DEV Community: Devtendo, Inc

Show Dev.to users: We made a meeting companion app on macOS to improve remote meetings

Devtendo, Inc — Sat, 05 Sep 2020 16:49:30 +0000

The goal is simple. Help highlight important stuff on the screen during presentations and remote sessions. Drawing on the screen and zooming any text should be easy-peasy.

Quick video link:
https://www.dropbox.com/h?preview=MeetingNinja-Intro.mp4

AppStore Link:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/meetingninja/id1527536623?mt=12

Devtendo Pro is now free for Open Source Projects

Devtendo, Inc — Fri, 24 Jan 2020 08:01:49 +0000

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/devtendo/id1488872267?ls=1&mt=12

If you login using Github, and have open source project contributions, you will be automatically upgraded to the Pro version.

Synchronous Communication is killing productivity in silicon valley

Devtendo, Inc — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 08:55:52 +0000

Paul Graham beautifully articulates why meetings kill productivity for people in the "maker's schedule":

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.

Meetings and Video calls are great for tasks that require instant decisions. However, most meetings in large companies can be replaced by effective documentation, well-written emails or small visual clips. Traditional communication tools are increasing company wide anxiety quotient -- How many times do you check your email? How many meetings are on your calendar? How much time do you waste to answer repeated questions? Real-time messaging is for quick updates; as the team grows, it invariably becomes chaotic and shallow. Is your real-time messaging tool preserving history or making it easy to track new tasks or old decisions? How many messages have you missed on Slack today?

Silicon Valley and the culture of having meetings from morning to evening is the top reason why startups have stopped innovating. We are not producing disruptive technologies -- incremental progress and the useless social software decade has pushed US back in the innovation spectrum.
Asynchronous collaboration at workplace = Happier and Productive Employees!

Async communication is necessary for modern distributed teams. It focuses on making sure that a collaborative task is executed without a lot of meetings. Please do not send one-liner emails or a slack message to report product issues. Create a video clip and highlight the exact issue with all the details on internal tools to avoid back and forth with your team.

Here are some instances where async communication tools are required in favor of synchronous messaging:

CEO to HR: "Can we answer 80% of the new-hire questions with already recorded screen-clips, videos, and effective documentation?"

Developer to QA: "Can you please share the exact steps to reproduce the problem? I don't see it on my machine"

Product Manager to Developer: "Can you please explain how to use the new feature. The documentation is not clear"

VP Sales to Customer Success: "Can you jump on a call to understand the customer escalation. Please document all the details and open a ticket"

Developer to Offshore team: "Can you upload the screen clip for every failed test case for the new feature?"

Sales to SE: "Can we send the customer a video clip of the new feature he requested last month?"

While there is no doubt that remote teams will build the future of software, I feel that asynchronous communication is also an important factor in team productivity, whether your team is remote or not. If you are replying to every email and slack message right away, how will you get time to "produce" software?

Time is a zero-sum game. Once you realize and respect the scarcity of time, you'd be more productive!

Check out our product that promotes more asynchronous communication using videos.

Use-cases of Visual Communication for Software Professionals

Devtendo, Inc — Mon, 20 Jan 2020 17:49:18 +0000

Executive Communication

Don't write long weekly emails to the team. Send them quick (video) updates on how the company is doing. How was the customer trip? How is the quarter looking? Are we going to meet our OKRs?

Explain features and capture product demos

Goal-1 for every software team is producing good software. No discussion required.

However, most teams don't understand that good software also means clear, concise and delightful documentation. New features need explanation and text-heavy docs are not always desirable.

Improve the quality of your product with better bug reports

Most companies don't have stringent policies on bug reporting. With distributed and modern offshore teams, the information required by the developer to root cause the reported bug may not be available for another 12 hours, so the developer will make assumptions and go on with his business, wasting precious company time.

What if a screenshot or a video of every "critical" bug is mandatory?

What are the steps required to reproduce the problem?

Every test machine should have a script to capture all the environmental details and logs before the bug is submitted. Just like the focus on business culture, engineering culture is developed by actions and not by guidelines parked on a wiki page. Just look at a bug report filed by your Team Lead/Architect or VP Engineering to gauge your company's engineering culture.

A training video to explain how the feature works can be shared with the internal team right after feature-complete during the development cycle. Product demo videos are super helpful for customers and can be published once the feature is shipped. A lot of back and forth emails and meetings are required for knowledge transfer and troubleshooting if the feature or product documentation is lacking clarity. Quick video generation and publishing will transform how your engineering teams communicate with the rest of the organization IOHO. Customer on-boarding videos are a must-have for every progressive software company.

Improve knowledge base

If you are executing well, your team will grow quickly and new hires will need the information to get started. Do you have an internal knowledge base to answer 80% of the questions expected by a new hire? Documenting workflows and key training videos is as important as providing nice and shiny gear to your new hire.

Improve new hire on-boarding with training videos

Communicate faster with your team. Avoid meetings for every discussion

This one is simple. Just observe your calendar for the past few weeks and look at the number of meetings that could have been simple video updates and asynchronous email conversations.

Don't encourage meetings when emails + videos will suffice

Improve customer success and support functions

How do you capture the issue reported by a customer? Is it always possible to understand what the customer reported using a small text email? Our customers make screen capture process an integral part of the workflow so that all the information can be captured in one call before the issue is escalated to the engineering team.

Remember that asking the customer to try out 10 different things when he files a bug is not going to result in a long-term happy customer.

Customer success increases your brand loyalty

Design Reviews

Record every important meeting and design review conducted by your team. How many times have you got into a discussion where someone forgot what was concluded in a previous design review meeting?

Weekly Newsletter covering Developer Productivity

Devtendo, Inc — Thu, 05 Dec 2019 09:50:10 +0000

https://devtendo.substack.com/

Building and supporting software does not require you to be in the office every day. Companies like GitLab, Digital Ocean, CircleCI, InVision, and Stripe have realized that remote work gives them a recruiting and productivity advantage over the competition.

We are witnessing a big cultural shift - remote work is going mainstream for engineers in the "maker's schedule"

Meetings and Video calls are great for tasks that require instant decisions, but not for everything else

Devtendo, Inc — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 05:16:59 +0000

Would love to get thoughts on this messaging from folks here at Dev.to?

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.

Asynchronous collaboration at
workplace = Happier and Productive Employees!

Here are some instances where async communication tools are going to be useful for your organization:

CEO to HR: "Can we answer 80% of the new-hire questions with already recorded screen-clips, videos and effective documentation?"

Developer to QA: "Can you please share the exact steps to reproduce the problem? I don't see it on my machine"

Product Manager to Developer: "Can you please explain how to use the new feature. The documentation is not clear"

VP Sales to Customer Success: "Can you jump on a call to understand the customer escalation. Please document all the details before you open a ticket"

Developer to Offshore team: "Can you upload the screen clip for every failed test case for the new feature?"

Sales to SE: "Can we send the customer a video clip of the new feature he requested last month?"

What's your favorite async communication tool? Is it still email or something more modern?

The quintessential remote developer

Devtendo, Inc — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 04:12:21 +0000

We are witnessing a big cultural shift - remote work is going mainstream for engineers in the "maker's schedule"

https://www.devtendo.com/post/the-quintessential-remote-developer

7 tips to improve productivity in your maker's schedule

Devtendo, Inc — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 04:23:17 +0000

Our team looked up and discussed all the gyaan available on the internet. Here are the top 7 tips:

Block time on the calendar to "build" - every slot should be at-least 120 minutes long. If you are going into meetings every 60 min, you will not be able to "produce" much. It takes some time to get into flow and reach peak productivity.

Do not check email or leave your slack application open during the "build" phase(s) of your day.

Don't check your phone. If something is super important, people will call you.

Always write down what you want to achieve during the day - it helps you to visualize what you want to do during your "build" slots of the day.

Focus on the tasks that you can finish in your "build" phase. Do not work on open-ended tasks. Divide big tasks into small consumable chunks that you can finish in a few hours. Time box it if you want to be productive.

Take breaks. Learn how to "recharge" your batteries. Every person is different - a walk, a shower, time with loved ones, exercise, books, movies, or even some twitter time can help you relax between your "build" slots.

Grade your performance at the end of the day. Write down what you did well. Think about what can be improved.

Also posted here:
https://www.devtendo.com/post/brainstorm-productivity

Do you have any special hacks?

SHOWnTELL: Asynchronous Communication using video clips #productivity

Devtendo, Inc — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 04:14:03 +0000

Imagine the last 60 min of your screen recording always available. As a developer, I've always been frustrated with recording screen to post clips on bug reports, or highlight the gaps in product specs, or dealing with customer escalations without a visual way of understanding the symptoms.

If there is a utility that captures and keeps the last 60 min of screen activity in a buffer, wouldn't it to super cool to just clip and publish something you saw on the screen. What if the buffer is available in the form of a software tool that sits in your menu bar?

"Send last 2 min of screen recording" to JIRA Issue xxxyy. One-click and done. That's the goal of Devtendo.

I'm happy to announce that we are in beta now.

Check out:
www.devtendo.com