DEV Community: Elise Gaetz Ferguson

Crowtail NodeMCU IOT Kit for Christmas

Elise Gaetz Ferguson — Mon, 28 Dec 2020 15:27:43 +0000

The big kid got an IOT kit for Christmas. He's obsessed with electronics so we thought this would be a fun experiment. So far it's proven to be a bit tricky. I'm going to document our progress here since I haven't found a great resource yet to help us.

Out of the box it seems like either we're missing some parts (based on photos I've found) or we have some updated version of the kit. The first lesson is an LED but we don't have the basic LED module that is displayed in the manual.
There wasn't a manual with the kit so I had to dig around on the product page to find one and print out. It appears to be loosely translated from another language into English.
We downloaded the LUALoader app and installed that on a very inexpensive Windows laptop that the kids use. After fighting a bit with the first step in the manual of connecting to a port I was finally able to get it working by changing to an Admin user on the computer and rebooting. I'm not certain how to know which COM port to use but when I rebooted a COM3 showed up (previously only COM2 and COM4 appeared) so when I picked that it connected.
So far we haven't gotten the LED that we did have in the kit to light up as indicated in the first lesson. Now looking at the photo of the product from the Elecrow website, it doesn't show the yellow LED I tried, so maybe I will try the red or green and see if that makes a difference.

Stay tuned. :)

WCAG Accessibility Guidelines and Tools

Elise Gaetz Ferguson — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 18:16:50 +0000

WCAG guidelines for web accessibility from the W3C

I’ve been working on compiling some information for my company about accessibility, testing, compliance, etc. In the process I was looking for a cross reference of which automated tools checked which specific guidelines. Being as at most automated tools can only cover about 25% of accessibility issues on a website I wanted to know which guidelines might need manual attention.

Seems like a pretty obvious request? At least I thought so. But even with my mostly “OK” google-fu I did not find what I was looking for. So I ended up creating my own.

Of course this isn’t a definitive guide. I only have a handful of tools listed. Basically I found the listing for each of the tools and slapped it on a spreadsheet. So this should be fairly accurate at least according to what each automation tool says they check. Your mileage may vary of course. You should be able to do some filtering by various columns to make this data useful to whatever project you’re working on.

Google spreadsheet

So give it a try and let me know if this was at all helpful in your accessibility adventures!

Craft Troubleshooting Round Up

Elise Gaetz Ferguson — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 19:27:31 +0000

So my new mantra is that if something takes me more than a few minutes and a google search to solve, then someone else out there might benefit from me posting the results of my troubleshooting. These things typically aren’t big enough for individual blog posts so they’ve been going on my personal Instagram so far. But I will round them up here for your benefit, lucky you!

Honeypot field in Craft CMS Freeform Forms

I was working on accessibility for a site that was using Craftcms Forms plugin. I’ve submitted this to Solspace and they’ll be updating it in a future release but until then …

Basically the form was not passing accessibility checks for the honeypot field and needed a tabindex of -1 added. So line 632 or so in the plugin I’ve added the code shown below and bam, we pass the accessibility tests.

When “entry” doesn’t exist on the homepage

Occasionally when we run some of the Craft CMS updates the homepage there’s an “entry does not exist” error. Depending on the update some of the settings on the homepage section may have changed and require some attention. In this case, we just needed to recheck the “home” icon in the site settings.

Solspace Calendar not showing repeat toggle

Finally, I had a request to add the ability to repeat an event using Solspace Calendar plugin. Well, what’s going on here? I have other sites using the same plugin that allow repeating events, why isn’t this one? Well, we had just run the latest update that included a new “lite” version of the plugin. Apparently the lite version does not include the repeat toggle so we just need to go into our plugin page and switch from the “lite” version back to our “pro” version that matches our license key.

Well I hope some of these things help you out! Stay tuned, there’s bound to be more troubleshooting around here.

Baby Steps into Adobe XD for Front End Development

Elise Gaetz Ferguson — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 13:01:02 +0000

The last big site I developed was designed by a new designer on our team. And when someone new joins the team that means new ideas. So we gave Adobe XD a try instead of the old standard, Photoshop. Of course as it usually goes in development, there wasn’t time for any official training so it was baptism by fire. Who am I kidding? That’s how we learn best, right?

Welcome to Adobe XD one baby step at a time

So this is just barely scratching the surface of using XD for front end development. We haven’t even begun to get into components and libraries and all that good stuff. Let’s see what baby steps I discovered while working on this site.

Selecting Graphics — If you drag the mouse and draw a marquee you can select the graphic you are interested in exporting. If there’s more than one layer on this graphic that needs to be exported, group these items together with Command-G or from the menu, Object > Group.

Once the graphic is selected and grouped then we can export it with the menu option of File > Export > Selected or Command-E. The export dialog gives you a variety of file types and qualities for export.

To create a spec sheet in the browser

Share for Development — This is a useful tool. If you go to the upper right of the XD window and select the “Share” button and choose “Share for Development” XD will generate a webpage, with or without exported images, that has all sorts of good information.

Click the “code” icon to reveal all sorts of good information

This spec sheet lists fonts, sizes, colors, and layout properties for all the elements that were on the XD file.

CSS layout properties

Simply select an object and the information will be displayed to the right.

Selecting a color block will automatically copy the Hex color to your clipboard. And selecting a font specification in the right pane will automatically copy the font information to your clipboard.

Measure Distances — Finally, XD makes it easy to measure the distance between objects.

While in the XD file itself: If you select an object, hold the “option” key, and move the mouse over another object, you will see the distance in pixels displayed.

While in the web spec sheet: Hover over an object and the relative distances will be displayed.

Measuring distance between objects

Like I said, I only just scratched the surface of how to use XD for Front End Development but I’m looking forward to learning more.

Trello Automations for Workflow

Elise Gaetz Ferguson — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 13:01:07 +0000

Now that 2/3rds of our development team is at least partially remote our white board of project status is a little less useful so we turn to Trello to help track what’s going on.

Our basic set up has lists for: projects/launch dates, backlog/waiting, a list for each developer, “in proof”, and completed. But the real fun comes with some automations.

Power Up — Custom Fields

We set up a few custom fields using the aptly named power up. The one we use the most is “completed date”. We’re frequently asked “hey, what did you guys do this week?” and being able to filter by the completed date is helpful for throwing together a quick report.

Power Up — Butler

If you have the ability to add multiple power ups, our next choice is Butler. You can do so many things with Butler.

Auto complete date (and remove complete date)

One of the Butler rules we have set up will automatically add the current date to the custom field “completed date” if someone moves a card to the Completed list. And conversely it will remove the completed date if that card is removed from the list.

Butler task to add a completed date

Butler task to remove the completed date

Auto assign card

The second automation we have set up will automatically assign a user to a card when it’s added to their list. If you have notifications set up, the users will get a reminder when a card is assigned to them.

Butler task to assign cards

We’re just getting started seeing what Butler can do for our Trello workflow and look forward to discovering more helpful automations.

New and Improved Trello Bullet Journal Workflow

Elise Gaetz Ferguson — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 18:59:41 +0000

Previously on “Trello bullet journal workflow” …

I had a process going using Trello to handle my weeklies when I decided it was just too much to do the paper bullet journal any more.

Well, I’ve been using that process for a while now and have made a few tweaks. The biggest addition being automations with the Power-ups.

I sprung for a Trello Gold subscription and it’s well worth it to be able to use more than one Power-up on a board. I’m currently using two on my personal boards: Calendar and Butler.

Building on my weeklies from my previous workflow post I found that I was doing a lot of repetitive actions that were just tedious. In comes Butler.

Board Buttons

Board buttons are buttons that are displayed at the top of your board and can be clicked any time to complete a task. One of the first ones I have set up is “ Archive Completed ”. On Monday’s when I set up my week I can archive all my completed cards with just a single button click.

Archive Completed Cards with one Board Button

A couple other buttons I have set up will create a few different cards that have my Monday tasks and some other tasks that I complete nearly every week. I have a “master card” set up for each of these tasks that contains a checklist of tasks. On Monday I can click my “ Monday Tasks ” button and Butler will copy that master card and place it in the appropriate list for the week. I just keep these master cards in my “Information List.”

Set up Monday Tasks

Master card for “Monday Tasks”

Automations

Additionally I have Butler marking tasks as “complete” and applying a certain label when the due date is complete. Then those cards are easily archived with my Archive button.

Butler automation for completed tasks

And because Google doesn’t seem to be importing tasks with actual due dates assigned I have anything that doesn’t have a due date marked with a specific label to make them easier to find and edit.

For items that don’t have due dates, add a label

Card Buttons

Another type of button is a card button. These are buttons that appear right on your cards.

Card button example

Right now I only have one card button and it’s for setting the card’s due date to “today.” That way I can set a due date to “today” easily without having to go through the calendar picker dialog.

Card button for due date

So just these few automations are enough to make my Monday set up a lot easier.

Displaying an RSS Feed in CraftCMS

Elise Gaetz Ferguson — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 15:45:30 +0000

CraftCMS doesn’t appear to have a built-in way to display RSS feeds and more often than not, clients want to display their recent or related blog posts on their main website.

The first thing we did to tackle this challenge was install the Craft RSS plugin by Guilty AS.

The GitHub page for the plugin has an example of how to display the RSS feed in your templates and it’s pretty straight forward.

{% set blogFeed = craft.rss.loadRss(“https://helgesverre.com/blog/feed") %}
{% if blogFeed %}
<h1>{{ blogFeed.title }}</h1>
<a href=”{{ blogFeed.link }}”>{{ blogFeed.link }}</a>
<ul>
{% for post in blogFeed.item %}
<li><a href=”{{ post.link }}”>{{ post.title }} — {{ post.pubDate }}</a></li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
{% endif %}

Just plug in your RSS Feed URL and off you go.

Naturally you’ll want to arrange the results of the feed in a way that best matches your site’s design.

You are might want to limit the number of posts you are showing. To do that we set a counter = 0 at the beginning of the block (line 2 below). Then before each “for post in blogFeed.item” loop we check if the counter is less than the number of posts we want to show (line 9). Right before the end of the loop then increment the counter with a +1 (line 17).

{% set blogFeed = craft.rss.loadRss(block.linkUrl) %}
{% set counter = 0 %}
{% if blogFeed %}
<h1>{{ blogFeed.title }}</h1>
<a href=”{{ blogFeed.link }}”>{{ blogFeed.link }}</a>
<ul>
{% if counter < 3 %}
{% for post in blogFeed.item %}
<li>
<a href=”{{ post.link }}”>{{ post.title }} — {{ post.pubDate }}</a><br/>
<span>{{ post.description | raw }}</span>
</li>
{% set counter = counter + 1 %}
{% endfor %}
{% endif %}
</ul>
{% endif %}

If you want to make this a little more flexible you could create a field in Craft to take in the URL of the blog feed, either per entry or as a global.

If you really want to get fancy you could create several different type of display options (card, list, etc) and let the user choose how they want to display the information.

ETA: I recently came back across this article while adding a feed to a client’s site. Turns out the code was a little incorrect and very annoying to not be able to copy and paste so I’m fixing those issues. You may also have to look at your feed directly to figure out what things you can pull in, in this example we had to pull in the full description as raw text rather than html in order to get the image and excerpt.

Trello Bullet Journal Workflow

Elise Gaetz Ferguson — Mon, 08 Jul 2019 14:40:22 +0000

I’ve been using a paper Bullet Journal for a few years now. After experimenting with a few layouts I settled on a weekly layout that I enjoyed the most. As I’m a person of habit I ended up making a generic weekly layout and had it printed in a book using Blurb. It ended up being quite affordable and saved me the time of drawing lines every week to get my layout set up.

But I kept finding myself not carrying it around with me, just leaving it on my desk. And if I was away from my desk and needed to “write something down” I would add it to my iPhone’s To Do list and then have to transfer it to my Bullet Journal. I really like putting some pen on paper but it was time to figure out something new.

I’ve also been using Trello for quite some time off and on and I took a look at some examples of how others had handled a “digital bullet journal” but it wasn’t quite what I needed so I made a few adjustments to fit my style.

In the “This Week” column I added card for each day of the week and put a color label on it to break apart the week visually. Update: I ended up creating a day of the week graphic and adding that as a cover image to more visually break up the layout.

My “Long Term” column is more for non dated to-do items and other random things.
My “Future” column is for next week and beyond cards. When I’m done with a current card but it recur in a week or two I update the due date - And my last change is the column for my “Google Calendar” entries. Using Zapier or IFTTT I pull in new items from my Google Calendar automatically and sort that column by due date.

Update: I also added a screen shot of my custom labels to more easily identify label colors. And for each IFTTT applet that imports events from each family member’s calendar I also assign an appropriate label.

My favorite addition so far — I’m using the free version of Trello so I can use one “Power Up” per board and for my bullet journal I’ve chosen to use the Calendar power up. This allows me to view my board in the “calendar view” which is nearly identical to what I’m used to seeing in my old paper weekly views.

Anything with a due date shows up in the calendar view on the appropriate day of the week. I can also add cards to particular days of the week in this view easily.

My final (so far) customization is a little more involved. I wanted anything I added to my iPhone Reminder (to do) list to get added to my Trello board. Unfortunately Zapier doesn’t appear to have anything that would connect my phone’s reminders to Trello, but IFTTT for iPhone can connect your Reminders to Trello. So I can continue using Siri to add reminders which will automatically get added to my Trello board as a new card.

And come to think of it, you could probably just use IFTTT for the Google Calendar > Trello connection as well if you wanted to stick with the least number of apps at a time. But it doesn’t look like with IFTTT you can directly assign a due date and if there is no due date on the card it won’t show up in the calendar view of Trello. You will have to assign it a date in Trello by hand if you are mainly looking at your weekly layout as a calendar. Not a huge deal if you are managing your journal and making sure you are getting things done.

Three Ways to Invigorate Your Development Career While Getting Some Sleep Once in a While

Elise Gaetz Ferguson — Mon, 08 Jul 2019 14:33:25 +0000

You just spent 8.5 hours working, probably had to do some house work, and you’ve wrestled a pile of kids into their PJs, managed 3 trips to the restroom and 4 drinks of water. Now you’re going to stay up until 1 a.m. working on personal projects and leveling up your dev skills, right?

If you’re anything like me the second the kids are in bed you drag yourself to bed. Brushing teeth and washing your face: purely optional. There’s no way you can stay awake and sit at the computer.
Don’t want to spend all your free time behind a computer?

It’s hard to keep up with the industry if you have a family and a household take care of. At the same time you’re working full time. Maybe you’re not a college student right out of school and don’t have time to code into the wee hours of the night, living and breathing code. So when do you find time to learn? How do you stay excited about your career in development?

Podcasts: One of my favorite options for leveling up is listening to podcasts. Either while working or in my case I enjoy listening to podcasts on my drive. I go into the office once every other week and it is a 90 minute drive so I’m able to listen to several development-based podcasts on the way to and from the office. I can sneak in another hour or so of listening while I mow the lawn. Even when I don’t have time to completely submerge myself in a certain tech, hearing interesting conversation about it keeps it fresh in my mind.

Networking: Even though I’m mainly a remote employee I do go into the office every other week. It’s nice to be able to see the people you work with and to enjoy some co-working time. An in-person lunch meeting with the people that you are used to chatting and emailing with online helps to energize.

Keep up on Slack with other developers in your company or even a network of previous coworkers and other developers when you aren’t able to meet in person. Keep the channels open to chat about new upcoming technologies and share links and ideas and troubleshoot problems.

Topic Lists: Keep a running list of keywords to search for the next time you have a few minutes either on your phone or on your desktop. I, for one, have a horrible memory so I keep a running list of buzz words and other thoughts that I want to do research on when I have time. Using a voice memo or Siri/Alexa/whatever comes in handy when my hands are not free.

I find that keeping up with some of the newer tech, even just being familiar with the latest and greatest, and networking with other like minded developers, is a good start to keeping me excited about my development career. I hope some of these ideas might help other developers, traditional or non.

The “mom stack” and how to juggle your kids and web development

Elise Gaetz Ferguson — Mon, 08 Jul 2019 14:30:38 +0000

When my third child was born I was working for a small company and did not have maternity leave. My husband had family leave for several weeks and when that time was up and he went back to work I decided to keep the baby home for a while before sending her to daycare with her brother. As a Web Developer that works from home almost exclusively I occasionally have a kid or two (or three) home if school or daycare is out for the day. In addition, my husband works out of town 3 days/2 nights a week. Things can get a little chaotic around here to say the least.
The Juggling Act in Action

The Stack

So how can a “developer mom” manage all the things? Here’s a few tools I keep in my “mom stack.”

Laptop — this one is pretty obvious. Sometimes you need to code from the couch with a sick kid, or at bedtime when the baby is nursing down for the night.

Boppy/nursing pillow — if you’re working with a small baby, a boppy style pillow can be a life saver. During the day if I’m working at my desk, the boppy’s on my lap and the baby on top of that nursing or napping. At night when I’m nursing the baby down and I want to get a few extra minutes of coding in, I can prop up my laptop in bed next to me with the boppy on my lap.

Standing desk and wraps/baby carriers — if you have a baby you’re well aware that sometimes sitting is the last thing your baby wants you to do. I have an Ergotron Workfit sit and stand workstation so I can work while I stand (a handy purchase because of an old back injury). A standing desk combined with a woven wrap or any other type of baby carrier can buy you some extra coding time even when the small person in your life doesn’t allow sitting.

Split keyboard — in an unrelated search for an ergo keyboard for my mac I came across the Kinesis Freestyle. It’s available with a longer cord that connects the two sides which would allow you to type around a baby/kid on your lap if you were so inclined.

Wireless/bluetooth headset — baby’s love cords. If you ever need to jump on a Skype call or want to listen to music while you work, wireless is the way to go when there’s little grabby hands around. It also allows you to get up and walk the baby without being tied to the computer.

Bouncy chair — when you do get the kiddo to nap, a strategically placed bouncy chair (or rock and play) next to your desk that you can rock/bounce with your foot will free up your arms/lap for a while.

Pack and Play — a play yard/pack and play/play pen is useful if your little one likes to wander away and you are tired of leaving your work to chase her down. Another fun option is an exersaucer/go-pod/johnny jumper.

Reaching tool — seriously, you know as soon as the baby falls asleep on your lap you’ll drop your wireless mouse or your cell phone.

Pumping Station — this one is useful for when your kids aren’t around. I have a small table set up next to my desk for hold my breast pump, it saves a lot of time to leave it set up and ready to use. Not to mention when you work from home you can pump while you work instead of lugging everything to a mother’s room. The little table I use can double as a desk for an older kid who wants to “help”. Set them up with an iPad or an activity book and they can work away next to you for as long as their attention span allows.

Entertainment — I have a pile of toys next to my desk for tummy time/play time: some books, toy laptop, a mirror, etc. Sometimes the baby likes to play with an old keyboard and mouse or a television remote I have laying around. You can squeeze out some additional independent play time from a baby when you give them something they usually aren’t supposed to have, mommy’s “toys” are way more fun.

I ended up keeping the baby home for 6 months while I worked full time. Around 5 months she started getting more mobile and more interested in being entertained by me. And that was about the time she started trying to kick my keyboard off my desk while she nursed or trying to participate in my typing. So she is at daycare full time now with her older brother. But we still code together if she happens to be home with me off and on.

Set up Gulp to do “all the things” for your front end

Elise Gaetz Ferguson — Wed, 19 Jun 2019 13:01:01 +0000

Recently I set out to see if I could get gulp to do all my front end “things” for me automatically. I had previously been using the VSCode task runner to transpile my scss or less files. But occasionally I’d run into issues on sites where another developer (or even myself at a previous time) had forgotten we were using a pre-processor and edited the main CSS file instead. And then we just end up with a mess between the pre-processor files and the transpiled files not being in sync. So why not minify? It’s good for site performance and if a developer opens the CSS file they will notice right away that it’s minimized and go look for the less/scss. And heck if I’m doing that why not add in an autoprefixer? And it’s always nice to have a sourcemap file to make it easier when you’re inspecting in the browser.

Install all the things

First things first. VSCode has a little bit on how a person might want to automate some processes and the first step is installing gulp.

Once you have gulp installed you’ll want to install the following other pacakges:

gulp-less

gulp-sass

gulp-clean-css

gulp-sourcemaps

gulp-autoprefixer

Create a Gulp Task

Now it’s time to create your tasks. You’ll want to create a file called ‘gulpfile.js’.

Require all the things

First in your gulpfile.js you will need to require all these nifty packages that you just installed:

A list of the packages you need to require in your gulpfile.js

Where do the things go?

Follow that up with a couple variables which will hold your source and output locations for your front end files:

File locations for your sources and outputs

Optional Options

Optionally you might want to define some options:

Sass and Autoprefixer options

Sass Task

Now we need to set up a task to deal with sass files:

Sass Task

Let’s go line by line and see what’s going on here (this will be similar to the Less task further down the article).

First, we initial the gulp task and give it a name of ‘sass’.
After the return statement comes the real work:
We use our ‘sassinput’ variable to define where we want the gulp task to get the source files from, in other words, where are you storing your .scss files?
Next we initiate the sourcemaps package
Followed by calling the sass package and utilizing any of the options we might have set up and logging any errors
The autoprefixer and it’s options come after we transpile the sass, this will simply add some browser prefixes to your final CSS to help with backward compatibility.
And now we are going to minify the resulting CSS, this example shows the debug options and prints out the starting and ending size of the CSS in the console for your reference.
Next we write our sourcemap file and in this case we’re saving that in an additional directory called ‘maps’ located in the CSS directory
And finally we write all these changes to our defined output location.

After all that you should end up with a nice minified, prefixed CSS file as well as a sourcemap file.

More for Less

Maybe you use less instead of sass, or you want to have both set up just in case:

Similar to the Sass above

The Less tasks varies only in the input variable ‘lessinput’ the less package (line 5), and the name of the task (line 1).

Watch the Things

Now that you have these tasks set up you can do a couple of different things.

You can use VSCode to run these tasks with the built in task runner (check out the VSCode documentation for that)
You can use gulp to automatically watch for changes to your source directory.

Watch tasks for gulp

The first watch tasks watches for changes in the ‘sassinput’ directory and runs the ‘sass’ tasks if it sees your files change. And the second does the same for the ‘lessinput’.

Let’s get running!

To run this watch task:

Save this new ‘gulpfile.js’ to the root directory of your local web project
In a terminal, or even more handily, in the terminal tab of VSCode, type ‘gulp watchsass’ or ‘gulp watchless’ (depending on what you are working on at the time).
The tasks will watch your directory for changes and run all the fancy code you just wrote to transpile and minify your CSS every time you make a change and save it.
And if you want to stop the task, a simple Ctrl-C will take care of that.

VSCode terminal showing the gulp task running

Code all the things!

Now that you have everything set up, go forth and code all the things, save your file and rest easy knowing gulp is handling all the nit picky stuff for you.

What automated tasks have you added to your gulpfile, I’d love to hear?

Working Remotely … When Your Team is in the Office

Elise Gaetz Ferguson — Wed, 12 Jun 2019 13:01:01 +0000

Working Remotely … When Your Team is in the Office

This is a popular topic these days with more and more businesses allowing employees to work remotely. There’s even a growing number of fully-remote companies. I’ve spent over the last 10 years working remotely for both traditional in-office companies as well as fully-remote companies. I’m currently one of the few remote employees in a traditional in-office company.

Of course the things you hear from everyone work: have a designated work area, take breaks, get dressed/ready for the day like you were working on site, etc. But here are a few more tips I’ve gathered from doing this for so many years.

Do Work

Use Tools : Trello, Skype, Slack etc all of these tools help keep your team organized and in contact while allowing a remote employee to participate easily. A whiteboard list of tasks is great for in-office employees but moving that to Trello (or something similar) will allow the team to view the task list from wherever they happen to be working.
Test Technologies : Ensure ahead of time that video conferences/Skype calls are as easy as pie. Can you hear? Can you see? Can they hear you and see you? It’s important to make sure all this works right off the bat rather than missing out on important meetings due to a crumby microphone on someone’s laptop.
Video Conferences : Consider having meetings where all employees (in-office or not) are on video conference. We have twice weekly check-ins that work well without the need for everyone on video but there are times when everyone on video would work better particularly with remote client meetings.

Share All the Details: Make sure any video conference links and phone numbers are readily available in the calendar invites so there’s no question on how to connect to the meeting in the minutes before the meeting.
Get Involved : I find that contributing to things like documentation, process improvement, and company intranet help solidify your role on a team. As a remote employee I don’t have the random interruptions during the day and I find that I might have a little extra time to keep track of steps/documentation as I work which can be shared with the rest of the group.
Schedules : Keep your schedule on a calendar the whole team can see. What are your normal working hours, lunch break, vacation days. Team members will need to know your schedule so they aren’t waiting for a reply when you aren’t around to answer.
Get Backup Work : Make sure you have something to work on as backup if you are waiting for a response from a team member. A remote employee can’t stalk a coworker’s desk like you could if you were in the office so you’ll want to make sure you have something productive to work on if you need to wait for a reply. And make sure you follow up to get the information you might be waiting for.
Speak Up : Make sure, as a remote employee, you speak up in group meetings. If you find it’s difficult to break into conversations in meetings, see about having your team add a meeting facilitator that will ensure everyone has an opportunity to speak without having to deal with lag and interrupting conversations.
Video Examples : Make videos (VidYard, etc) to record examples if you can’t talk to someone live. Do you need to show a team member how to access some information? Is there a bug you’d like to show someone but can’t do it in person? A quick video is worth 1000 words, right?

Get Social

Get to the Office : Visit the office when possible and attend team building activities in person. It’s important to feel like part of the team both in the production aspects as well as the social aspects.
Get Musical: We’ve started a group playlist on Spotify that in-office and remote employees can listen to and help curate.
Get Creative : Participate in events digitally when in person isn’t possible. When our company does events like specific dress up days I try and dress up and take a photo to share. Get creative and try to participate as much as possible even when not in the office.

Experiment

Things to Try: There’s a few tips I haven’t tried yet but would be open to experimenting with such as having accountability partners, using a stand-up meeting bot like howdy for slack, and starting photo sharing channel in our slack group.

Are you one of the only remote employees at a traditional in-office company? What are your tips for making it work?