My Remote Developer Life — AMA
A tour through the factory — Infinite Red
The conception of this article was requested in the Gitter chat from one of our more popular open source projects.
OK Janyk, here’s your Golden Ticket 😉 I’m no Wonka, but I can try.
I LOVE how I work. There’s always room for improvement, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve been a professional programmer for 16 years, and I’ve seen a wide variety of styles. Remote work is the future and Technology is leading the remote work movement.
Working remote isn’t all gumdrops and sugarcanes, though. Lots of people fail terribly at remote work. Even those who thought they’d love it find themselves irritated without reason. You’ve got to have the right mindset.
In my experience, to effectively work remotely you need 4 keys:
- You have to love where you work each day (Physical and Employer)
- You need a disciplined routine
- You necessitate a mostly asynchronous work system
- Lots of trust all around
Armed with these 4 keys (and Oompa Loompas wouldn’t hurt) let’s get started on the tour!
Good Morning!
My (personal) morning starts with a round of Clash Royale to get my eyes fully open. STOP JUDGING ME! I like Supercell games. I believe it’s important to start each day with something positive and fun. Creativity is fueled by play.
After obligatory teeth brushing, it’s straight to stain the teeth again with coffee and listening to Amazon Alexa’s flash briefing on technology.
Do you feel that? … It’s no rush. Your day starts when your mind and body are ready to work.
Without a client meeting, which I’ll get to later, you’re pretty much at liberty to check in at varying times. Remember, we’re in different timezones and on different teams at any given moment. Our asynchronous system gives us freedom from the old 9–5 unproductive cube farm. We’ve found creativity and productivity are courted and not summoned.
Caveat: Courteous team members will try to be available when other members of the same project are active (this is one place where trust is key).
Yesterday’s Slack check-ins looked like so in my timezone:
Because my morning is chill, I’m usually ready to get right to work! But I usually hold off for 15 minutes, to check in with the team.
As Todd Werth (who is quoted often in this article) will tell you, there’s no water cooler chat in remote work, so you have to put a little effort out to be extra human. I’ll usually reach out and chat with those who are online, and those icons become real-life people. I get to ask about their family, their house, and even “Would you be interested in playing Team Fortress 2 at lunch?” A friendly, daily connection is really healthy.
When I finally meet people I’ve worked with (IRL), I don’t feel like I’m meeting them for the first time; building a good online rapport is just what we do. Our conversations pick up in person exactly where they left off virtually. This applies to people inside and out of Infinite Red. Virtual people are real people.
People ask if I get lonely in a house with two dogs all day, and the answer is, “not even close.” I’m communicating with others often. Enjoying where you work is critical, and I enjoy my work location, my clients, and my co-workers. There’s nothing lonely about my day. In fact, I have to work hard to stop from over-exposure so I can focus and code. More on that later!
Meetings — The Fix-point
First order of business: do you have any meetings today? We make extra effort to be prepared and ready for meetings. Meetings are one of the few unmovable fix-points for our days. Always respect them, and NEVER miss a client meeting!
Team meetings are fun, and I generally look forward to them, as I’ve got a fun team and we all know how to run a meeting.
Keys to a good meeting: You have a pre-defined agenda and you never go longer than needed. Sure we can chat and be silly too, but there’s a high respect for everyone’s personal time.
Client meetings are also pretty light-hearted, but demand our full attention. I rarely meet a client in person, so I have to make certain I put some effort out during our virtual meetings. I even sometimes dress up!
Dressing up is just a small investment. Remote video is the window to the world, so invest for success. I’ve got a decent microphone, lighting, and camera prescribed by Todd Werth, and some echo diffusion technology suggested by team member Derek Greenberg. Here’s a quick candid photo:
Getting SH*T DONE
With a quality setup, my day generally glides in and out of conversations, meetings, and zen-like coding sessions. We’ve got an impressive Trello setup that provides a long list of TODOs for any given project. My goal is to take a chunk out of our tasks, both assigned and inspired. The goal is not to be busy, but to be productive.
To be fully productive, after the morning chats, I try to turn off all notifications and get a couple hours of serious visible productivity knocked out ASAP. I think it might have been Tim Ferriss who suggested: get as much as you can done before lunch. Those are by far, my most productive hours.
Lunch is whenever/wherever. Sometimes I use it to catch up with old friends, and sometimes I stand in my kitchen and wolf down leftovers to get back to work. Much like Gary Vaynerchuk says, and I’m paraphrasing: work is not an early bird gets the worm, or a night-owl plan. It’s momentum based. The discipline is knowing when you’re producing.
Open Source is Key (for us)
With productivity in mind, how do we work so hard on Open Source?
People wonder how we do it! Balancing Open Source and proprietary makes life easier, not harder. Here’s the trick:
Nothing breeds discipline, quality, and trust like writing software knowing the whole world is watching. Many of us got where we are by being active in the Open Source Community. We hold this part close to our heart, because that happiness inspires productivity.
When you consider what we’d have to do in order to have an asynchronous, challenging but agreed upon user-friendly model for our team to use, you end up exactly back at the benefits of Open Source in the first place. Now add on thousands of other developer eyes that investigate this code. The value abounds! Like in the book “The Lean Startup,” the worst feedback is none at all. This is why we know it’s important to make time to answer questions and issues that the community has provided.
We’re fortunate to have a team and open-minded clients who understand the benefits of this strategy. Fortune favors the bold. Kudos to the Infinite Red founders who surge forward past ever-increasing concerns for breaking the mold. If a client doesn’t understand our mindset, we have no problem in letting that client go.
Founders like Jamon Holmgren and my teammate Mark Rickert know these benefits first hand from their popular contributions throughout Open Source. We live what we preach.
⚠️ Warnings ⚠️
There are common pitfalls and scary situations that befall all remote developers. Identifying them can be difficult and even kind of Wonka-tunnel scary.
No 9 to 5 is a double-edged blade
Having a flexible schedule means you don’t hold common hours anymore. The cost is that you might find yourself working your brain hard late at night.
People might say, “Wow you work ALL the time!” The truth is that you woke up late, or had a long lunch, or just took a while to get things started! Or who knows, maybe it is a busy day? Only you really know why you’re working after dinner. Whenever you find yourself juggling your time, identify the culprit, and see if you need to tweak your allocation. Like a guitar, it will go out of tune from time to time, but it’s not too hard to bring things back to harmony. Calibrate and tune often!
Distractions
Over-exposure mentioned earlier is just a type of distraction. And distraction is the real enemy of remote work. When people hear “I work remotely”, they think I don’t work at all. It’s not their fault. Almost everyone honors the sanctity of the work place, but with remote work, there is no workplace.
The societal boundaries are gone, and people try to devalue your time. So each of us have to put our own boundaries back in to protect our work day. This is usually more difficult with family than with friends. The process isn’t straight-forward and it takes time. Tell people you’re busy, you have a meeting, your boss needs you, etc. To quote Todd again, “everyone respects your request when you say ‘boss,’ even when you don’t have one.”
That means including time for yourself, too. No time is more sacred than to keep yourself sharp. That can mean a game, a siesta, a yoga class, or simply a walk. Pushing half-heartedly for more time is less valuable than pushing whole-heartedly for less time.
Good Day Sir!
No Wonka elevator at the end or lifetime supply of chocolate. Just a broad horizon of what’s awesome. By the nature of our asynchronous work, this account is very specific to my work day. Others may vary widely, but I’m open to answer any questions you may have in the comments below.
On a final note, I get asked often if we’re hiring at Infinite Red. Usually by people who want us to bring this quality to them, but the truth is that you have to bring yourself to quality. We’re always interested in individuals who understand that.
About Gant
Gant Laborde is Technical Lead at Infinite Red (⚙ web and mobile app dev ⚙), published author, adjunct professor, public speaker, and mad-scientist in training. Read the writings of Gant and his co-workers in our Red Shift publication. If you’re looking to discuss nerdy tech, he’s all ears. If you’ve got a conference tech, he’s happy to present.
View half-witty, half-groan technical tweets with @GantLaborde on Twitter, and follow him on Medium and GitHub.
