWD—Global Accessibility Wins Day! 🏆). Accessibility is not reliably taught as part of the foundation of web education, in universities or at bootcamps.

As a self-taught dev in the early days of the web, I mostly had to learn on the job and am grateful for the conference talks, books and blog posts that have educated me and made me into an advocate for web accessibility. I invite you to join me in this and wanted to highlight some resources that can help, no matter where you are in your accessibility journey.

Just getting started

Is all this new to you? Awesome! 🎉 There is no better time to start that right now and these resources are hand-picked to help you start to learn about digital access/inclusion and people with different disabilities.

Myths and Facts About People with Disabilities—Even if you think you’re starting at zero, it’s likely you’ve picked up some misconceptions about disability from friends, family or popular culture. This list created by the Easter Seals is a great jumping off point to course correct and grow your understanding of folks with disabilities.
Ableism Explained—Ableism is “set of beliefs or practices that devalue and discriminate against people with disabilities.” This extended definition by Leah Smith provides concrete examples and talks about the impact of ableism.
When we design for disability, we all benefit—In this 2015 TedxMidAtlantic talk, Elise Roy shares how being Deaf allows her to create and design solutions that might not be obvious to others.
How I do an accessibility check—Rob Dodson walks through how do do a simple accessibility evaluation of a web site. If you’ve never considered these things, this is a friendly 12-minute whirlwind tour of many important concepts.

Developers

If, as a developer, you’re interested in building accessible products, these resources will get you sorted.

Links vs. Buttons in Modern Web Applications—Marcy Sutton provides an in-depth discussion of two important HTML elements and the impact they can have on accessibility.
Inclusive Components—Heydon Pickering’s amazing resource of interactive components designed and coded with accessibility at the forefront, including a thoughtful walkthrough of those decisions. Highly, highly recommended.
a11yEngineer—Great tool for generating detailed acceptance criteria and testing guidelines for accessible web and mobile products.

Team practice

Accessibility is definitely a team sport. These resources outline how different roles in your org can contribute to building inclusive and accessible experiences.

Accessibility for teams—Part of Google’s Web Fundamentals, this section outlines how project managers, designers and developers can incorporate accessibility into their roles.
Vox Media’s Accessibility Guidelines—Similar to the previous resource, but also expands to include content creators and QA.
Creating an Accessibility Engineering Practice—Okay, I’m going to acknowledge that this is a big read, but you’re getting the benefit of Dan Na and his experience leading Etsy’s first accessibility team. Take your time with this one, but definitely dig in.

Keep going

No matter where you started, there’s more to learn. These are the ways I keep accessibility front of mind all year long, not just one day in May.

One of the ways I start learning about new things is to sign up for newsletters ; getting regular, digestible amounts of info works really well for me. For this purpose, I pretty much recommend the A11y Weekly Newsletter to everyone involved in building for the web.
Adding voices of accessibility experts, including those with disabilities, into your social media stream is a great way to learn. This list of folks and groups to follow on Twitter will give you some options.
Join communities focused on accessibility, like local meetup groups or the web a11y Slack community (invites to this group are currently limited, but feel free to DM me on Twitter if it would help you!).
If you’re looking for information about something specific, both The A11y Project and Awesome A11y are huge resources.

Better remote teams

Angelique — Wed, 19 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In this series, I’ve shared how and why I started working remotely, what has made me a successful remote employee for over a decade, and why I think 2020 was more about working through a pandemic than a great experiment in remote work. Hopefully this was good, relevant or even validating information and now we’re left with: What, therefore, should I do?

Working—and, more specifically, collaborating—remotely can be improved in some fairly simple ways.

Be real and realistic

First and foremost, we need to be real about the fact that folks are working from their home or, as COVID restrictions ease up, their local coffeeshop or on the road. Tech glitches, interruptions will happen.

Though I was already working remotely, the Portland HQ of Lumen Learning—like many others—transitioned to remote last spring with great urgency. During one of the first team meetings after that switch, the CEO straight up stated that we should all expect meeting and workday interruptions (from partners, children, critters) while working from home, and that they were not a reflection on anyone’s professionalism. That felt both realistic and kind, which to me is some of the best of leadership.

Meetings and not meetings

Speaking of meetings, all the things we already know about running efficient meetings—as well as when something is not meeting worthy—is extra important when your team is remote. Honestly, it’s easy to multitask or tune out on meetings as a remote employee, so it’s worth the effort to make meetings worthwhile and relevant.

In my experience, two quick changes can make massive improvements to your team meetings:

Establish if this meeting should be a meeting
Create and share an agenda

1. Establish if this meeting should be a meeting

I know this is the source of many flowcharts and memes—and yet, here we are. It’s still true.

If the meeting is a straightforward announcement or status update, it’s really just better to share via email, Slack or whatever broadcast, async tool your team favors. If something requires a decision and is either simple or well documented, try getting to that decision in an async method.

Building up the muscle of asking this on your team is likely to get you characterized as someone who hates meetings, so it’s certainly helpful to frame this as wanting the team to be better and more effective and not just clearing the decks on your calendar.

2. Create and share an agenda

A simple agenda accomplishes so much:

Folks can establish if the meeting is relevant to them and opt out
Those attending know how to prepare, setting everyone up for success
Sets expectations about the meeting style: brainstorming, deciding
Keeps the meeting on topic because aha! 💡 you have agreed-upon topics of discussion

Once you’ve gotten into the habit of doing these two things, look into other methods to keep your meetings meaningful. I recommend Let’s Have Better Meetings! and 17 Easy Ways to Make Your Meetings Better as jumping off points for that exploration.

Wellness and boundaries

Another key way you can improve your remote teams is by having open conversations about wellness and role modeling healthy boundaries. Especially if your team operates across time zones, folks may feel the pressure to always be on, always be available. Even as a manager or leader, this is not realistic and certainly isn’t sustainable.

On my team at Lumen, we’ve added information into our onboarding process about setting available hours on your calendar, and we use similar features in Slack to disable notifications. It’s important to document things like this because it sets an expectation of team norms.

Additionally, while I used to prioritize having my camera on during all our video meetings, I have done some recalibration in the last year. Teaching remotely and this summary of Stanford research into Zoom fatigue made me sympathetic to how intrusive that expectation can be.

Overall, many of these “fixes” aren’t even that specific to remote collaboration. Unfocused meetings are a drag on productivity and morale when everyone is around the same conference table, not just sharing the same Zoom line. With notifications hitting our phones at all hours, establishing team norms around shutting that down is important for on-site, hybrid and remote workers alike. In general, teams (and leaders specifically) need to build an appetite and a practice for evaluating which of their current processes are helping and hindering their teams. Paying attention and soliciting feedback on these things is the true key to better remote teams, better teams.

Lessons learned working remotely for over a decade

Angelique — Mon, 17 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

To wrap up this series on remote work, I’m going to focus on the things that improve a remote worker’s life. In this article, I’ll share what has worked for me on an individual level and, in a later post, tackle what can be done and offered at the company/team level.

First, a reality check about what working remotely has looked like for me.

Photo by AdrienBe from Pixabay

Pre-COVID, your social media streams may have been filled with images of folks with their laptops at airports, on beaches, in coffeeshops, in Airstream trailers. Remote work was seen as a means into a ✨ digital nomad ✨ lifestyle.

Photo by Anrita1705 from Pixabay

Since March 2020, the imagery used to describe remote work has changed a lot. The serenity and, let’s admit it, aspirational nature has been replaced mostly by chaos: partners working side-by-side on the couch, a kitchen table that is an office and a classroom, the WFH mullet.

Neither of these pictures represent my experience or ideal as a remote worker. When I’m showing up for work as a remote employee, that usually means I’m at my standing desk in my home office. Not only do I know where the nearest electrical outlet is, all my gear is plugged in and ready to go. I have speakers and headphones, external monitors and other peripherals. Being in a different location when I’m traveling, going to conferences or making an appearance at our headquarters, is novel, but it’s far from ideal for me.

My workspace, circa 2019.

Ben Halpern of Dev.to has written something about this as well:

I have been able to dramatically optimize for the 95% of the time I get to be sitting at the same desk with the same peripherals all hooked up. […] The 5% of the time I find myself away from this setup and still fully in work mode is a rather unideal scenario.

—Ben Halpern, The Best Remote Work is Delightfully Unglamorous

This isn’t to say I don’t unplug and roam at times (I’m writing this blog post from my couch with a snoring pitbull at my feet), but the vast majority of my work—both coding and interacting with my team—is done at my desk.

While we’re talking about my desk, let’s dive into some specifics about what keeps me happy as a remote worker:

Standing Desk === Dancing Desk

I started using a standing desk around 2011, in part inspired by Gina Trapani’s blog about their benefits. I find it’s pretty key to my happiness as a developer, keeping my mind engaged and my body flexible and moving. It’s easy for me to move about, including the not-infrequent dance break.

My set up is fairly simple: a wooden IKEA countertop and a set of telescoping legs. I’ve considered getting something fancier, but this has really worked for the last decade. 🤷🏻‍♀️

💡 You can read more about my desk and other details about my set up on my /uses page.

Consistency

While remote work is often lauded for its flexibility, what I appreciate is the flexibility to create a consistent schedule that works for me. The structure of my workdays is very consistent—including when I start and stop—while the content of those days and what the work itself looks like is quite changeable.

I start each workday by running a Ruby script that pulls data from my Google calendar and our team’s Jira board, presenting me with a list of scheduled events and tickets assigned to me. Reviewing this means I’m ready for meetings and can set reasonable expectations for myself about how much head’s-down time I’ll have for coding. I organize all this info in Markdown files, a hybrid system inspired by Coraline Ada’s lftm (low-friction task management) system and bullet journaling.

During the day, I check back in on this list, marking off things as they’re handled and adding notes about the tickets I’m working on. If I’m working solo, I usually have Focus@Will going in 20- or 35-minute intervals, which is like a supercharged Pomodoro.

I take regular breaks and make sure some of those, like lunch, are marked on my calendar and respected by my coworkers. Since a majority of my team is on the West coast, I also use their lunch break as an opportunity to get away from my desk and, weather permitting, enjoy some sunshine.

Finally, how I disconnect at the end of the day is just as important as the energy I bring to starting my workday. For this, I once again return to my daily agenda and review what I completed, noting what I’ll have to pick up tomorrow. Additionally, I’ve started to rely on the “5pm questions” from the free “Your Plucky Path” career planning guide created by Jen Dary. Revisiting why I’m working in the first place and acknowledging I’ve met those needs or goals is a great way to wrap up my workday.

Extroverts can do this, too

As a generally friendly and outgoing person, I often encountered some level of surprise that I am happier as a remote worker than in an office setting. Honestly, I think the key is that I usually have plenty social outlets, both in person and digital, with coworkers and with friends. Whatever interaction I’m missing out on at work, I’m instead able to gain in going to meetups or book club.

If work is your primary place of social engagement, I definitely understand how this might feel different. But, also: join a book club or schedule a movie night with friends!

It’s not always rosy

I used to say that in any month of working remotely, there’s always one garbage day, where the inconvenience of being in my house versus an office or coworking space was really obvious. Maybe my dog made a mess or the folks I share my house with have an unreasonable case of interruptitis. That day is irritating, but it’s not like that all the time, and the benefits definitely outweigh the frustrations.

Finally, it’s worth reiterating that these are the things that have made being remote work for me. These are my lessons and not hard-and-fast rules for anyone looking to be happy as a remote employee. A lot of articles about remote work are like that; full of DOs and DON’Ts, but not everyone needs the same things to be happy at work. Some folks, like me, need an office with a door, others are happy on the couch. What’s important is to know yourself well enough to establish those wants and the fine tune your work day for them.

Working remotely through a pandemic

Angelique — Tue, 11 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Since the middle of 2020, folks have been fretting and opining about worker productivity in articles, in blogs, on Twitter. Newly remote workers had barely plugged in and opened their laptops, and yet there was a sudden gnashing of teeth about whether anything would get done in this new environment.

Framing this conversation around the viability of remote work is, to me, pretty deceptive. In reality, what they were asking is, “How productive can we expect our workforce to be in a global or national crisis?” But to ask that would be crude, so instead they’ve attempted to pass some sort of judgement on remote work based on the last year.

If you started working from home in spring 2020, I would like to tell you with my full heart and full voice that your experience as a remote worker is in no way normal based on my experiences as a remote worker for the last decade-plus.

feminism & sharks

@messypixels

In case you need to hear this: the drop in productivity is not just about working from home/remotely versus going into an office.

I've been a remote employee for over a decade and these are not normal times we're living through.

03:53 AM - 16 Oct 2020

feminism & sharks

@messypixels

If you've only worked remotely since March, your experience has been 90% working through a pandemic* and 10% working remotely.

*TBH, a series of crises

03:53 AM - 16 Oct 2020

So, let’s break it down: how is working through a pandemic different than working remotely?

Overnight transition

Because this shift to remote work was in response to a health crisis, it was done with a speed that remains shocking:

Within just three weeks (mid-March to early April), the percentage of Americans working from home doubled from 31% to 62% as offices and schools shuttered to help curb the spread of COVID-19.

—Ellyn Maese and Lydia Saad, Gallup Panel Data (April 2020)

No question, this is how things needed to happen, but that speed also came at a cost.

In comparison, when Fractured Atlas was transitioning from a hybrid organization to a fully virtual one, we spent 6-8 months planning and discussing the transition—and that was with a significant number of employees already working remotely.

The speed of the current transition left many scrambling.

Employers had to figure out:

how to equip workers at home
ways to share information securely and asynchronously
how and where to hire folks going forward

Teams were required to do all the same work, but adapt to doing it remotely:

communicating and collaborating
supporting each other
maintaining team culture

Individuals needed to:

carve out “office” space in their homes, often a shared resource with the other adults they share the space with and/or kids who also suddenly needed remote classrooms
attempt to maintain work-life balance when the two were suddenly right on top of each other

Also, folks were doing all these things on short notice with zero idea of how long they would need these new arrangements for. So, yeah, some folks started out with low-effort solutions like working from the couch or kitchen table because maybe it was just going to be for a couple of weeks. But then, after the second month, maybe they saw the need to recalibrate or at least give themselves a deadline by which they’d want to sort out a better working situation. This means the transition was overnight, but also extended as folks understood their needs for a long-haul of working from home.

While none of these things are insurmountable—existing remote workers showed up quickly with articles and blog posts sharing their best practices—they’re also not trivial, especially in the midst of a global crisis and so many unknowns.

Intense levels of instability

In general, your workforce is always doing their jobs with some amount of background chatter or stress. Maybe it’s something low-grade like if they remembered to sign that permission slip this morning or what color to paint their bathroom. Sometimes it’s deep and personal stress, like waiting for the results of a health exam or caring for a chronically ill loved one. We usually get by and keep getting things done by most of us pushing aside the low-grade stuff during our 9-to-5 and coming together as a team to pick up the slack when one member is going through hard times.

In March 2020, we were all in the hard stuff and full of the unknowns together. So, while the TPS report might be open in one tab, the others were devoted to whether or not this COVID thing was serious and a whole section of our brains were locked up wondering if that cough we or a friend couldn’t shake over the last week was serious. As time went on, we switched our browser tabs to our local and national COVID dashboards; added stress about job insecurity, followed by gun violence and legislative assaults on trans folks; watched incidents of and reactions to police brutality and a violent insurrection attempt in the US Capitol.

Again, folks weren’t and aren’t distracted by working remotely specifically—or, if and when they are, that’s just as manageable as our standard level of distraction. They’re distracted because they’re working remotely through a pandemic and a series of other crises.

All Zoom, all the time

I’ve worked with teams that default to conference calls and those that default to video, and the latter are always better for me because of the addition of visual cues and identifiers for who is speaking. In general, I default to video on in my chats with colleagues and appreciate when they do the same.

Having said that, I’ve still struggled with Zoom fatigue this last year because the overwhelming majority of my interactions have been via video call, which was not at all the case prior to March 2020. While it was the primary way I interacted with my coworkers, it was not how I:

chatted with family and friends
networked or attended conferences
played games
went to happy hour

Last year, videoconferencing escaped the confines of my workday and became something I did regularly in the evenings and on weekends, too. This is certainly not the hardest thing about the pandemic (nor was Gwyneth Paltrow eating bread 🙄), but it had a cumulative effect.

Additionally, in the face of all the stress I outlined previously, one of the ways we process those things is in community—which likely puts you back on Zoom, once more.

Extra credit: You’re a parent

While all of the above is a lot , I’d be remiss to not include the experiences of folks who had to handle it all, plus the impact of their kids being home 24/7 and attempting online learning. My brother is older now, so this has not been part of my immediate 2020 experience, but I’ve watched friends, colleagues and students cope with this. While being a remote employee was initially a perk for me as a parent, my brother wasn’t home during the entirety of my working day; I had a set window when I knew I would redirect my energy and attention to him, his day and his homework.

If you started working remotely last year, that was likely not the case for you. Instead, you found yourself balancing being present for work meetings, troubleshooting your kid’s LMS and struggling harder than your wifi…and then had to do it all again, five days a week.

None of this is normal

So, to reiterate, none of this is representative of my past decade-plus of working remotely. Instead, these circumstances are unique to working through a pandemic, wrapped and interspersed with a series of other crises. If you started working remotely in March or April 2020, your successes and struggles this year are only very mildly attributable to working from home because there’s just so much damn else going on and impacting you.

Later this week, I’ll share details about what has worked for me doing my job remotely and how teams can do to improve the experience of working remotely together.

My journey to becoming a remote worker

Angelique — Mon, 10 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I have been working remotely since 2007. When I accepted that first work-from-home role, I didn’t expect it to be a lifestyle and was simply making a convenient choice:

My husband was already commuting over 40 miles one way for his job
We had a single car
We were raising my brother, who was about to start middle school

Working from home gave me the opportunity to be there when my brother got out of school and allowed us to avoid buying a second car. I got to be a homework helper and motivator and skip out on a commute: winning!

I left that role when my freelance web development work was taking off. Since I already had a functional home office, I didn’t see any benefit to letting an office or even joining a co-working space. And, then, when a client asked if I would join their team full-time, it was with the understanding that I would remain remote — their team was in Detroit and I was living in Baltimore. Again, a choice of convenience or practicality, but it was definitely this experience that made me realize I was actually committed to working remotely.

Like most remote workers, I was required to show up at the office on occasion—in this case, on a cadence of every 2-3 months. While I always enjoyed the face time with my team, I quickly realized how uncomfortable and unproductive most office spaces are. Meeting rooms, team lunches—all great! 👍🏻 Sitting in a cubicle or standing at a counter to code for hours on end—meh! 👎🏻

I realized that in my home office I had a far greater control over my focus and interruptions. In shared work spaces, even when wearing decent headphones, there’s the opportunity for a steady stream of distractions, especially in the dreaded open office floor plan.

When I started looking for my next role, I considered whether or not I wanted to limit myself to remote positions. As is usual for me, my consideration took the form factor of a pro/con list which quickly made me appreciate my remote life. In accounting for the time I saved not commuting and gained in spending more of my day with my husband, I finally accepted that I was all in, totally about that remote life.

Since that realization, I’ve made it a point to join teams that are already experienced with remote work and have invested in the tools to make remote workers successful. At Fractured Atlas, I used tools like Zoom, Slack and Mural for the first time professionally, all of which make remote collaboration significantly better. During my time on that team, the decision was made to transition the organization to fully virtual, which gave me the opportunity to share my decade-plus of experiences working from home in individual and group conversations and on the company blog.

At a time when more folks are working from home, as well as trying to figure out if they want to stick with this remote life, I thought it might be helpful to reflect on my experiences a bit. This is the first in a series of posts about working remotely. Later, I’ll share additional posts about:

Nevertheless, Angelique Coded 👩🏻‍💻

Angelique — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 14:43:53 +0000

In the late '80s and with very little fanfare, I wrote my first computer program. After pressing the pastel buttons on my Atari XEGS, I was faced with the blue-on-blue Atari BASIC screen. I followed a series of tutorials introducing the syntax and core programming concepts like variables, if-then and loops and eventually created a sequence of randomly placed and brighly colored lines on my TV screen. I was filled with a sense of wonder and possibility.

Photo by Adam Jenkins

I wasn't looking to be a computer programmer. The XEGS was in my bedroom along with an unconscionable number of Barbie dolls, ribbons from dog shows and a stack of books; it was another hobby, another toy. This context was helpful and, very likely, empowering. Gamergate was decades away, FAANGs were something in vampire stories, and I was just a pre-teen girl in her bedroom playing with colors on a screen.

While that moment didn't put me on a certain path to coding, it did make it feel like it was something possible, something in reach. As a result, computers remained an important part of my life. I went on to make friends in a variety of online worlds (Prodigy, local bulletin board systems, Sierra On-line's Imagination Network, AOL's Red Dragon Inn) and become a host of Teen Chat on America Online.

I was adept at using desktop publishing software and became editor of my high school's newspaper and poetry journal. From my freshman dorm, I discovered Geocities and published my first web page (and my first, but not last, "under construction" GIF 😹). As a journalism major, I was thrilled with the publishing possibilities the web offered.

While I'll never know how welcoming or not the comp sci department was on that campus, I was once again, safe in my bedroom, typing away on a keyboard and inventing new things--only this time I could share they with others far beyond my screen.

Tech and the web today are more beautiful and uglier than I imagined in the '80s or the 2000s. I've worked full-time as a developer since 2014 and have been teaching others to code since then as well. In the last handful of years, I've learned new JS frameworks, my first functional language and launched two design systems into production. In the last year, I had a hand in making our financial accounting courseware accessible to more students.

While I still savor technical challenges like these, I also feel my biggest impact is in teaching a new generation of front-end developers and in making the teams I work on better for all. In 2021, my focus isn't solely on what I code, but very much on what we can build together. By sharing the sense of wonder and possibility I've maintained, I also manage to grow it.

Migrating from Middleman to Eleventy

Angelique — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Before sharing some of the details and process I used to migrate this site from Middleman to Eleventy, I think it’s helpful to provide some context behind my choice.

First and foremost, there’s not a damn thing wrong with Middleman. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Honestly, working on Middleman had only gotten easier for me since I had been developing on Windows back when I started the site in 2015 and had since moved to a Macbook. While I was running on an out-of-date version of Middleman¹, I didn’t foresee problems updating the Middleman gem or the site.

Three things led me to redo things in Eleventy:

I had elected to use Eleventy in the advanced web development course I teach at MICA² and running my site on the same generator would give me more experience using and configuring Eleventy.
Eleventy is so awesomely flexible. While I was initially sold on the minimal configuration, with Eleventy that only means you don’t have to customize things, but you certainly can. The ability to use multiple templating languages, to use JavaScript for all sorts of logic, to work with data in a variety of formats–Eleventy is simple to set up, adaptable and powerful. It’s a great choice for what I’m doing now with the site and really anything I want to do in the future.
Community – I find the creator (@ZachLeat) to be a stand-up dude (see, for example, his enthusiasm when I tweeted about teaching with Eleventy) and the community around Eleventy to be friendly and encouraging.

Setting up Eleventy #

Because I thought I might want to archive the previous version of the site (this migration also included a redesign), I opted to create a new GitHub repo for the blog. I’m not precious about my git history, so this was an easy choice for me to make.

After creating a new repo, I copied the Eleventy base blog template for the basic structure.

At this point, I copied over the content from my existing blog and started troubleshooting what was broken or wonky.

Content tweaks #

I updated all my filenames to use a .md extension instead of .html.markdown and removed the date from the filename; this was an expectation of Middleman’s blogging, but always struck me as ugly and wonky.
I updated my front matter to remove the time because it wasn’t in a format that Eleventy was parsing (I got the time for free when creating new blog posts via the Middleman CLI, but didn’t use it in my UI) and to add square brackets around my tags.
My actual Markdown content required two updates. First, I had to change the way code blocks were identified (Middleman uses tildas and I needed to change that to the ` symbol. Also, Middleman let me get away with not having a space in my markdown headings (e.g., ##A second-level heading), but Eleventy had issues with this, so I added the space everywhere.

Once I identified issues, these updates were easy to make in bulk via the command line (for filenames) or the search and replace UI in VS Code.

Additionally, I had missed that I was using some Markdown plugins and sorted out how to add and configure those in Eleventy.

Finally, Middleman allowed me to write draft posts and identify them by adding published: false to the post’s front matter. This doesn’t work the same way in Eleventy, so I moved this content instead to a _drafts folder and added that to my .eleventyignore file. At this point, it was also important to clean my build folder and restart my server to make sure draft content wasn’t showing up on the site.

Build changes #

One of the things Eleventy gives me more control over is my asset and build pipeline. While Sass compiled ✨automagically✨ with Middleman, this is not the case with Eleventy. Configuring this is not my favorite part of web development, so I mostly wanted a build process that was as straightforward as possible. So, uh, no webpack. I opted to use Parcel (since I was already succesfully using it on a work project), but expect there’s lots of cleanup and/or optimization I can do here. I may also try out Snowpack at some point in the future since I’ve heard good things.

Finally, actually deploying/publishing my Middleman blog had been a fairly wonky, almost embarrassing process³ where I built the site locally and then used the command line to push the static output to my web server. Just wholesale copying over the whole directory. I did it infrequently enough that it always felt fraught and required several “notes to self.” I knew there were other options, like hosting on S3 and having a pipeline based on merging into my git repo, but hadn’t gotten beyond the research stage about how to do that (well, and tweeting about it and soliciting help from my great pals).

As my redesign was nearly complete, I explored deploying the site using Vercel and damn if it isn’t simple and great. Other than adding my domain name (and sorting out my mail servers), I’ve had to do zero customization there – it just works. After I merge changes into my main branch on GitHub, the site is live in about a minute. Legit, I used to spend more time than that verifying my old command line process. 🙀

Wrapping up #

There was a lot more involved in redesigning the site, tweaking Eleventy and using Nunjucks templating, but at this point in my process I had successfully migrated my content from Middleman to Eleventy. 🙌🏻 For the redesign, it’s worth mentioning that I relied heavily onNunjucks documentation, 11ty Recipes and Andy Bell’s Learn Eleventy From Scratch course.

Lessons learned hiring in tech

Angelique — Sun, 07 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Since my team is currently hiring, how we go about hiring for tech roles is very much on my mind right now. I’ve participated in hiring on three different teams now (on both sides of the hiring equation), and my own thinking and process has evolved.

Designing an interview gauntlet

On my first team, I transitioned from being a freelance contractor to a full-time hire and never experienced their interview process. So, when I was asked to hire additional front-end talent, I was a bit overwhelmed with the task. I had heard of the whiteboard interviews that are common in tech (and were used by the back-end team), but that activity seemed so far removed from the daily job as to be meaningless. While I’m proud of that choice, I also admit that my sense of what was useful to ask in an interview was still pretty underdeveloped. Desparate for guidance, much of the process I used was informed by a CSS-Tricks article on front-end interviews.

Looking back over these interview questions, I see now that they focus mainly on testing a candidate’s knowledge and tactics:

Name 3 ways to decrease page load (perceived or actual load time).
Let’s say you start a new project right now –- what solution would you choose for adding custom icons to the project?
What CSS units do you commonly use?
List as many values for the display property that you can remember. (This one really makes me wince now.)

After enduring a gauntlet of quiz questions, candidates were invited to an in-person interview which included more quiz-style questions and a coding activity, also cribbed from the CSS-Tricks article. We provided candidates the image below and a set amount of time to recreate the button in CodePen (with explicit free reign to search the web for anything they normally would look up):

Exercise: Recreate this button using only CSS.

While I wouldn’t be keen to use this activity now, it was relevant to the job at hand, where both being able to spot important details in comps and recreate them with pixel-perfect precision was a requirement. It definitely tested candidates and even enraged one who, after twenty minutes, glared directly at me and then my boss and said, “It’s not like she could do this either.”

The candidate was wrong (I had timed myself recreating the button), but I didn’t feel good about pushing someone to that point of frustration and definitely felt the interview process could be improved. We eventually replaced this specific activity with recreating a nav element that existed in one of our products – it had similar complexity to the button, but it was spread out over more elements and somehow didn’t feel as grueling.

Lessons learned

Anything I ask a candidate to do during the interview should have immediate relevance to what the job asks of them. Essentially, no whiteboarding; if you ask a candidate to write code, they should be able to do so in a familiar code editor with the tooling they’re accustomed to.
Avoid questions that can and should be resolved with a web search or a visit to MDN. Knowing stuff is definitely important to the job, but outright quizzing candidates isn’t as revealing as one might hope and adds extra stress into an already fraught process.
Tricky “gotcha questions” don’t feel good as a candidate or as an interviewer.

A better understanding of the interview process

Interviewing for my next role, I had my first experience of being on the other side of an interview activity. After two screening interviews, I did a series of remote interviews and was given a timed activity. I was given a problem spec sheet that outlined a variety of information that might be included on an organization’s profile and asked to design wireframes for two different organizations, showing how I would handle the competing needs of the information.

While it was not explicit that this would be a coding exercise, I work faster in HTML and familiar CSS frameworks than I do in programs like Figma or Sketch, so I created two HTML documents using a combination of the Skeleton CSS framework, jQuery and PlaceIMG:

One of two wireframes I presented.

I wrote just under 100 lines of HTML, 125 lines of Sass and 40 lines of JS in the allotted time, which seems like a miniscule effort in comparison to some of the take-home activities assigned to candidates these days. However, the hiring committee wasn’t expecting any code at all, so presenting a wireframe that had animations and hover effects definitely made me stand out.

More importantly, while some of the interview questions I was asked did touch on my opinions about tech topics, the vast majority of the questions were about how I approached problem solving overall and how I collaborated with others. The interview, as a result, felt more like a conversation than a quiz.

After being hired, I participated in the hiring process for coworkers both on and off the dev team and gained new appreciation for how this thoughtful process came to be. As a member of hiring committees, I was asked to take implicit association tests to understand my unconcious biases and also given rubrics by which to grade candidates, helping us keep the important criteria for the role front of mind and providing some quantitative data to a process that can be ruled—disasterously so—by instinct.

Lessons learned

Good hiring processes come out of very thoughtful consideration about the outcomes you want and the things that might get in the way of those outcomes. For example:
- For many folks participating in the hiring process, it’s on top of their normal job, so providing guidance is necessary to steer things in the right direction.
- Bias has the potential to affect every stage of a hiring process. Deal with that head on vs pretending otherwise.
Hiring conversations should feel exactly like that—conversations—and not oral exams.
Bonus lesson: Avoid asking candidates to solve design problems your team is currently working on. While the activity presented to me in my interview for this job wasn’t a source of frustration at the time, I soon learned that it was something that was in the upcoming work queue for the team. In retrospect, I would avoid interview problems like this because it’s entirely possible to create a conflict where you don’t hire the candidate with the best solution (for a variety of valid reasons). If you go forward using anything suggested or created by an un-hired candidate during the interview process, you’ve essentially gotten free work out of them. Better to avoid this possibility alltogether.

My best, current thinking on hiring

For my current role, I had an informal conversation with the hiring manager followed by an all-day on-site interview with members of the dev team and the organization overall, including the CEO. The phone screen felt like a conversation, while the team interview clearly worked from a script of questions. Additionally, a couple of days before the on-site, I was presented with a JavaScript code sample and a matching test, and asked to review the code and be prepared to discuss it. The email introducing this code included this note, which I found to be a great display of kindness:

Please don’t overanalyze the code too much - we’re not here to ask trick questions, but to instead engage with you as you read this code and share thoughts about it.

It’s rare for anything in an interview process to put candidates at ease— but this did it for me. I probably read this sentence ten times before my interview. I remember it now, over a year later. Not only did it make me feel comfortable with the code review, it made me excited to meet the people at the other end of the email who were invested in treating candidates so kindly.

I’m currently doing my first round of hiring for Lumen’s front-end team and am grateful for my years of experience—hiring and as a candidate—that have informed this process. I’m building onto a process that has been updated since I was hired and hope my changes improve the process for candidates and, assuming we make a successful hire, are adopted by the rest of the team.

Things I’ve added to our process:

Inspired by our VP of Product who included specific references to Lumen’s company values of commitment, openness, generosity and creativity in a recent job description, I’ve done the same for our engineering team (see the job description). Being successful at Lumen means being invested in those values and our educational mission.
Created documentation about the process for the hiring committee and others involved in the hiring process. This provides a consolidated, shared resource for everyone and also allows me to remind folks of the importance of hiring. It’s easy for it to feel like an add-on, an extra ask on your work day, but I truly believe it’s some of the most important work we’ll do this month.
Requirement for all involved in the hiring process to complete a handful of implicit association tests and read two articles, one about the downsides of hiring for “culture fit” and examples of unconcious bias in hiring.
Added a request for a candidate’s pronouns before the first interview. This prevents interviewers from doing any guesswork and hopefully signals to candidates that we care about having a respectful working relationship.
Instead of scouring online lists of “front-end interview questions,” as I did in my first hiring role, I’ve taken inspiration from how our learning team thinks about assessments. Before writing exam questions, first there’s an understanding of the learning outcomes of the chapter. So, I got clear about what I want to learn about a candidate at each stage of our interview process and created a document with those headings. Only after I knew what knowledge I was after did I look at our existing interview questions, selecting those that help us learn those things or drafting new questions/discusion points when none of the existing questions proved useful to my goals.
We’ve adapted the original code conversation to instead be a take-home code review exercise and, for this search, I updated that to have a front-end component. Additionally, I added some more specific prompts and questions as part of the code review to better understand a candidate’s previous experience with code review.
Provide a rubric/scale for evaluation from the hiring committee, in addition to our more standard conversational evaluation. My goal here is to prevent the hiring committee from being too swayed by who speaks first or a good candidate from being skipped over because of bias.

Lessons learned

This process is ongoing—as in, we’re currently conducting interviews—so it’s too early to sum things up in a tidy bow. However, two things stand out to me at this point:

Like so many other things, the hiring process is iterative. I’m learning things all the time, which allows me to refine and improve whatever my current best guess about how to do this. You also get to a better result faster if you get insight from more folks. Listen to your team if they say they would be put off by a question or request or express that they wouldn’t be succeed at your activity; none of these are good signs.
Know your WHY. Why are we asking this question? What do we want to learn? Also: Why are we asking for pronouns? Why do we need to do this bias exercise? I haven’t been asked these questions in our current process, but I’m prepared for them—most specifically because I didn’t ask for permission for these changes to our process, I just implemented them.

And that really touches on part of why I think hiring is so important. It’s not just adding new team members, it’s also a moment for the current team to reflect on about what they value, what the team culture is—to celebrate that and to make adjustments. Especially on the smaller teams I love to lead and work on, hiring has a huge impact on all of us, which is why I spend so much time thinking about it…and, now, writing about it.

Leading with humanity

Angelique — Sun, 24 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

On January 6, like so many other Americans, I watched a scary and violent thing unfold in our nation’s Capitol. Because I watched things happening in real time on my screen—on the PBS News Hour livestream, but also in people’s responses in Twitter and various community Slacks—I was aware that, in addition to the immediate stressful events, there was also an undercurrent of “How am I supposed to work through this?”

This extra layer of anxiety as people watched dramatic events unfold was particularly frustrating to me because it suggests organizations and teams struggling with humane leadership—which I would have thought 2020 gave us ample opportunities to practice.

That night, after the Capitol had been reclaimed but before the final electoral votes had been tallied, I tweeted out:¹

feminism & sharks

@messypixels

If you're a developer/work in tech, based in the US, and your company leadership or manager acknowledged today's events (more specifically: gave you time off!), pls reply or DM me.

I want to know which teams to recommend to folks going forward.

01:30 AM - 07 Jan 2021

I wasn’t prepared for the deluge of info that came my way, but was heartened to hear so many stories from folks who felt cared for by their managers, who were inspired by their leadership’s clear and thoughtful responses. Not everyone was doing business as usual, and I needed that kind of good news to buoy me.

Over the next several days, I gathered up the details as they were shared and tweets and DMs, hearing about the responses from over 200 companies and have published a full list of the info I received here.

see the data

Some notes about this data #

This is not meant to be a list of Good Companies™️. This list is not definitive proof that these companies are good places to work now or in the future.

So, what is this then? This is, specifically, a list of companies where an employee felt treated humanely enough on January 6th to reach out to me and let me know about it.

To me, that is a data point. It is interesting and worthwhile, but it also shouldn’t be overstated. It’s one employee’s experience at a very specific time. In some (most?) cases, the company leadership may not have even made any statement, but an individual’s manager or team lead did.

How to use this data if… #

You’re looking for your next team #

If you’re job hunting, I’ve added a filter for if the company is currently hiring (again, data valid as of this blog post) and a link to their current openings. There is also this separate view of that data filtered to companies that are currently hiring. (You’re welcome. Searching for your next job is grueling, so I hope this gives you a little help.)

Additionally, when you’re interviewing with any team, ask what management and leadership did to respond on January 6th. Ask what accommodations they’ve offered as employees have transitioned to working from home due to COVID. Ask what the organization’s commitment is to racial justice (as well as how that is being tracked!) and if Juneteenth is a company holiday.

More resources #

Maria Campbell also has a great blog post about finding safe places to work
Looking for more great interview questions? Check out this list by Julia Evans.
{key : values } gives you the ability to sort on companies based on their stated values.

You’re a team lead or manager #

Did your company respond humanely to the events of January 6th? What about the BLM protests of May 2020? If you can’t answer “hell yes!” then accept that you have work to do. (No one ever says “hell maybe!”)

Start having conversations with your company’s leadership and your peers about how to do better. Ask why no one said anything during those events and if that silence is in line with your company values. Ask your direct reports about what would help them. Ask them to be specific and then let them know when you’ll be able to report back about outcomes. Let them know you want them to hold you accountable.

Also, note that suggesting PTO and sharing resources—the very metrics I use in my data—are meant to be a baseline, not a goal post. Telling folks they can take time off, but not letting them know that deadlines and other obligations will flex accordingly isn’t really helping.

Mariya I. Vasileva

@mariyaivasileva

All companies five days after attempted coup.

“We know the last few days have been difficult. We value the well-being of our employees above all else. Please attend our virtual wellness workshop to learn how we can help you stay productive.” twitter.com/lizthegrey/sta…

03:00 AM - 07 Jan 2021

Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) @lizthegrey
So, has your company's leadership made any kind of statement about the coup to employees or not?

Also, ask yourself: Do I need permission to speak up about this? I had been in my current role for less than a year when I started sharing antiracist reads and my Juneteenth donations in a company channel. These weren’t common or comfortable conversations, but who am I waiting for to get us to a better place? What am I willing to risk to make lives better for the people I care for?

feminism & sharks

@messypixels

An additional challenge for fellow white folks:
Yes, learn _and_ act.

One thing for #Juneteenth: I'm donating my salary for the day between Assata's Daughters and my local bail fund (links below). twitter.com/KingCurryThund…

14:19 PM - 19 Jun 2020

Manveer Heir @KingCurryThundr
I hope all the white people who have #Juneteenth off for the first time and only learned about this holiday in the past couple weeks take time to reflect why you didn’t know about this until now

More resources #

Lara Hogan has an entire section on her blog about leading through crises
The articles and talks at LeadDev are top notch and many cover subjects relevant to this post

In closing #

We need more folks who are leading with their heart, not just during a pandemic and a coup, but for all times. Companies and leaders love to say that their teams are like a family, but then your boss wants your updated TPS reports when a damn coup is going down.

Companies do not have be like families to be run and organized as if they depend on human beings. I implore you to look at your current organization, your current team and think about what could be improved in this regard to make your work together more humane.

Finally, extra special thanks to everyone who replied to my tweet, publicly or privately, for making this list possible. Let your team leads, managers and CEOs know what they did right this month.

I wasn't the only thinking about this. Liz Fong-Jones created a Twitter poll with disappointing results and Dr. Nneka D. Dennie asked a similar question about universities.