SidesWays Blog

Working with distributed and overseas teams is a fact of life these days in technical environments especially and knowing some basic tips will utilize the talents of the entire team more effectively. Time Zones Time zone differences can accumulate to mean real schedule slippage so you have to try to use the time zone difference to your advantage. For example, if the shift in India starts 10 hours ahead of east coast time consider working in the evening for an hour or two to prep work plans for the next day. When you arrive in the east coast morning, the team in India will have had several hours to work on tasks that you'd agreed to. If you wait until the morning you may miss an entire day of productivity in India. This time zone issue even comes into play with east coast / west coast teams. If your west coast team gets a late start they are going to push the east coast team to have meetings at the end of the day. Not always practical. And having the west coast team get up ear...

Facebook sponsored test suite for HTML5 mobile development. Very cool. http://rng.io/

I've been in my new position for six months now so I have enough distance to write this posting. This past year I experienced unemployment for the first time. The why is not so important for this post (there are many good reasons in today's economy), but I wanted to record some tips that helped me through the experience. 1. Take care of yourself. Exercise regularly. Routine and ritual help you keep your balance. I have a meditation practice that was helpful. Get medical help if you need it. 2. Don't go it alone. Stay in touch with your family, friends, and religious community. 3. Focus. Decide what you want although it may very well change as you experience the ups and mostly downs of job search. Have target companies. They'll change too, but the world is so large that without a focus you'll feel lost. 4. Take a break. You can search for jobs all the time if you don't force yourself to take a break. It takes 48 hours to unwind (see  Cortisol ) though tru...

For my primary email account I use FastMail instead of GMail. Why? FastMail is very fast, reliable, and feature rich. GMail is fast, reliable, and feature rich. I like the features of FastMail, but the primary reason I use it over GMail is the communication that they have with their user base when there is an (inevitable) problem. Here's a post about a recent problem: http://blog.fastmail.fm/2011/05/15/outage-report-a-cascade-of-errors/ This is the kind of thing I have never seen out of Google or Yahoo and probably never will. It's an advantage of being a relatively smaller service. They have maintained a policy of rapidly communicating with their user as well with a  status blog in addition to their regular blog . SalesForce implemented a similar "communicate with the users" policy after they had a major outage. You can see what they tell you about their service at  http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/ . Google Apps has a similar page at  http://www.goog...

This was just a fun diversion of hearing what it's like to work at the South Pole. If you're footloose and fancy-free, have a craving for adventure, or are very driven to be cold you may want to try landing a position in Antarctica. One Hell of a Long Day - A Summer Working at the South Pole (David Pablo Cohn) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBaQtsft2bM

I've been a fan of Jim McCarthy since I heard a recorded session of his talk at one of the Microsoft developer conferences back in the 90s. The thoughts represented are echoed in Agile practices today. There is a nice set of short videos at: http://www.mccarthyshow.com/the-23-rules-of-thumb/ which are also available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/McCarthyShow#g/u He also has a recent (Dec 2013) keynote at InfoQ: Culture Hacking http://www.infoq.com/presentations/culture-hacking-singapore Some my selected favorites: Rule 1 - Don't know what you don't know Rule 4 - Don't go dark Rule 5 - Use feature teams Rule 6 - Use Zero Defect Milestones Rule 7 - Don't flip the bozo bit Rule 8 - Beware of a guy in a room Rule 13 - If you build it, it will ship (daily build) Rule 23 - Get the team into ship mode

Joel Spolsky  has one of the higher rated programming blogs and goes into the thought behind StackOverflow.com . It's a site designed to share programming information efficiently. Some interesting timecodes: 01:00 he worked on FogBugz 05:00 some interesting discussion about competing information exchange approaches 16:00 he worked on Excel VBA (a source of consulting work for me for years) 25:00 discussion about .NET stack and performance of C# being great 37:40 Things You Should Never Do (don't rewrite a software product from scratch) 44:00 stackoverflow.com is #1 resource for new programming technologies http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ