Coding Blocks - How to Work Remote Effectively

Episode Date: March 30, 2020

Since we can't leave the house, we discuss what it takes to effectively work remote while Allen's frail body requires an ergonomic keyboard, Joe finally takes a passionate stance, and Michael tells them why they're wrong.

You're listening to Coding Blocks, episode 129. Subscribe to us and leave us a review on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more using your favorite podcast app. And open up the internet and go to codingblocks.net where you can find show notes, examples, discussion, and a lot more. Wait, you should have said https colon forward slash forward slash www dot. That's right. Like you forgot that part, right?

You needed that part. I do. Yeah, my bad. I'm still new. And he's pronouncing things like Siri now. Go to CoddingBlocks.com. And yeah, follow us on Twitter at CoddingBlocks or head to www.CoddingBlocks.net

and find all our social links there at the top of the page. And with that, I'm Alan Underwood. I'm Jerzek. And I'm Mikkel Outlaw. I mean, if we're mispronouncing things, come on. Right. All right. And this episode is sponsored by Datadog,

a cloud-scale monitoring and analytics platform that unifies metrics, traces, and logs so you can identify and resolve performance issues quickly. And the University of California, Irvine Division of Continuing Education, one of the top 50 nationally ranked universities, UCI offers over 80 certificates and specialized programs designed for working professionals. All right. And today we're talking about tips for remote working because we've all three of us been

working remotely for a long time and we're pretty, pretty good at it. So first, some news. We're pretty good at it. That's to be seen. But yeah, so as we like to do, we like to thank those who have taken the time to write in. And I think that just not as many people are probably um on the podcast right now because they're all at home taking care of kids and doing nine million other things in between um but they'll all tune in here pretty soon because

they're going to lose their mind so uh we got one from itunes and that's krausling so thank you very much for taking the time to write in we appreciate it all. All right. And also we've got some link here in the show notes for some freebies from TechSmith, which I guess they're doing it for a couple months here, it sounds like. Yep. I want to say that it went through June. I think we mentioned it on the last show. But, yeah, if you're working at home and you need some tools to improve your work at home stuff, this is a good way to get a hold of some things that might help you out for the next few months for free. Snagit. Snagit. Yeah. Snagit is one of my favorites. So yeah, check that out. Yeah. I just double checked and it is through the end of June.

Cool. Yeah. So, uh, yeah. So as Joe alluded to, uh, you know, we're going to be talking about some work from home tips. So basically what happened here is, uh, the three of us have been remote working for many years now. And, you know, Joe's optimistic about it and saying that we're successful at it. Uh, you know, your mileage may vary. Um, and, uh, but, but, you know, in light of all the recent events, like we've had questions, you know, we've been filled in questions both outside of work and for work, like, hey, what are some tips to, you know, improve, you know, work from work from home productivity. And so we thought, okay, well, maybe we'll share this with the rest, you know, with our listeners to like some of these ideas. And so that is, we thought we'd take a break from designing data-intensive applications for a moment and talk about work-from-home tips. And basically how to not lose your mind doing it.

Yeah, and I plan on telling you the truth about work-from-home, by the way, so be ready. This should be interesting. And also, just a heads up, like, this show is kind of based on a conglomeration of information that we got from multiple people that have worked on our team over the years, right? So, these are both things that we've come up with as well as our peers and what's helped us survive, what, five plus years now doing this. So, yeah.

All right. So who wants to start us off here? I'll do this one because this was the one that I tagged on before we put these together. Probably the most important thing is you need to have a solid internet connection, right? If you're working at home and you have to network and interface with people, you need something fast. Like don't skimp on it, you know, spend the extra money if it's available. In some places you can't get really fast, but you know, get as fast as reasonable, right? Like I'd say, I mean, I don't know what you guys' thoughts are, but I'd say 50 megabytes or megabits per second or faster is what you want, right?

If you're getting 50 megabytes per second, we need to talk. I want your connection. Right. Megabits per second. Yeah. Everybody measures things differently. But yeah, so 50 megabit per second or faster, right? If you want to be able to do video networking without hiccups

and all that kind of stuff you guys have any thoughts on that i mean obviously i get the fastest i possibly can within reason but well i don't know i don't really care that much i think there's i think there's a difference though because like um the speed of the connection okay fine yeah sure depending on what you're. But I think now with the work from home, uh, you know, tools that we're going to be using now, and we're going to get to some of these,

but you know, I think the latency matters even more. So, yeah. So you only had a 25 megabit connection. Okay, fine. You know,

but if it's got a ping time of three milliseconds it's amazing you know right you know what i'm saying like that that's that's going to matter a lot more yeah i guess that's fair because if you were to uh and i don't even know that it's in some places the only thing you get is like satellite internet that's not going to work for video conferencing right like your your lag time is going to be 15 seconds behind what people say and all that. So yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. So, so basically the idea there is if we were to, uh, make a comparison, like you're looking for quality, not quantity. And so in that case, the quality would be the, the ping time, or, you know, you might even like really get into the jitter. Oh, but you know, the, the megabits per second would be the quantity.

Yep. So, yeah. So, uh, since we are talking about, um, video conferencing since that, that was, you know, as it relates to the conversation of latency, definitely turn your camera on when you are on any kind of video conferencing call. I can't. It's such a pet peeve of mine when I jump into a call and any one person doesn't have their camera on because then my immediate assumption is you're not paying attention,

are you? Oh, really? You don't think that? I never got that out of it i just thought they didn't want to do their hair whatever my hair my hair i it's funny that you take it that way like i that's never been my thing my thing is just like a real conversation in person you look at people to find the visual cues yes right and just you know how the sausage is made here. Like when we record our podcast,

we're on zoom, right? Because I can tell if Joe Zach wants to say something because he'll have a look on his face, right? Or if outlaws get ready to say something, he has a look on his face and, and those visual cues are so important for communication, right?

And just there's also the human factor. I mean, I think Outlaw, you, me, Joe Zach, we've all talked about this stuff privately in the past. But the one thing that stinks about working from home or one of the things that stinks about working from home is you feel isolated, right? Like you're almost just by yourself all the time. And seeing that face on the other side of the line is almost like being in the room. I agree with everything you said, but I still stand by my point

that if you don't have your camera on, I assume that the reason why you don't want to have your camera on is because you don't want to see, you don't want me to see that you're not paying attention. Like you're still doing something else or, you know, and I don't mean to say like, you know, you're like not even sitting at your desk, you know, like, you know, it's just, you know, you connected to the phone call and then walked away. I'm not, I'm not going that extreme. I'm just saying like, you know know you're actively engaged in whatever some other

task and you just don't want anyone to see that you're not paying attention to the conversation because you can tell when people aren't paying attention like you oh absolutely you'll know when somebody's like working on something else oh yeah i mean i assume you can see like the you know the dark light dark light like flashing across my face whatever i'm like all tabbing around like a madman. But sometimes I'm not paying attention. And sometimes I really am and I'm like going between notes. I'm taking over here and I'm looking for my email for that thing that somebody else said or Googling something that somebody said. But sometimes I'm playing Minesweeper.

No, that's not true. I'm not saying I'm perfect, by the way. Like there are times where I might zone out if a conversation goes in a particular direction where it's like, okay, well, I don't have a lot to contribute that to that area. So I might like go back to whatever code I was working on or, you know, reading some random story or whatever, you know, but I still keep a camera on. And there have been times where like friends have called me out and they're like, yeah, I can see you're on your iPad. And I'm like, yeah, that's legit. But I would agree that this is one of the most important things. The next one to me is actually the one that I probably have the biggest pet peeve about. And that is if you're going to be on calls with people, get a good headset or set of headphones with a good microphone, man,

get a good microphone. I don't care what it's going to cost you. You can get them between $20 and $500. I don't care, but get something. So, yeah, I mean, the real takeaway there is don't rely on the built-in microphone and speaker in your laptop, for example, and assume that that's going to be good enough because while you might think it's working for you, it rarely is it working for those on the call. Like I can think of one person who has like probably a 98% success rate with his, his setup where he always uses the the microphone and speakers on the computer but he's definitely that that's definitely the exception in my case and to your point about the the headset like the one headset that i have seen

everyone use that has been rock solid every time without, without a glitch? Does anyone care to guess? Yeah. You're going to say the AirPods or not the AirPods, the Apple earbuds, the earbuds, the Apple earbuds,

the wired Apple earbuds. Every time anyone uses those, I don't know. I guess they just got it right because while they might not be the most comfortable things to wear, the sound quality is always, you know, good from like when you're listening to somebody speak on those on a on a conference call it's always you know at a consistent level of quality and i mean even having used them the the sound quality that i'm listening to isn't that bad so and we'll have a link in the show notes for that

because two things I want to point out here that at least are key for me. One, they have to be wired. I don't care how much money you spent on your wireless headphones. They basically all suck when it comes to the microphone. You could ask Outlaw, you could ask anybody. The AirPods, right? They're anywhere

from $150 to $250. He's even got the Beats Pro. What are they called? The Power Beats Pro. The Power Beats Pro. The microphones on them and the Bluetooth connection to the thing, you just never get good audio quality out of it. So everybody else who's listening to you suffers. Get wired headsets. So we'll have a link to the Apple ones that he's talking about. I think you can get those for $30. They're $20 on Amazon. I hate the way they fit.

I don't like them personally. But I completely concur that I've never had an issue. When somebody's speaking through those things on another end of a call. I'm always perfectly fine with them, right? They sound good. There are two other sets that I'd like to call out. The one that I wear basically all day, every day are the Sony MDR-XB50APs. These are in-ears. And the reason I like these so much is one, the sound quality is excellent. The microphone on it is also very good, but they're so comfortable. Like I can keep these in my ears all day long, which I have been of late. And they never are fatiguing. Like some

in-ears, they'll kind of wear on you, and I just can't tolerate it. The tips that came with these are so comfortable that they're all-day wears, and they're fine. It's a one-button, though. I can't do the one-button. I need three buttons. That was the one thing that was frustrating. When I was looking for a headset for doing this kind of stuff, I was actually looking for the volume up volume down in the, in the middle clicker one.

Sony doesn't make it. And it's a shame because these particular headphones have a ton of great reviews on them because they are excellent, but the one button does kind of stink. Yeah. And then the other set I'll bring up for those that actually want something that they don't like in ears or whatever. There's the steel series Arctic sevens. Now, so the Sony's that I just mentioned on Amazon right now are about 26 bucks.

They're not bank breakers, right? The steel series. So a buddy of ours, Nick, this is what he wore all the time. And I can tell you right now, the microphone in that thing is absolutely solid. I've actually worn these and listened to them. The sound quality of them is just excellent. They're wireless, though. Say what? They're wireless, though. So they're wireless or wired.

So you could actually use them wireless. It has a USB dongle for doing the 2.4 gigahertz wireless, or you can wire it and use a 3.5 millimeter adapter, just like most regular sets of headphones. So these right here, I can highly recommend because they're comfortable. They sound fantastic. And the microphone on them is great. Now you're going to reach a little bit deeper into your pocket for these, but you can use them for gaming and other stuff. So these right now on Amazon are 125 bucks, but again, they're wireless or wired and they're great all around things. But the key here is use a good set, a good headset that has a decent quality microphone. And one other thing I want to

say on this topic, because this is the one that I am the most irritable about when somebody joins a bad audio. I mean, not the guy that has the headphone review site. He would have an opinion about this. That didn't even add up. This is the number one, by the way. This is my number one. Oh, it's yours also. Yeah, whatever you're going to say next, if it's what I think it is,

like this is my number one, absolute, just do this. So I'm curious. You only do one thing about working from home. Oh, no, no, no. So mine, it's You only do one thing about working from home. Oh, no, no, no, no. This is so mine.

It's going to be your next one. yeah. Mine is also don't assume because a headset is made for headset communication that it's good. And I have two examples of products that you should not buy to use as these and they're the Sennheiser SE one thirties or the Sennheiser SE one sixties. The only difference is the one 30 has one ear pad.

The one 60 has two, it comes with a USB plug and whatever they do in their little USB adapter cancels out half of what people say. So it's phasing in and out constantly. So again, you know, we gave a few recommendations here. Just know that they're not all made equal.

Right. And I'll leave it at that. So that's my pet peeve. So Joe's out. Here's yours. You go ahead. Just mute when you're not talking. This is like,

this is my number one. This should be the first bullet. Maybe even we could... I could live without you getting a headphone. I could live with a laptop mic. I could not live with hearing your breathing, clicking on the keyboard, making a peanut butter jelly sandwich.

None of that stuff. When you're not talking, please mute, especially as the number of people on the call go up. Please mute. If it's just you and one other person, just go ahead and just mute. I love it when you hear like background conversation. Mute early, mute often. When you hear like background. I love it when you hear like a background conversation going on.

You're like, I don't think you meant for us to hear that. Yeah, that's the worst thing is sometimes you forget to mute. But see, I got to say, though, I'm not okay with the laptop sound. Do not use the laptop microphone. So scratch what Joe just said. I do agree with the mute, but do not fall back and just use whatever's built into your laptop because chances are it's really terrible. I'm telling you, man.

How about we each get one pet peeve, one pet peeve. I don't know. We're going to be limited to that. These still ones look pretty, uh, pretty good though, man.

Like I'm kind of tempted to pick up a pair of these cause they look pretty impressive, but I swear I'm just not seeing the, the still headphone still series Arctic seven, art, art to seven. They look pretty awesome because I love an over-the-ear headphone.

It's so much more comfortable to me than an on-ear. How do you pronounce it? The Sennheisers? Oh, yeah, the Sennheisers. Those are on-ear headphones. I can't stand an on-ear headphone. It's like the worst design

ever, in my opinion, because it's just squeezing it. I can't. I on-ear headphone. It's like the worst design ever in my opinion because it's just like squeezing it. I can't. I'm not a fan. No, the Arctic 7s are seriously good. Like, seriously good. Sound quality wise, functionality wise, they are really good. I mean, these things have

almost 7,600 reviews and it's got a 4.3 rating on Amazon. Yeah. Yeah. They paid a lot for those reviews. So it's tells you quite a bit about the reputation. All right.

Well, you know, fine. All right. So what's outlaw? What's your number one pet peeve? Uh, the pet peeve camera.

Yep. The camera. Mine's mine's good audio. It might just fall specifically and mute. Yep. Turn your camera on. Mine's good audio. Microphone. It's just mute. Specifically. And mute. Okay, so yeah, we've already hit our top three pet peeves in the first three things we had.

That's good. Maybe we can do the things we like the most later. Yeah. It's probably the camera. A good microphone. And when you mute. Yeah. I'm just guessing, though.

That's my guess. The next one that's interesting that we have actually had a lot of experience with that is hyper frustrating is not all video conferencing apps are good at everything. There's one good one and everything else is crap. That's what it feels like. And so...

Zoom, if you're listening and you would like to be a sponsor of Coding Blocks, reach out to us. You can hit us up at info at codingblocks.net and we would love to have you on as a sponsor because let me tell you, all other

video conferencing options are just junk. We've tried them. Skype is awful. Teams, Hangouts, WebEx. I'm trying to even think of another one. We tried Join.me for a minute. Yeah, GoToMeeting, Join.me, calls in Slack.

I mean, we love Slack, but it's no Zoom. Right. So here's the thing, right? What it really boils down to is if you just want to have a face to face with somebody and talk about something, Hangouts is fine. Most of them are fine for that, right? Most of them will get the job done usually. Zoom is the only one that we've consistently had success with for screen sharing. And what I mean is go screen share something with somebody on Hangouts and see how long it takes them to say, it's all blurry. I can't see it. Well, or better yet, try to pair program remotely with anybody on anything other than Zoom. Right. and it is just an awful developer experience right yeah you like like alan said you're gonna find it where it's like heck i can't read it it's blurry or

you know or maybe it's so delayed in the refresh that they're like showing they're like three screens later and you're like still seeing something like no no you haven't changed screen yet what are you talking about? It's just, and that's, I know that somebody is going to mention, uh, you know, well, you know that there's like live code options in visual studio, visual studio code, like, okay, I get that. But you know, sometimes you just want to like spin up a screen share session and, and those other sessions that you, you mentioned,, sure, they're fine for a small

number of people, like if it's just one or two people that you're going to be calling, then fine. But I kind of have a problem with even in those scenarios because inevitably, I'm going to want to screen share something or I'm going to want to see some kind of screen because that's where the conversation is going. So, like, I don't even like to default to like a Hangouts, for example, because it's just like it's eventually we're going to get to the point where we're going to have to switch. So why not just go ahead and start from the other one to begin with? Yep. Joe, you have any strong thoughts on this one? Oh, no.

Zoom is the best. And I mean, like we've got like 4K displays and everything and it just, Zoom is just so wonderful. I miss you Zoom. If you're out there, if you can hear me Zoom. Yeah. So, I mean, we pay for it for coding blocks because this is how we communicate. This is how we do our podcasts. We talk to each other face to face like this. If we want to screen share, we can. If you're stuck with other tools though, just be aware they're not all made the same. Right. They're not all made equal.

And if you have multiple video options at your company, like maybe you have Slack and Hangouts and Skype, you have to pick the right one for what you're doing. Right. Skype was always excellent in terms of the quality, but there was always a problem with lag. Like what Outlaw said, like the, you know, Hey, I'm, I'm, I'm over here. Wait, wait, give me five seconds. So the, the screen will catch up, right? Like there was that issue. So Skype was always excellent from an audio and video quality, but there was just the, I guess it was trying to push too much data. And then you had other things like hangouts where it dithers the video so much that you can't even read something on screen.

And in the process, it cooks your processor. Oh, it does, yeah. And that's another thing. Zoom is pretty easy on the CPU, which is really nice when you have a screen share or a call with more than one or two people. Yeah, I should also take this opportunity to say, Zoom, if you are listening, and I know you're in the middle of crafting an email to info at codingblocks.net because you want to sponsor,

and we appreciate that, but I should also use this as a PSA. Don't change anything because whatever you're doing, you got it 100% right. Like, don't change anything. Don't touch anything. You're done. You got it right the first. Like don't change, don't change anything. Don't touch anything. Yeah. You've got it right. The first time my money. Yeah, exactly. Oh, and another thing, we don't even have it in the show notes here, but if you don't already

have a decent webcam, there's tons of options out there. I do want to mention because it comes up several times in the Slack over, over time, People will be like, hey, I know somebody mentioned a webcam. What's a good one? We use the C930E Logitech for the show. And the reason is, is it offloads the video encoding and all that stuff to the camera. So it's not eating up your CPU cycles, contending with the other stuff that you're doing. And believe it or not, it actually makes a big difference. Now, it's not the perfect camera ever. Like we have to do some things like you download a settings app for it and turn off autofocus. Otherwise it's constantly trying to refocus on your face. So it's not perfect, but you just tweak a few little things and it works

great. So, you know, little side note. Yeah. Sadly, I don't know that that camera is available for sale anymore. I just put a link to it in our show notes there. But we've actually referenced this camera before in, I don't remember if it was like the developer shopping spree or something. But it's definitely come up before. But I just put another link in there and I'm looking at it on the Amazon and it's like, here's your buying options. Go look at these other sellers because Amazon isn't selling it. Yep. Which is sad because if it was available for sale, I would be tempted to buy more. All right.

So who's got the next one here? Not it. Not it. I'll take it. What was the next one? Oh, yeah. Okay. Disagree.

What? Disagree. Disagree disagree disagree okay i got ahead of you i meant to wait until you were talking to interrupt you yeah no no it makes sense yeah i mean we're on hangouts right now so you probably can you hear me now oh that's another wait hold on that's another complaint too about like a webex for example, that totally annoys the – it seems like you spend the first 10 minutes of every call trying to like, hey, wait, why can't you hear me now? Can everybody hear me now? I'm actually breaking out in a sweat right now thinking about this because that happened this morning.

I can't hear you, but you're saying you can hear me? What do I don't – well, what do you need to do? Or like, yeah, every call starts that way. I'll call you all. Right. And, and the, yeah, that's the worst. And the, for whatever reasons, it seems like every time I do get on a WebEx call, it never remembers the settings that I use for the microphone or the camera.

It's like every time it's like, I just decided to revert to some default. And, you know, I know you haven't changed anything in the last five minutes, but, you know, why not? And if you want to actually see a Mac crash, go ahead and run WebEx. It will happen. Sorry, WebEx, but you know, seriously. All right. So, uh, yeah. Communicate when you're going to be away during normal hours. So if during normal business hours, there's some reason why you aren't planning to be at your desk, don't let your team just guess. They're not mind readers. And because they can't see you, they're going to assume you're there.

And so if they ping you on whatever your instant messaging platform is, or, you know, they're going to expect some kind of a feedback loop that's relatively short if they think that you're there. So if you can't be there, then you need to communicate that with your team. Hey, I'm going to be away for a little bit. I got to go run an errand or I got to, you know, you know, assuming you're able to take it out of the house, you know, I got to run, do an errand or whatever. Right. Let that, let that be a known thing. Right. You know, I mean, we, in our,

in our group, you know, we'll just send like AFK messages, you know, Hey, AFK for the next 30 minutes. And then that's good enough, right? Joe Zag shaking his head. Yeah, he doesn't like this. No. Are you ready? Your thoughts, please.

Yeah, I hate this. I really hate this because people have all sorts of stuff to do throughout the time, like throughout the day. Sometimes you go get coffee. Sometimes downstairs, I get a refill uh sometimes the doorbell rings whatever um my gripe is that i don't think that anyone needs to be available 24 7 every time they get a message and so to me it's not so much about letting me know that you're going to pick up your kid because school got out earlier or something because you know really i just don't

care like i trust that you know you're gonna get back to me or whatever if you're gonna be gone for hours sure put on the calendar but for little stuff like if you run out to starbucks i don't care like i trust that you know you're gonna get back to me or whatever if you're gonna be gone for hours sure put on the calendar but for little stuff like if you run out to starbucks i don't need to know that you know to me it's just noise but what i hate is the expectation that someone can ping you on slack and say hello and you're a jerk if you don't answer within 10 minutes this is all sorts of times i shut that stuff off because people will you know you'll be in two hours of meetings back to back i don't want this thing blinking at me. So I'll shut down the chat window or shut down Slack and then come back to it because it's asynchronous communication, which means I'll get back to it when it's convenient for

me. You know, if it's an emergency, by all means, call my phone or something. But like, I just, I really hate that idea. And some people get really irritated when you don't respond to them. But to me, it drives me nuts that people think that you can just kind of ping out of nowhere and you're supposed to drop whatever you're doing and pay attention to them during a meeting or whatever. So I just don't like that idea. I think that we should be a little bit more autonomous and responsible with stuff like that and just do you. Okay, but hold on. There's a difference here, though, because if you're going to leave your status in, like, your instant message is as available,

and then you're really not available because you're either not there or you're not paying attention to it or whatever, like, that's where the frustration comes in. So the ask is, hey, if you're going to, like, shut it down, then just say, like, hey, I'm busy. Because you can change the status and then do it. Or say like, Hey, I'm busy. And cause you can change the status and then, and then do it. Or like, Hey, I'm snoozing notifications. And then like people will know like, Hey, he's not, he's not going to get this for a while. Right. And then they'll know that your head's down on something. Right. Or, you know, like in the case of a way that you're just not there. Right.

And so that's what I'm saying. Like, you know, as a, that's one way of communicating you're away. Okay, so I'm a total fence sitter on this one. But I do want everybody to mark down, this is the first time I think on the show that Jay-Z's ever been this passionate about a particular stance he's taking on something. So just go ahead and mark this down, episode 129. It's asynchronous communication. See what I mean? So here's the thing. Like I am totally with Joe in that if I've decided to run out to Starbucks, I'm not telling anybody don't

care. You know, I, to me, I don't want to introduce that noise. The only times that I ever do something like that is if I forget that, you know, I had a doctor's appointment, I'm going to be away from my keyboard for two hours. Right. Or, or if something came up and my wife's like, Hey, I really need you to go do this because you know, X or whatever. Right. And it's totally unexpected. Fine. If it's during lunch hours, I don't care. Right. Like I'm not going to tell anybody one way or the other, you know, figure it out. People are eating. So I, um, it's a courtesy thing. If you're going to be away for an unexpected amount of time that is during the typical working hours, right? Like I'm not talking around lunch. I'm not talking about any of that kind of stuff, but I do tend to agree. If I'm just going to disappear for 15 minutes, like I need to go

stretch my legs, walk around, go get the mail, do something like nobody's going to know about that. Yeah. And if they do instant message me, then I'll get back to them when I get back. Right. Like it's not a big deal. The thing is though,

I think with this, it's more about patterns. So this gets into the very next bullet point that we have here, which is make sure that your communication, your chat app or whatever does have the proper status on it. Like what Outlaw was saying, if you're available or whatever. Don't be that person that always shows online but never responds to anything. Yeah. Right?

And don't get me wrong. We all understand that we're busy. We all understand that we have things going on. Like, like Joe said, you know, maybe your own calls back to back to back, which can happen. That's fine. But don't be that person that never responds to stuff and never lets anybody know that you're going to be away for some reason. Right. Like as long as it's not a pattern, I don't think anybody, anybody will ever care about it, right? It's only if you create this pattern of you can't be gotten in touch with that it really becomes a problem. Here's the rub though. And like, I mean, so you say like, Hey, if it's during lunch hours, like, you know, and I'm not there just to, you know, like everyone should just assume, Hey, he's probably not at

his desk right now. Cause he's eating it's lunchtime. Right. But it's also like a question of, well, what's lunchtime for you? Cause yeah. Every day for years. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, so lunchtime for me is typically somewhere in the rain. I don't leave my desk for lunch until sometime between 1.30 at the earliest and sometimes not until 2.30. I know, that's the habit. That's the pattern that you're referring to, Alan. Like, oh, well, you know, it's not uncommon that Alan or that Michael disappears during this particular period of time. Right. But, you know, where I was going with that, it was if there's something unexpected, like, oh, I have, you know, you made the doctor's appointment example or, oh, I need to go drop

my car off at the shop for an oil change or something like that. You know, like, you know that you're going to be gone for, you know, not 15 minutes, but like if it's, you know, going to be 30 minutes to an hour, then I kind of feel like if it's during normal hours and it's not part of your normal routine of being away from your desk during that time, then that's when you should communicate, let everybody else know like, hey, I'm getting a late start this morning because of X, Y, Z. Or I'm going to be out a little bit in the afternoon because of X, Y, Z. But what's the threshold?

Like 30 minutes? I don't care about 30 minutes. I think it's beyond 30 minutes is where I think it is. Yeah, when you start hitting close to an hour for me, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. I'm fine with someone putting it on the calendar, like doctor's appointment, 930 to 1130. And that's it.

I don't need to see an email. If I go to message somebody and they're not there every once in a while, I just assume that people are doing a late lunch or they're doing something flexible because they had to work through lunch or they had a meeting or they had something else or some errand they, some errand they needed to run. So, I don't know. It just doesn't bother me at all when people aren't around. Like, I see it all the time when people aren't around for whatever reason. And sometimes, you know, it just could be like the window's shut. I don't know what my status shows if the window's shut, but I'm sure there's been times that I've got the thing pinned and it shows messages. Like, you know, I flip back over, there's like five

different messages, you know, blinking from different people. And I like five different messages, you know, blinking from different people. And I'm like, well, you know, I'm sorry. I don't even want to go respond to everyone and say like I'm on a call. I feel like, you know, if it's an emergency, you're going to have to call or find some other way to do it. And if it's not an emergency, well, you know, I'm sorry. I'm busy right now. And so we're going to have to send an email or schedule a time. I'd rather do that anyway.

But, you know, that's kind of an artifact of how we're working right now. You know, we've got a lot of meetings and stuff. So I spend a lot, a lot, a lot of time on kind of ad hoc calls. And so, I don't know. I have mixed feelings about kind of chat in general because I do feel like whenever you kind of ping somebody and just kind of start unloading with whatever problem you're thinking about right now, you're kind of like telling them like, hey, I want you to drop whatever you're doing right now because I want you to deal with me. And I think that's kind of a rude thing to do anyway. And don't get me wrong, I do it.

You know, like when I'm hot about something, like, you know, I go after it. But I do recognize that's annoying. And I need to be okay with people saying like, I'm doing something else right now. I'll throw some time on the calendar tomorrow. Because if you don't do that, then you just end up running from fire to fire and never actually getting anything done. So that's my piece. There was a great article that I want to say it was Mike RG that shared it from in the Slack group. And I don't know that now I can find it because I read it a while back from when he shared it originally, but it was basically talking about this same kind of thing, like as it relates to asynchronous communication. And, you know, just because you

send somebody an instant message and whatever your application of choice that your, you know, group uses, you shouldn't assume that you're going to get back something, you know, immediately. And so depending on what the technology is that you're going to use to communicate that message, then that communicates how urgent it is. Right. And if it's like on fire, I need an answer right now, then that's a phone call. Right. Or, you know, assuming that you can't walk over to the person and see them in person. Right. Um, which right now none of us can, but, uh, you know, um, but yeah, so either in person or a phone call, but you know, instant message is somewhere like, uh, you know, you assume that like, Hey, if you got back to me within like the next 30 minutes

or so, like, you know, that that's probably about right. You know, uh, maybe a little bit longer if they're in a meeting, you know, you, you wouldn't be an unheard of for it to be an hour, but if it's an email, then it could go, it's not unheard of for it to go a day. Right. Before you would get a response back. Right. I think, I think the real key here is be professional, right? Like that's, that's really what it boils down to. You know, the whole notion of letting people know you're not going to be there. That's probably only really important if you're being relied on for something super important.

That's a hot topic of the day or something like that. Right. Just be professional. It's not that hard. And, you know, it's just it's a common courtesy. And especially when you're used to working in an office like what you said, Joe. Right. Like, you know, the instant messaging, some someone sort of like tries to bump you to the top of the queue. It's no different than when

you're working in an office and you just, you know, turn your head to the side and like, Hey, Hey Joe, uh, what do you think about this? Right? Like, I hate that too. That's how this podcast started. Oh, but what do you want okay yeah that sounds good yeah so you know again you'll have to find a groove you'll have to find something you're comfortable with but for the most part you know just just be professional and and it should work out oh man but let me tell you if you send you if you send me just like a a high or hey or whatever got a minute like for me it's just like oh that tells me it's like oh this is some big hairy thorny thing i'm going to like dump everything i've got in my brain now and

like concentrate on this conversation for the next 20 minutes so it's like that's definitely getting bumped to like you know like the the edges of what's socially acceptable to respond to and i do think i think like if you send like a an instant message then i've basically got an hour window and if i'm near the end of that hour then i gotta say i'm sorry when i respond you know like hey I do think if you send an instant message, then I've basically got an hour window. And if I'm near the end of that hour, then I've got to say I'm sorry when I respond. You know, like, hey, sorry it took so long. I was doing something. But if it's 30 minutes, that's just okay, I think, in my book.

Yeah, even an hour, depending on what's going on. Again, there's no hard, fast rule here, but be respectful. Go ahead. Well, I was going to say that I was trying to find some funnies for this one, and BuzzFeed had this whole set of articles or tweets that they have collected that were to the humor of working from home, and I'll include some links to it. But one of them, one of them that, that struck a bell with me cause I'm like,

Oh, that's so true is, uh, uh, one of the tweets from Sarah says, I guess we're about to find out which meetings could have been emails after all. That's true.

That's so true. Yeah. So, I mean, when you think that that thing that you want to pick up a phone and talk to somebody or you want to instant message them and they're like, well, why aren't they responding? Like, ask yourself, like, really, like, would an email be good enough? Like, could you just email that thought and, you know, let them respond when they have an opportunity to? Is it critical that you get that response right now? I know for me, it's a little bit like OCD

sometimes where I want my immediate feedback loop. Even on pull requests, it's like, why haven't you approved my pull request? Did you look at my pull request? I mean, you must have reviewed it. Why wouldn't you want to review it? You should want to. If you ask me twice, I'm just going to rubber stamp that thing. Oh, now I know the trick. You should want to review my pull request, right? I mean, so why haven't you wanted to do this yet? Why is it not?

So, yeah, but I do have to force myself to be like, no, it'll be fine. There's no reason why it can't wait until tomorrow before it got merged got merged in it's not that big a deal right right it kills me inside but i do it you know when it comes to messaging too like depending on where you ask affects the quality of the response you get from me too like if you slack me and ask me a question i don't know off the top of my head i might say you know i'm not sure that's a good question i'm not sure you That's a good question. I'm not sure. But if you send me that email, then to me that means, okay, you've got a little bit more time. Go find out. And say, okay, well, I looked and this is what I found and blah, blah, blah.

So it just kind of means to me like if you can ask a question easily, then you are kind of asking for a more casual response. Yeah, I like that. And that brings us into the next thing. If you can Slack, we love it. However, are we using Slack as in a proper noun or are we using Slack as in a verb? Using the Slack application so that you can be a Slacker. So we all love it, right? Like we have an amazing Slack community and truly, truly love the application. There are some downsides to it. One of them being that they have your messages and they keep it forever.

And if you're using it in like a company type of environment, people have a tendency to just paste whatever they need to up there, right? Somebody says, hey, what's the password for the database? So you paste it in there. You're technically sending that outside of your network, right? So there are some downsides to it. But for just general communication, man, I can't stress how much I enjoy Slack and being

able to use Giphy, right? Like there's like, seriously, we're now in an environment where we can't use that. We don't have anything like Giphy. And it's just like, there's a part of fun when you're working remote that you miss because you're not interacting with people all the time, face to face. And Giphy kind of bridges that gap, right? Like having something funny pop up on the screen that all you had to say was Giphy, you know, uh, denied or something,

right. And seeing some funny thing come up. So, or ship it or ship it. Right. So, um, you know,

if you can use a tool that makes communicating fun, it's worth exploring that and seeing if it's something that can work for you, at least in my opinion. If you've, you're installing Slack for work, you can go ahead and pop into that coding block Slack and then, uh, just alt tab whenever you need a minute of fun.

You can totally do that. And we have a lot of awesome people like Micro G out there who are always doing things. Speaking of which, I did. Did you guys see the tweet that I put out today from CodingBlocks? It was the hot dog cooker. What? No.

So Andrew Diamond is actually the one who had this and posted it in gear. It's amazing. So you have to watch it later. But essentially, it's probably the worst idea ever. And it was gear. It's amazing. So you have to watch it later. But essentially, it's probably the worst idea ever. And it was so amazing to look at. I mean, I think I have one of these. I'm trying to pull it up now.

Where did you did it from? Oh, wait. Maybe I don't have one of these. This is the Turbo Master 5000. It's amazing. So at any rate, yes. I mean, oh, wait, stop, stop.

So anyway, all right. So we now have this next section we call digging deeper, but apparently we dug deep into these. Yeah, we can fly through. Yeah. So we'll try and cruise on through these. You want to hit us off with number one here, Joe? Yeah, don't be afraid to spend time on calls just chatting about non-work-related stuff. I think that's really good to do in the beginning.

Just kind of take a minute and say, like, anyone do anything fun? Or, hey, how's the dog doing? Or, you know, the new whatever. You know, I have a hard time saying why this is important, but it seems to just loosen everything up and make everything better. And you get to know people and everyone just feels more connected. Well, that's why. That's what I was about to say.

That's the why is getting to know your team. And then there's a sense of camaraderie there and team building there. And a true story behind all this. All three of us, we work at the same company now, Broadcom. But when we first started, it was Bay Dynamics. And we worked with people that we'd never met. Right. And we did this, you know, every time we got on a scrum, you know, or something, you know, there'd be a couple minutes of banter and then get in.

The first time we all met in person, it was like we knew each other for years. Right. It was like a bunch of friends getting together and hanging out like it truly was. There was no, at least from my perspective, I don't know about you guys, it never felt uncomfortable or forced or weird or anything. Yeah, I mean, you already had a good idea of what everybody's drinking tolerance was. That's awesome. So, yeah, I mean, I cannot overstate this one at all.

Like, this is something that there's a human factor to when you work with people. And you need to realize that, right? Like, we're not all robots. You need to get a good laugh. You need to, you know, hey, how are you doing? You know, I heard you were sick. You know, how are you feeling? Whatever.

You know, that stuff goes a long ways. Yeah, and, you know? I heard you were sick. How are you feeling? Whatever. That stuff goes a long ways. Yeah, and work can get tense sometimes. Some meetings, disagreements, arguments. And so it's important to kind of remember that you like each other and kind of make sure to remember to kind of just take a minute to laugh with each other before you go for the throat. So laugh, laugh, laugh. I kill you. All right. Now here's my 14-point bulleted plan on destroying your plan.

That's amazing. Be available and over-communicate. So, I mean, I kind of like this. I am bad about over-communicating. I should – I'm always happy when i do it whenever i've written something i'm able to reference something or or pull up something that's written down and be able to say like see you know here you go that's so much better than uh you know trying to explain or you know justify something after the fact um i don't know like what do you

guys think that means to say be be available and-communicate? Well, I mean, we haven't really gotten into communicating status and, like, the importance of that. So, you know, if you are running behind or running into trouble or lagging on something that, you know, you were expecting to be done, then it's important to communicate that sooner rather than later. Yeah. You know, and send out that flare, especially if sometimes you'll think something's really, you know, going to be easy or fine or whatever should be done tomorrow. And then what's not,

it's tempting to kind of feel bad and try to make up for and work late or whatever. And so it's like almost like there's this inclination to try and kind of cover it up. But it's just, that just tends to lead to more misery. And a lot of times the reasons behind it, you know, the reasons why it is taking longer things that need to be communicated and talked about a lot of times you might find out that people might just say, Oh, yeah, we knew

that was going to happen, or we had a plan for that or whatever. And so the sooner you realize that you're going down a path, a bad path, or you're not going to make that deadline, the better and you know, even if you maybe have missed the first two chances you had to say it, say it now. Go ahead and take the opportunity and say, you know, crap, I'm sorry. I should have said this yesterday. But, you know, here's the problem. Yeah. And, you know, I'd like to say that, you know, we use Jira.

If you have some sort of ticketing system where there's a task you're working on or whatever, that is a great place to put that information, right? Yeah, that's the best. Because it bubbles up and no one has to come bugging you and asking you. You can just kind of take a look and glance and think about it and know what's going on and trust it. And people can be tagged on it, right? So instead of sending one-off emails that get bounced around and forgotten about and archived or whatever, in the future even. So it's great because I can put it on status like, hey, I was working on Presto and I found this, right? And I can tag Jay-Z on it. And then he'll get a notification that, hey, there's a new comment on this ticket,

right? Which is beautiful because if he's already a watcher on the ticket, he'll get even more annoying emails when I don't tag him saying that this is there, right? But more importantly, it's the fact that you can come back in the future and look something up. Right. A lot of times you'll send out, uh, people will send out detailed emails that say, you know, I went through these steps and I found this kind of stuff. Emails get lost, right? Emails get archived. They, they disappear. Whereas if you go back into your ticketing system, you might be able to search for whatever it was that you were doing. And if you kept good notes in there of what was going on and over communicating the status, you can almost it's almost like reading a in terms of what you've got going on the challenges you ran into because chances are it's going to come back in the future at some point yeah the worst thing you can do is just like go down a dark hole and not tell anybody and not ask for help and so uh yeah you know that should that needs to be avoided at all costs hey and to and to

joe's point a second ago about going down a particular path of trying to cover it up and working more and all that kind of stuff. The problem is if you are new at remote working, it's so easy to continue working on into the night, right? Like it's really easy when you feel like you're backed up on something and it's because, I don't know, you feel like you weren't making the progress you needed to or whatever. You know, when you started at eight in the morning and six o'clock rolled around, you're like, well, I didn't get done what I needed to get done. I'm just going to eat real quick. I'm going to jump back on the computer and you'll be there till 11 o'clock at night. I know all three of us have done that. And the problem is, if you set that as a precedent, you're going to find yourself miserable before long, right? So be realistic, communicate statuses, and make sure that you do set your cutoff times to be like, look, you know,

I put in 10 hours today. I need to take a break. I'll come back to it tomorrow. Yeah, that's a good point too. I always think it's really important to kind of use that flexibility. Like there's times when we definitely work long hours because there's a big demo the next day or something really needs to happen or you're blocking somebody else. So you like kind of, you know, rearrange your schedule, you work late and, you know, get it done. Yay, hooray. I have zero problem with people making breakfast the next day and taking a little bit of a slow start and kind of making that up at some point or whatever. I think it's important that you kind of communicate that stuff,

especially if it's a big demo or something. You don't want to just be gone at 10 a.m. and everyone's trying to find out what you did or if there's a problem or whatever. So you want to be careful with that stuff. But don't be afraid to use that flexibility to your advantage because the business certainly will use it to their advantage, right? Totally. Yeah.

I mean, any business is going to let you work as hard as you want to work. I mean, in our career, you typically – I mean, unless you're contractors, you're, you're not getting paid overtime, you know, you're not getting paid hourly. And, you know, even my experience has been, even in a lot of contract positions, you're, you're doing it at a flat rate, not at a hourly rate. So there's really not a lot of advantage, but there is a more advantage to you to take a break,

to step away from it, clear your mind and then come back to it fresh. So, yep, it's, it's key. You have to know where to draw the line. If you're, if you're just new at this remote working thing, you have to set your own personal boundaries. You know, you gotta be flexible, right? Like, like Joe said, if there's a big demo, come on, don't be an idiot and don't be a

jerk. You know, you're going to do what you got to do. But on the flip side, you are working at home. You should be able to take some of those additional things because let's be honest, when you work in an office, you waste a lot of time. People stopping with side conversations in the hall, whatever it is, right? Like you waste a ton of time in an office. You are probably more productive at home than you are in an office and you shouldn't be punished when you're doing that kind of stuff, right? So as a worker, you know, work, if you're a manager, a boss, somebody that's in a leadership role, understand that people are probably working harder for you because you work harder to prove yourself when you're not in somebody's face all the time. So, you know, you have to be flexible

on both ends of it. Now, along the lines of this, you know, communication over communicating strategy, though, we haven't talked about keeping your calendar up to date. So in the case of the doctor appointments and whatnot that we mentioned earlier, like, yeah, if you, if you did remember if, if, or, you know, it wasn't a, an unexpected appointment. Yeah, sure. You know, add, add those to your calendar, uh, ahead of time. Uh, you know, obviously the examples that we gave before were like when, you know, you didn't plan for it or something like that, but, um, anything that you can do to keep your calendar up to date so that people will know what your availability is. And then that way, you know, you didn't plan for it or something like that. But anything that you can do to keep your calendar up to date so that people will know what your availability is. And then that way, you know, there are certainly times where somebody will ping me about something and I'm like, well, hey, you know, I don't have time to talk about it right now, but how about you schedule some time,

like block out some time on our calendars. And, you know, that way I can be fully focused to, you know, devote myself to whatever that topic is that you wanted to talk about, right? And use the tools available for it, right? So if, like, for instance, I wanted to set up a meeting with Outlaw and Joe, I should look at their availability on their calendar because I should assume that their calendars are up to date. And so I should pick a time that will work for all three of us. Right. Use the tools.

If you use an outlook, it has fantastic scheduling capabilities in there. It'll show you if things conflict and all that kind of thing. Same thing with G Suite or Google Suite or any other set of tools. Right. Learn your tools and use them to your benefit and everybody else's benefit. And I'm big on scheduling meetings for like even one-on-one type stuff. Be like, hey, I'd love to pick your brain and get like a picture of how something works. Like how does it build pipeline work? Like can I throw 30 minutes on your calendar just for you to walk me through?

Like I think that's totally awesome. I think that we should do this sort of stuff more often. So a lot of times, you know, I talk about, I complain about being on calls all the time. A lot of them are just like ad hoc kind of remoting sessions. And even though I complain about them, I'm really glad for them and I gladly accept them because it's doing that sort of thing that kind of helps make the whole, you know, the whole team better. And so it's not necessarily big, you know, six, seven, eight, 10 people meetings that are going on all the time. Yep. And there's one other thing here that we've kind of learned over time when working remote. And this is only something that you figure out

as time goes on is if something's urgent in an email, you need to call it out. Put the word urgent in the subject, right? It's not enough to just mark it high priority like everybody used to in the past and hit that exclamation mark before they sent the thing. But the problem is if you send an email that says, hey, there's an issue here, chances are most people who work remote are going to jump on that and be like, oh, this must be a really high priority because why else would he have sent the email out right now, right? So the problem with that is if you send out five emails a day and everybody just jumps ship of what they were doing and jumps on that, you're losing a ton of productivity, right? And you're

probably duplicating efforts a lot. So make sure if it's important, send it out, state that it's urgent. And then before, if you're one of the recipients of the email, before you start working on it, say, reply to the email and say, I've got this, right? And then that way everybody else knows, okay, I can wait. I don't need to do anything right now. You know, outlaw's working on this thing, right? If he needs help, he needs somebody to jump in, he will let us know. It does feel like a little bit of an oxymoron, though, because, like, if you want something to be urgent, then I don't know that email is the best form of communication. Like, I mean, email to me doesn't doesn't signify anything is urgent.

Now, what I do, like if. My kind of habit on in this kind of regard is if I'm sending you an email that I need you to do some kind of action on, I will in all caps prefix the subject with action required. And then and then give whatever the normal, you know, title subject of the email is going to be. But in that regard, I'm still not like, hey, I need you to do this within the next 30 minutes or an hour or something. Totally agree. If we're talking about urgent, urgent, the sky is falling, that's a phone call. What I'm saying is if you send out something that's like, hey, there's a problem with X, Y, and Z, you need to at least let people know, if you send out something that's like, Hey, there's a problem with X, Y, and Z, you need to at least let people know, Hey, that's something that we want to get on the books

that we need to do. But you know, Hey, don't stop everything right now. Right? If it's a stop everything you do, when you see this, then you prepend it with something like action required, urgent, something right. But it's worth noting that you call it out otherwise you can end up putting an entire team into um chaos mode when it's not deserved that's true and i think we could probably do a whole episode on uh email etiquette and like how to get what you want out of emails it might be really boring but i would i would like it yeah i mean i think a lot of times like and i'm sure a lot of people do this, I'll be at the grocery store or the drive-thru or something,

and I'll check my email briefly. And if I see something that's long or looks like it's going to get me twisted, then I'll just mark it as unread or not even look at it. But if I see that urgent or whatever, then that's a ticker to know, like, uh-oh, something needs to happen here. Yep. So be flexible as another tip here. And we kind of touched on that already. So unless you guys have something else to add this,

the only thing I have to add here is from a management perspective, if you know that your team's remote, you have to also be flexible, right? Like you have to know that some people are going to be away at times or whatever. What you need to care about as a manager, as a leader in a group that has remote workers is focus on the results, right? Like don't focus on whether or not somebody's at their keyboard between one and two o'clock PM. Focus on, did I get the delivery that I was looking for, right? And that's really, this isn't just for remote work. This should be basically everybody, everywhere in business, right?

Focus on results. You know, I've seen a lot of articles, especially researching this show, like about kind of work from home tips. I haven't really seen a list of things not to do. And I don't think I've ever heard of anyone trying to do this yet, but could you imagine if a work from home type place or someone, you know, doing everything going on right now, tried to say, okay, we're all working from home from nine till six lunch is from 1130 to 1230. And, uh, you know, that's it. If you need to be 15 minutes late, please email your manager for approval. That seems crazy to me. And so I've never been in that kind of environment. So I don't know what it's like, but I assume that there's some places that are just now dipping into working from home that are probably still trying to do that. And I'm sure

their hearts are probably in the right place where they're probably thinking, well, it's best to have everyone around at the same time if somebody needs help or whatever. And there's probably some benefit to that, but I am so much more in favor of you know leveraging flexibility and asynchronicity so if someone wants to work at 6 a.m because they're you know they got to take it get their kid ready in the morning like do it if you want to work later because you're a night owl you know whatever if you want to split your day up i really don't care as long as you're you know available to kind of communicate during like core hours and we figure out how to make it work. But I'm all about the flexibility. I agree. 100%.

God, could you imagine that'd be so weird? It's like, okay, it's nine o'clock. Everybody here. I know in the past, at least there've been, there've been tools for finding out if somebody's actually on the computer for X number of time a day and all that kind of like, there's like a roll call. Yeah. Working on results,

man. If you get the results you want, then, then you're, you're ahead of the curve. Right. And typically that's done by good leadership. Um, and by good leadership, I mean, people that are encouraging people to do the work they need to do, but also be able to have that flexibility. You'd be amazed by giving people a little bit of that flexibility, how much further they'll go to accomplish a task, right? It's a pretty big deal. But, you know, with your comment though, it kind of like, oh man, my OCD like kind of flare went off when you made that comment about like checking to see like how much time you're actually at the keyboard. Just because you're not at the keyboard doesn't necessarily mean that

you're not, you know, working. Like I know that I have a group of friends with that I go cycling with and almost every conversation that we have is work related conversation. We're brainstorming something or like hashing out some idea during the ride. So it's like, Hey, would you rather have a meeting at your desk

or would you rather have that meeting on a bike? Right. And for me, I'd rather have that meeting on a bike. And like some of those ideas are things that are like we use today. There are things that was like a random brainstorming idea. Like, hey, what if we were to do this? Could we do it? Could we make that work?

And, you know, what would life be like? And now it's actually a thing that we use daily. Right. Yep. Yeah. There's no doubt. The only time that you're productive is not the time that you're sitting behind a keyboard. So, um, one of the, one of the other things we have on here that is kind of crucial for working remotely, I think, is favor shorter milestones, shorter deliverables, right? Because you get more instant feedback. You can turn the ship quicker if you need to, right? If you have these super long project milestones and everybody's working remote, it's not as easy to get together and see that things aren't going the way that you need them to. Joe, you've got a smile on your face. I just looked at how long we've been recording already.

It's crazy, man. I thought this was going to be a short one. It is now. Just like encoding shorter feedback cycles that helps people get results and helps you kind of see when something starts to blow out. We're a really big fan of the term fail fast for like breakaway project that we can go after and try to either succeed or fail quickly. We know that something's not going to work and we can just go ahead and ditch it. That's actually something I

like a lot, by the way. When we adopted that term of fail fast, instead of, no, let's not do that, it was, let's get in there and see what it is if it if it looks like it's going well then hey it's no longer you're gonna fail fast it's hey let's turn this into a mission right so i i really like that adoption of spend some time see if it works if it doesn't move on right yeah i think working from home fits really well with kind of the whole like agile idea sprints um you know scrum all like all those things kind of all work together because they're all about that fast feedback and so you don't just go off in some weird hole and come back

together three months later like okay let's put the pieces together what do you mean you didn't finish you know like you got to find that stuff out faster but i think that's just a better way to work if at all possible anyway. So yeah. Small increments. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. The, the, the key on this one that he was about to say is working in small increments is if you have a task that's going to be longer than two weeks and you probably need to break it down a little bit further, right? Define what it is you're trying to accomplish.

And then, you know, that way you don't have just these massive long projects. And again, visibility is key, man. I hate this next one. I hate it with a passion, but I tend to somewhat agree with it. I mean, that's so hard. It is. It's impossible. So it's basically estimate your work items, right? We've talked about this in the past. All three of us hate estimating work because you're always wrong. It doesn't matter what you do.

You put in, you put in, it'll take two days. It'll take you one hour. You put in one hour. It's going to take five days. Like you cannot win this game, but it is important to be able to see, uh, at least roughly how much time do you think you have in front of you to get certain things done, right? It's just a guess. It is.

An educated guess, mostly, but a guess. So allowing and encouraging people to work in groups and teams, I think that's really important and really good. It helps everyone stay connected, and you get a lot of ideas and a lot of frustration out of it. And good frustration. I was going to say. I'm talking about the kind of pressure that makes diamonds like sandpaper and wood, right?

So, yeah, this can be a source of frustration when you get wildly different ideas kind of coming together and taking different tacks on things. And sometimes it can be frustrating to be going down a path and to have someone come in and say, what if we did things completely differently? And especially if it's something that you already can kind of consider, but, um,

you know, that's, it's worth talking about that stuff. And sometimes as you find yourself explaining why you didn't do something, you realize maybe those reasons actually have gone away and maybe that actually is still on the table. Yeah. Those are, those are hard conversations. Yep. Then you got the brainstorming sessions.

I mean, we probably, I say all three of us are involved in those frequently. They can be good. They can also be frustrating. Many scrums that are feature or project based, this is one that I think all three of us sort of adopt where if we're working on some sort of special mission, we'll just set up quick, hopefully calls to, to get like touch points, right? Like, Hey, where are we? Anybody have anything that they're currently, you know, waiting for somebody else to get done or, you know, just a quick status. It shouldn't be super long. I'm less a fan of general scrums. I like it to be more targeted.

Right. Like these, these project-based ones, right? Yeah, yeah. Like, because it's so easy to tune out on the larger ones where, you know, people that you aren't working with, that aren't working in the same use case or function or whatever that you're working on, it's so easy as those members are given their status to just tune them out. And then that's when you're like, okay, let me turn off my camera and go back to work.

And that's when the outlaw forgets to mute and you hear his mechanical keyboard clacking away in the back. What are we having for dinner? Yeah, okay, I'll be out there. I never thought to turn off my camera while I was working. That's a great idea. I'm going to be turning off the camera a lot more. I don't like when there's a scrum. And this happens a lot when there's a lot of people.

You'll have a scrum and then one subject will just dominate. So someone will go 45 seconds, 45 seconds, 45 seconds. And somebody will jump in and say, wait, haven't we thought about an essay that's like 45 minutes down some rabbit hole? And everyone else who's not involved is just like, well, there goes my afternoon. There goes my 45 minutes. Yeah, man. Yeah. Yeah.

That's not a scrum. And then the last thing we have here is pair programming. Encourage people to do it, right? If you're trying to onboard somebody into a new technology, a new area of your code, whatever, it can be super helpful, but you better use the right screen sharing application. Zoom. So, you know, in all seriousness, like it's super important, but it can be a really effective tool. I know, Joe Zach, you do it quite a bit. I've done it a few times. It can be really helpful.

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, just backtracking one moment, though, because ever since you talked about these still series artist sevens, I've been kind of like obsessed, like looking into it in the background here. Did you know we've actually talked about these before? Did you know that? No, because you of all people should. It was on your developer shopping spree in episode 93.

Oh, man, that's been a while back. So the point is, the point is, is you're consistent. I am. That's the takeaway. Yes. I try to offer good advice. Oh, by the way, guys. So I think one of our friends shared this with,

with me the other day and it's awesome. There is a page and we might even put it in the show notes here where people are learning things about their significant others that they didn't know because they've never been stuck at home with them. right? And there are some really funny comments like, I totally didn't know that my wife was that. We'll circle back to this person, right? Or I didn't know that my husband was this take-charge person at work. When at home, I can't get him to make a decision. Yeah, so it's some really funny stuff in that particular article.

Oh, I want to see that. Yeah, it's right there at the end of what we just ended on the show notes there. I'll drop that down in the resources we like. Today's episode of Coding Blocks is sponsored by Datadog, the monitoring platform for cloud scale infrastructure and applications. Datadog provides customizable dashboards, log management, and machine learning-based alerts in one fully integrated platform so you can seamlessly navigate, pinpoint, and resolve performance issues in context. Monitor all your databases, cloud services, containers, and serverless functions in one place with Datadog's 400 or more vendor-backed integrations. If an outage occurs, Datadog provides seamless navigation

between your logs, infrastructure metrics, and application traces in just a few clicks to minimize downtime. Write yourself today by starting a free 14-day trial and receive a Datadog t-shirt after installing the agent. And if you're interested in that Datadog purple awesome t-shirt, you can visit datadoghq.com slash cutting blocks to see how you can enhance visibility into your stack with Datadog. Once again, that was datadoghq.com slash coding blocks.

Hey, how's it going? Joe here. It's going good. How are you? Thank you. Please consider leaving us a review if you haven't already because it really helps us out a lot. So if you go to codingbox.net slash review, we try to make it easy for you. And we know it's a little uncomfortable, but we promise you that it's worth it. Fingers crossed.

No, they're not. Just kidding. But, yeah, if you could leave a review, that'd be great. And with that, we head into my favorite portion of the show. Survey says. All right. So back in episode 124, we asked the survey that everybody is dying to know the answer to because I know I am. Which keyboard do you use?

And your choices are code keyboard, DOS keyboard, Ergodox, Kinesis Advantage, Kinesis Freestyle, Apple Magic Keyboard, Apple Aluminum Wired Keyboard, Microsoft Sculpt ergonomic keyboard, Microsoft Surface keyboard, or the ultimate hacking keyboard, or some other mechanical keyboard, or some other chiclet keyboard, or the other keyboard. And your last choice is the one that came with my laptop, because ain't nobody got time for carrying around fancy keyboards. All right. So all of those great keyboard choices and you know, we kind of have a love affair with keyboards. I don't know if you have noticed this, but if you go back and look at like our developer tips or not tips, but shopping sprees and developer gear, like there's always at least a keyboard recommendation on

there. It seems like so. Yeah, we have some opinions about keyboards. So what do you think? Let's start with Alan. I'll let you go first. What do you think the most popular answer was with a percentage. What keyboard do you use? So I'm going to go with this only because I think that's what it's going to be. Not because that's what I would agree with, but the one that came with my laptop, because ain't nobody got time for carrying around fancy keyboards. I'm going to say 24% and it's going to hurt me if I'm right.

Which one? Wait, which one did you say? The last one, the one that came on my laptop. Oh, the one that came on my laptop, 24%. Okay, sorry. And I actually know the answer because I talked to Mad Viking God and my soulmate from Australia, Michael Tippett, on what the appropriate answer and percentages should be. So I took the two answers, combined them. And so I can tell you without a doubt that the true answer to this is the ErgoDox with 111%.

111%. I like it. I like it. I don't know why you're laughing. Whatever. By the way, I'm probably going to buy one of those. I like it. I don't know why you're laughing. Whatever. By the way, I'm probably going to buy one of those, but go ahead. The Ergodocs and somehow more people than voted voted. Yep.

And we got to 111% Ergodocs. It's the right. It's the true answer. I don't know if that's what people selected. You know, I mean, okay, so before we get into this answer, one, I'm a little opinionated here because I love my DOS keyboard. Like that, it's just, it's everything I would need it to be. It's everything I want it to be.

It's awesome. I love that keyboard. I see Alan shaking his head. That's only because he hasn't experienced the magical love affair that is the DOS. It needs to be ergo. If they made it ergo, then I'd care, but I don't.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that just says a weakness about you, that your old frail body can't handle anything but an ergo keyboard. Can't buy that. Yeah.

See? Meanwhile. Then you got Joe Zach who's had cuts on both his hands to take care of that kind of stuff. So, you know. Yeah. But yet you don't use an ergonomic keyboard, do you? I use the split, yeah. The sculpt.

Oh, you do? The sculpt. Oh, okay. I'm about to get a third one. Yep. A third one? You need to be able to... How do you type on the two already is one question,

and now you need a third one? It's funny you mentioned. I actually busted the mouse on one of them, so I used the keyboard from one set and the mouse from another set, and this second set is wearing out now, so i'm about to go get a third hey you should look at the logitech k860 also if you haven't it's a crude it's no no i think you'll like it all right i'll look is it does it have a wired mouse because i would love a wired mouse uh i'm sure it's not i think

it does but no no that so this is just keyboard. But look up the K860. All right. Sorry. I mean, I've got my mouse recommendation, which has forever been the Razer DeathAdder. I love that mouse. And it's wired. Okay. We'll leave mouse for a future survey.

But I've definitely already tainted the population there with what the correct answer is on that um all right so alan says it's the keyboard that came with his laptop at 24 and joe says that mathematically it makes sense that it would be their ergodocs at 111 i revealed the truth, yes. Yeah. Yeah. And it should come as no surprise when I say that the person who got the correct answer is obviously going to be Alan. No! Yeah, of course, no. I'm going to get a drink. We're all lazy, so of course it was going to be the

one that came with the laptop. It makes sense. A lot of people would pick that one. What's the percentage there? I'm kidding, Alan. You did not get it right. Oh, cool cool you were wrong so it's mechanical keyboards it was a mechanical keyboard it was not the ergodoc so technically neither one of you got it but uh it was other mechanical keyboard for the win okay so wow so um you know i i'm i'm interpreting that as if you have some random Corsair mechanical keyboard or your favorite Steampunk mechanical keyboard or something other than one of the ones that we listed.

But yeah, because I think even it was 32% of the vote. That's pretty high. That's good. What was number two? Number two was the one that came with my laptop, but you overshot it because it was 18%. Okay. And then it's just going to go down from there. So ErgoDox was not so great.

DOS did beat it. DOS. I just had to point that out you know i'm not trying to rub it in um but i mean it won for a good reason look dude the ergo docs pushes 350 if you want it right like it's not it's not the same thing with the kinesis advantage too and all that and now alan is not cheap it will set you free. Alan, you will be happy to know that the other keyboard did come in fourth place finish. That's amazing. I have no idea what kind of keyboard that's supposed to be because I thought that my list was already pretty exhaustive. So if it's not a chiclet and

it's not a mechanical keyboard, I guess, I think we said other, the other, other keyboard would be things like that whisper quiet Dell keyboard that came with your Dell or, you know, your IBM or something like that, I think is what we said, but yeah, yeah, I'm not a fan. I was surprised though. I was surprised that the code keyboard, um, you know, came in where it did. It came in below the ergo docs,

which was surprising to me. Uh, your sculpt or ergonomic, that was third. It's dude. The sculpt is it. So here's one thing that somebody in Slack actually brought up. If you have long fingernails, chiclet keyboards don't work.

And as somebody that doesn't have long fingernails, I never thought about it, but I have noticed anytime that my fingernails get to a point where they need to be cut, it is actually more annoying to type on a chiclet keyboard. And it's just not something that ever really struck me. But as soon as she said it, I was like, I'll be doggone. That's absolutely legit.

okay. It's good. I'm sorry. I didn't, I thought you were done. I'm sorry. No, that's good.

I, I, um, it's going to be surprising, but I have an opinion about this. Oh yeah. So, so, okay. So here's the thing.

So I do grow out the fingernails on one hand for guitar playing, right? And I don't care what type of keyboard I'm typing on, it's annoying. Like anytime it's like, you know, like if when I do cut them or, you know, like if I break it or something like that, then it's like, oh yeah, okay, now I can type fine, you know? But because it does feel like, I don't care what the type of keyboard is. It feels more comfortable, but like, you know, uh, yeah, I mean, it, it does it. I love it when they're, when they're just long enough to play. Cause then, then you did, there's definitely a sound difference when playing guitar

uh when when your nails are grown out a little bit better but it is annoying from typing so yeah but it doesn't it doesn't matter if it's mechanical or not and when you see people that have like really long fingernails and and they're typing and they have to like type like they have their with sideways well they had to, like, type, like, they have to... Sideways? Well, they had to keep, like, their fingers, like, really flat on the keyboard in order to type with the bottom of their finger. And I was like, how? That's so...

Because I'm usually with the tip of my fingers typing. Right, same. So. Yep. Cool. All right. Well, for today's survey, given the topic of working from home and trying to not lose your mind and also be productive, I'm asking, we thought we'd ask like, hey, what's your preferred

method to increase your productivity? So your choices are code to music in the background. Is that freedom rock? We'll turn it up, man. Do you guys remember those commercials? No. No. Oh, man. I probably just aged myself.

Absolute silence, except for that annoying buzz coming from my UPS and my monitor and LEDs or Netflix and code. That's a thing, right? Or treadmill or bike desk tone, my brain and my glutes. Or Pomodoro. I live my life one quarter hour at a time. Or pajamas all day long. Executive lounge wear. Thank you very much. Yes.

Or take a break. Go for a walk. Eat lunch, anything to reboot. So I think this one will be multiple choice too. We'll do this as a multiple choice one. Okay. I think it makes sense. I think it makes sense. Yep.

This episode is sponsored by the University of California, Irvine Division of Continuing Education. Python is one of the fastest growing programming languages and UCI's Python Programming Certificate Program will prepare students for opportunities in web development, data analytics, core software development, and a wide range of scientific and mathematical applications. Students will learn programming concepts including programming styles, idioms, libraries, data structures, data retrieval, processing, visualization, networked application program interfaces, and databases. UCI certificates in data science,

predictive analytics, machine learning will prepare students to gain the necessary skills to land a job in data science. Additionally, those interested in predictive analytics and machine learning will learn to improve and optimize business performance. If you're looking to become competitive in the global marketplace, advance your career, or start a new one, UCI has the resources to support you on your new path. Spring registration is now open. Visit ce.uci.edu slash coding blocks. That's ce.uci.edu slash coding blocks to learn more and reserve your seat. Again, that's ce.uci.edu slash coding blocks and reserve your seat today. And so now let's talk about conference etiquette. And by conference etiquette, we don't mean like the conferences you go to,

but the conference calls that you're going to be on, which – Used to. What was that? Used to go to. Oh, yeah, right. I mean, obviously, these are the video conferences that you're going to have your camera on, right? I mean, that should be etiquette number one is camera on. I don't know.

Are you seeing a pattern in my opinion on this? What if there's more than 10 people? Camera on. Camera on. I don't care if there's 100 people on. Unless somebody asks you to turn them off for bandwidth problems. On. Always on. Yes. Just with problems on always on.

Yes. Just always. Nope. Nope. Yeah. I don't care what the number of people are on the, on the call. If,

unless it's a problem, I think the camera should be on personally. Um, but your default, uh, a mode of operation should also be to mute. You know, if you're not talking, mute. Yes.

And if there's more than how many people, mute. Zero. I mean, unless it's just you and one other person, you know, mute if you're not talking. It's kind of like, yeah, I don't know. I mean, I see where you're going with that. Cause it can be tedious depending on,

uh, you know, for really small groups, if it's you and like two or three other people, you can be tempted to not do it, but just practice, just practice it. I don't need to hear you slurping your soda.

I gotta say, this is another place where Zoom absolutely wins. If you are on a Zoom call on your phone, they have a mode where you can be on a screen. Like if you're driving, especially is what it's for. If you're, you know, on the move, there's a screen that's like tap when you want to talk. So you hold down the button when you want to talk and you let go of it when you're done talking. Like, that's just genius. It's beautiful.

Zoom, don't change a thing. Man, so good. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, this one. This one's so key. When you get on a call with several people, ask, can everybody hear me okay? It's so simple.

And WebEx still, I'm going to hate on it a little bit more, for whatever reason, what Outlaw said where it'll revert its settings, sometimes it'll decide to turn auto gain on and somebody will start talking and blow your eardrums out. But then it'll come back down to earth. Then it'll be another 30 seconds before they say something. And then the next time they do,

then it's like a kick drum going off in your ear. And it's like, man, come on. Your ears are doing mic check, right? Yeah, I was going to say that like one thing that I really like, you can do this with Zoom. And I don't believe you can do it with a WebEx that I recall, but I love the ability of like when you create the,

the invite that you can actually say like, Hey, by default, participant video is on participants are muted when they join. And then that way they have to explicitly unmute to talk like, you know, they don't, you know, get caught off guard right away, you know, but their videos on, cause you know, that's my pet peeve. Do you remember being nervous when you first started doing teleconferencing? Nervous? I don't think I, I don't think I was either. I don't know. I do know like whenever kind of new people would join the team,

it's like the first day they would wear a polo. And by day four, it's like underwear on their head. Yeah. Nobody cares after a minute. The next one, too, though, that's pretty good is if you're presenting, hey, can you see my screen? Because if you're like us and you have multiple monitors, they might be able to see a screen, but they may not be seeing the one that you thought they should see.

And here's another little pro tip. Because what Joe Zach mentioned earlier about, you know, he might be in a meeting and he doesn't want messages coming up. Well, a lot of times you'll get notifications and some of those notifications, you may not want everybody to see. So instead of sharing your entire screen, share the window that you plan on showing. I know that can be annoying sometimes, especially if you're going to be bouncing back and forth between things. But, you know, if you're showing Visual Studio Code, choose to show Visual Studio Code and not the rest of your screen. The other day I scripted a joke for scrum because I thought it was so funny.

I didn't want to forget it. And then someone later when I shared my screen, it was up on a sticky note and they saw that not only had I scripted this bad joke, but it was like part of like, so I said, yeah, I plan to give it.

And so it was embarrassing. It was premeditated. I mean, premeditated, bad joke i feel like this would be a great opportunity to uh go back to the tip from um episode 125 that joe gave where you can use muzzle to automatically uh hide those notifications that are going to come up if you're on a Mac, but, uh, that's awesome anyway. Yeah. I mean, cause, cause you can, you know, just share the specific application instead of

that whole screen, like you said, and, you know, and sometimes that's better anyways, because, you know, depending on it, it does help to know your audience because depending on the monitor that your audience is using, uh, you know, they might not be able to read your 55-inch 4K screen that you're coming from. So you don't want to share the whole screen, the whole desktop. So it might be better if you were to go ahead and scale that down to a 1080p screen and then just share that one application. I'm not referring to anyone in particular. I know it sounded like a rather specific example, but

it was truly just off the cuff, off the top of my head. Samsung model blah, you know, anybody that's doing that. Yeah. Definitely no one on this call whose name is Mike or Joe. Oh, man.

I like that, too. We got to dip here. I'll give others an opportunity to talk. And if someone hasn't said anything in a while, I've been kind of quiet. It's good to kind of mention it and ask for the feedback. And I know this is something Alan's really good at, and I'm really bad. Like, I get really flustered when I try to break in, and it's a heated conversation, and I feel rude stepping over people. And then it's hard to get in there.

And so you end up kind of saving your comments. And then Alan will say like, Joe, you've been quiet for a while. I got it. And I'm like, yes, three things. But part of that is I'm not afraid to be like, hey, somebody, I'm passionate about this. I'm going to say what's on my mind. But yeah, you kind of do have to be willing to nudge in, which is, that's why the video is so important though, right? Because if I see that Joe's about to say something, I'll be quiet.

If I see that Outlaw's about to say something, I'll be quiet, right? And you miss a lot of opportunity to let other people talk if you don't share your video because you don't see those things happen. Yeah. I mean, it's I know speaking from my own experience, like some there are times where like I'll try to like nudge in when I can, and depending on like how, uh, you know, depending on what I think the urgency is of what I'm trying to say is like, there'll be times where it's like, if I try, just because of the latency involved in the network or whatever, you know, you don't, you don't necessarily mean to over talk somebody or, you know, as they are also trying to butt in, but you know, sometimes it happens.

And so there'll be times where it's just like, oh, forget it, it's not even worth saying. You know, and if it truly is worth saying, then I'll just, you know, keep waiting until I do get my opportunity. But hey, related to that though, here's a pro tip that we haven't mentioned yet. And that is, and this is another reason

why something like Hangouts is not, this is where like Hangouts comesouts falls apart in my mind, is that most of the teleconferencing type applications, the default is going to be like, hey, whoever's speaking is going to be them, you know, their face in the big area. And you might see like a couple of thumbnails of some of the other people, if at all, depending on the application. But a lot of them will have like a gallery type view where you can see all participants at one time and at, you know, an equal size amount of real estate on your monitor, right? And for me, I love that view in every one of the applications, because then if you're not talking, then you're never going to show up in that screen in that default speaker view. But if I'm watching gallery view, then I can see like, oh, hey, you know, Alan or Joe might want to say something and they're just patiently

waiting. And, you know, sometimes they might even like, I know I'll do this. I'll like literally put my hand up, you know, kind of like as an indication, like, hey, you know, if it gets around to me, I've got something to say. And those are the kind of like nonverbal cues that you can see because the camera's on and you put it in the gallery view. Now, Hangouts, and this is why I say where Hangouts falls apart, once you get beyond four people in the call, then Hangouts will be like, no, I'm only going to show you whoever's speaking in the large view, and I'm going to show you a few thumbnails, and that's it, right? Yep.

You can't change it to go up to 10 or 15 or 20 or 30 or any of that like i'll at least give webex credit in that realm right like you can you can get a bunch of people on screen same thing with zoom um hangouts got some catching up to do yeah zoom's got a raise hand flag uh that a button you can push i like a lot i like the idea of being like whenever people want to hop in like instead of everyone trying to talk over each other like waiting until for a quiet moment to hop in there like idea of kind of like raising your hand and saying like i've got a medium and then kind of i don't know being a little bit more orderly i do feel bad sometimes when like we've been a remote team for so long and every once in a while we'll get on a call with like a third party or something who's not kind of used to our culture

and here we are like these hardened veterans used to like zoom in all day long and we've got other people and i i just i don't know if sometimes i'm worried that maybe they're just getting trounced by our like aggressive speakover style yeah step up to the plate people yeah you get on the call with with the the guys from coding blocks prepare to get bounced we're not that bad maybe sometimes well so next up is use a tool to help you focus um whatever it's easy to get distracted by any number of things i mean come I mean, it's only the center of our survey for this episode. And you're like, whatever. No, no. There's a difference between being productive and something to help you stay focused.

Like, come on, man. Like, if you're working on an interesting problem, I would venture to say that you'll be focused, right? If you're working on something that's boring, yeah, it's hard to focus. But there's nothing on this planet that's going to make me go, oh, yeah, that'll make me focus better. You know? It's not that. But no, no, no. I mean, come on, man.

We've both been there. It doesn't matter. I mean, sure, if it's interesting then that's definitely going to help but it could still be you know boring or uh you know just chopping wood kind of style but if you have something that's just going to like help you zone out and to where like whatever that task is that's all you're going to focus on it can totally help you right okay that's fair noise canceling headphones kind of do that for me. They, like, block out the world.

So, yeah, I guess. Yeah, I guess that's a tool. But I guess I was thinking, like, the Pomodoro thing, eh, whatever. Get out of here with that. I experimented with Pomodoro a little bit for studying type things. Like, if I was going for, like, I just got the GCP certification, like, I would do things like set timer for an hour because it would be things i just didn't want to do i was like fine joe just do this for one hour just focus on that and then you could play a video

game or whatever you know i negotiate with myself and so what i would find usually is by the time that thing was buzzing like i would be into it and so it was kind of a a way of uh gaming gamifying myself because i don't have discipline i guess it was a way of gamifying myself because I don't have discipline, I guess. It was a way of encouraging discipline that I was lacking at certain times. You brought up the noise-canceling headphones. I think we've talked about this before in the past where this was more in the office environment, but there would be times where I had noise-canceling headphones that I was wearing them. I wasn't necessarily listening to anything. I just wanted to block

out the rest of the world. Yeah. Same, same. Like I'll do that. Yeah. I mean, I guess there's some stuff to this. I guess this goes back to the whole self-help things. Like I just cannot stand most of that stuff anyways. I don't, I don't know why. I mean, I assume that we could all probably benefit from self-help books and whatever else. But I don't know, man. Like, I'm always more focused on results than... No, man, come on. That's not fair. We've all seen you for years now.

You always have headphones plugged into your ears. Your music is usually, you know, you were always... This is this guy that would have a dedicated amplifier on his desk at work this is when we would like go into an office he would have an amplifier on his desk and then and then uh not a mixer but like an eq and everything like he was set up so that he could have the most amazing sound quality from his phone. Right? So don't tell me that you don't have your way of increasing your productivity.

You would jam out while you're writing code. Yeah, I mean, I guess. I don't know. I guess when I think about tools to help me focus, so I'm thinking like Pomodoro or things like that, like I don't need that. Give me an interesting problem, right? Like that's focus, right? If I'm doing something boring, then it doesn't matter.

Like five minutes in, my eyes are droopy. I'm yawning. I'm drooling on myself. Like it's more about the problem, the challenge, whatever it, I'm yawning, I'm drooling on myself. Like it's, it's more about the problem, the challenge, whatever it is I'm working on. Well, I mean, sometimes, you know, it's not, yeah, it's not about staying awake. Sometimes it's just about like, Hey, I can't be distracted by everything else that's going on around me. And, you know, it's easy to have, you know, some music on and just forget about it. Right. Cause like, you know, the thing that for me, and I know that,

you know, we're going to have an article about like how that's not necessarily for everyone, but, um, you know, it's easy. Like music, especially as one of those things where you don't even necessarily have to have it up loud. If it's music that you know, that you already know, you'd be surprised just how quiet you could set that volume to. And in your mind, you can still follow along the song, right? Because you know it, right? Like you only need to hear, you just need to barely be able to hear a couple bars of it. And you're like, yeah, I know where it's going next, you know, and whatever.

And it can be enough to like just keep you distracted from the things around you to where you can focus in on what you're doing. That is true. That's absolutely true. All right. So I guess I'm not going to poo-poo on this as much as I initially was. There you go. All right. So how about we go to choosing the right desktop sharing tool?

We covered that one. I think so. We can move on. Yeah. We all agree it. Yeah. Move on. Yeah. We all agree. It's zoom. All right. So let's move on to develop a routine.

Disagree. Oh, really? Come on. No freaking routines. No. Okay. I got to hear your reasons.

Cause I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to tell you why you're wrong. As soon as you tell me why you think you're right. No, you just tell me why you're right with your routines and I'll tell you why you're wrong. No, no, no, no, no, no. Because I'm going to prove to you why you have a routine.

Go. Let's hear it. I do not get up and start work roughly at the same time. I don't either. Yeah, I got nothing for it. Like some mornings, some mornings I'll want to listen to an audio book before I get rolling just to kind of give me some entertainment for the day before it gets rolling. Some mornings I'll listen to podcasts. Some mornings I will watch a Udemy course. Some mornings I'll be reading about things.

Some mornings I'll make my own breakfast. I do not follow routines. The only thing that I routinely do is get in my vehicle and drive around mindlessly for a little while. So there's part of your routine. And then the other part of your routine that I heard was that you make a point to every morning, you make some time for you, whether that's taking a course, reading a book, listening to an audio book, listening to a podcast. Every time you take that your routine is you make some time for yourself in the morning. That's your routine, man. I mean, I guess you could say that, but my

routines also to eat lunch and dinner. Like I don't count that as a routine. I get up, I brush my teeth. I go do this. I go do this. I go do this. Right. Like that's not my routine. My routine is I'm going to do whatever I feel like in the morning before I get rolling. Right. That's not my routine. My routine is I'm going to do whatever I feel like in the morning before I get rolling. Right. That's I don't know if you'd call that a routine. It's not like like I get what you're saying. But but usually when I think of a routine like that's somebody who gets up at five o'clock in the morning, goes hits the gym for an hour, comes back, eats a small breakfast bar and then goes to work like that to me is a routine.

That's a routine. An example. Sure. I'll give you that. I agree. I think it's maybe good to have a routine, but I think some people, it's good for them to kind of have that rigor and they do well with it. But like, just like you said, Alec, for me, like I definitely, there's times I always

wake up early. But sometimes I'll play a video game for an hour. Sometimes I'll do a Udemy course. Sometimes I'll get programming early. If I had a 12-hour day the day before, I'm probably not going to be waking up and getting ready to go back to programming. That's the day when I'm probably going to make breakfast or take a long walk with the dogs

or whatever. You know what it is for me? I like... I don't like knowing everything that's going to happen. I like some level of, um, spontaneity, spontaneity in my life, right? Like it's, it's one of those things to where if I go to bed and I know that I'm getting up the next morning and just picking up exactly where I left off the previous work day, like that's, I'm like clockwork,

man. No way. Say what? I'm not, I'm like, there's no question about it. Yeah. I,

I'm, I'm up at around the same time. I, uh, you know, I would either take the kids to school when, when that was a thing. Uh,

but now, you know, there's no more school ever again. And I go get my breakfast from the place that makes the greatest fries ever. We've already agreed. And I order the same thing. They know exactly. Well, I can't even walk in the door anymore. But when I could, they would like know, they would already have my order ready. They knew exactly what I was going to order, like clockwork. And I will spend, you know, time reading in the morning.

So I usually don't like log on for work. Like I usually log on for work at around the same time, which is, you know, generally speaking around nine 30. And I don't feel guilty saying that because, you know, I stay on so much later, but, uh, you know, yeah, but I'll, I'll spend, you know, 30 to 45 minutes before that time, you know, reading on some subject or, or studying on something. Right? Like that's pretty common. I can't do that, man. And Joe, it sounds like you're kind of more, you just, you need that non-structure just

to make your day not feel like, oh God, I know what's coming up next hour, the next hour, the next hour. Yeah, I just like to be able to focus on whatever I think is most important. Sometimes that's just, you know, having some me time playing a video game or whatever but uh a lot of time like sometimes they may be spending two hours responding to an email you know that i got the night before or whatever i do like to say that uh i do try to uh finish reading all my email at the end of the day i hate like leaving for the day with unread emails or unresponded to emails so i like to do that at the end and i really hate starting the day by reading emails because sometimes they'll

just suck you in. And I feel like I get a big productivity burst when it's like quiet and no one else is around. Like if I get an early start, like, you know, like log in and just start coding and working on something and solve something without getting distracted by emails or whatever, then that's really nice. But don't always, I'm not always able to do that. Let's also, let's also, this also, this cannot be stated importantly enough,

the CIA and all those people are keeping track of everything you do. And if they know your pattern. That's right. Security, national security. Yeah, totally kidding. So I can be easily faked then. It's almost like, I don't know that years ago I'd read something about, Hey,

when, when you take a shower and you do everything with your eyes open, if you close your eyes and try and do all the same things, it works different parts of your brain. And, and so I'll do random weird things like that just to make things more interesting. Right.

And to me, that's what's fun. Like I like the spontaneity. I like the not knowing exactly what's coming, not knowing what I'm going to do. Like, dude, like when I say I drive around randomly in the morning, I'm not kidding. Like I've probably hit every back road around where I live. Cause it's just like, Oh, I'm going to take a turn here. I'll eventually find my way back home. And it's, it's just, I don't know. It, it, it helps keep things fresh for me. I always feel like I might find a better way to check this out. A lot of this would probably drive you nuts. But when I'm, I make coffee every morning, as soon as I wake up, sometimes I measure

the coffee that I put into the thing. Sometimes I just dump it from the can. Sometimes I use a spoon. Sometimes I do half a pot. Sometimes I do this. Sometimes I use filter water. Sometimes I don't. There's a very little pattern to how I make coffee, and I've been doing it for many, many years. Okay.

I'll just say it. What if I accidentally find the perfect combination, right? You never know until you try those 5,000 other ways. I don't even buy the same kind of coffee every time I go to the grocery store. Like, sometimes I'll get the same one six times in a row. Sometimes I'll be like, you know what? I'm going to get the dark even though I don't like it as much. Me too.

I swear to you, I'm the same exact way. I know what I like and I like what I like. And I have, I actually, there is a measuring, not a spoon, but like a measuring cup, I guess, that came with the coffee canister that I have. And that's what I use to scoop. Every time when I make the coffee, I'm making the exact same amount and I'm using the same scoop to measure. I also have a separate measuring spoon for the coffee creamer so I can put in a measured amount of the coffee creamer.

But a lot of this though, I mean this is way off the topic of the routine part but more just about like you know diet and and like because even the foods that i'm going to eat i i will like you know have a measured amount of of what i'm going to eat in an effort to try to like because otherwise like my my my default reaction is well like i want to eat all the things like i yeah, like whatever, if you're putting it in front of me, I'm just gonna be like, oh, I need that in my face. And so, you know, but so I have to like, you know, give myself some kind of restraint. So I like will measure it. Hey, by the way, both of you guys need to buy the AeroPress. If you like coffee, you should try it.

So Carl, Carl Schweitzer from MS Stuff Show is actually the one who turned me on to it. It's amazing. It's amazing. All right. So let's carry on here. And we only have a few more before we make this a five-hour show. So one that's key here would be to have a dedicated workspace. And when the notes were put together, I guess, Alan, you said, like, if possible. But I don't even think that should be an if. Like, have a dedicated workspace and and when the notes were put together i guess alan you said like if possible

but i don't even think that should be a if like have a dedicated workspace like in order to be able to work to to to be effective to like from working from home where do you play video games i mean in the same place that i would work. All right. At my desk. It's not dedicated. But no, no, no. That is dedicated. You know, Joe Room. No, no.

I think what he's saying is fair, though. That's where he works. That's where he games. That's fine. But I mean, for me, like, I don't care. I have a laptop. I'll work anywhere in the house, right? Like, I put in some headphones.

You never do that. I know. You never do that. You never do that. If you remember right there for about a month, I went to Starbucks and worked there every day because it was just, I needed to be somewhere different. I needed to go to the outside world. We all used to be able to do that.

I mean, we're talking about now in this new world that we live in, you have to work from home. And so in this, in this new age, you have to have from home. And so in this new age, you have to have a dedicated workspace. And my point, yes, I too used to go to work at a Starbucks or a Chick-fil-A or whatever, but that's a part of our past. We just have to look on it fondly and we got to move on. We can't do that anymore. I will say the, the one part of this to where I, you know, being completely honest here, yes, especially when you're taking calls,

you need a place to where you can at least take a call and not be, you know, not sound like there's, there's some sort of circus going on in the same room. So yeah, you need to have something set up, even if you got to go show yourself in a closet. Right. So whatever. I'm just suddenly reminded of like seeing little ones climb on stuff in the background and flinging diapers around.

Yes. My friends have seen my kids grow up from, from every good and bad angle there is. Oh, man. The next thing that we have on the list here, and I completely agree with this, is make sure you stop at some point. Like I mentioned it earlier, you've got to have a cutoff time. You can't sit at your computer all day, every day. At some point,

it will wear you down. So you need to make sure that you are caring for yourself personally, mentally, as you go through this. This next one's great. Yeah. I mean, I feel like I should say this one since I'm the one that measures my food. But, you know, avoid overeating and going to the pantry all the time. And, you know, I mean, the kitchen is close, but, you know, try to avoid it if you can. I feel like it's easier to eat healthy at home than it was for me, like, going out. Because, man, if there's something on my plate, it's gone. You know? I've definitely eaten healthier since I've been at home. I struggle with that because I find it easier to, like, order something and know that it's

constrained to whatever that, you know, thing is rather than like, oh, okay, you know what? Here's the deal. I'm going to go ahead and make, like, a week's worth of something, and then I promise I'm not going to eat it in one setting i promise that before i have that chance i'm going to like and that's why i like you know i forced myself to be like no no let's let's measure this out so it makes sense it definitely does make it a little bit harder when the refrigerator's right there and you got a snack closet and all that kind of stuff, right? Like, do your best to minimize that because it won't take long and the pounds will add

on. You thought that freshman 14 or 15 was real? Just get that work from home 15. Wait till you get the senior 50. Seriously, it happens quick. Oh, man. I like this next one, too. Get out of the house right like running air

yeah yeah it was legal or oh you can still do it just don't breathe the air around you just don't get caught don't get caught you better have a you better have a hall pass yeah and i'm a big fan of this on you know and this goes kind of goes back to my undisciplined approach on life. You know, I don't try to say like break time two hours after I start, take 15 minutes. You know, you have meetings, whatever. You have other stuff that's important. I don't want to stop in the middle of being productive just to go whatever.

So sometimes that ends up with me taking a walk at 415 in the afternoon and I don't tell anybody. I don't update my status explicitly. Hopefully it gets set when the computer goes to sleep or I lock the screen, whatever. afternoon and i don't tell anybody you know i don't update my statuses explicitly hopefully it gets set when the computer goes to sleep or i lock the screen whatever but uh yeah i just think that's important i think it's good to just you know take a break every once in a while and especially it's kind of cool to walk around your neighborhood like i feel like i really know my neighborhood well like i know who drives what cars who drives too fast like whose yards a mess whatever because i'm walking around the neighborhood all the time like a weirdo.

That's awesome. For me, it was going out for a ride. Go out for a mountain bike ride or something like that. That was the thing for me. Unfortunately, they've closed all the parks now. We're just going to wait it out, I guess. But yeah. So I guess I'll have to walk, I guess, is the point then.

So the other tip is keep your meeting short like this one. Have an agenda and stay focused on it. You can see that we rock this one. We did. Hey, we actually did stay focused on this. Apparently, there was way more information in here than what we'd remembered. So, whatever. I want to try the whole thing.

I heard about Amazon doing it where basically you would print out something before the meeting. You have a written description. Everyone would go read it and then come and stay on topic. It drives me nuts when meetings are so chaotic by the end of it. You don't even know what you've talked about. It's like been seven different ideas. You're not even sure which one you decided on. Oh,

I, I'm a big fan of structure there, even though I'm not a fan of structure anywhere else. That's a, that's a whole nother episode on things I don't like about meetings. Cool. So that, that wraps up this portion of it.

We do have several resources to share with you links from blogs and other things that we'll do. And I did want to point out, Zoom actually has quite a few articles that, you know, because of this whole COVID-19 thing that's going on, they have a bunch of articles to help you within this one post. Also, Slack, we mentioned we love. Teams, Microsoft Teams is actually a really good program. That is also a we mentioned we love teams microsoft teams is actually a really good program um that is also a link that we have here and then i do have the funny tweet thing down at the at the bottom of this resources thing so you know feel free to go in there and check out this stuff if you didn't get your fill here and uh and if you have another one that we don't have listed make sure to leave that in the comments for a chance to win a house.

It's kidding. Just kidding. I think I just started sweating. All right. Well, with that, we will head into Alan's favorite portion of the show. It's the tip of the week.

Yeah, baby. I'm going first. I've only got one, but it's really good. Learn.unity.com is a great way to learn Unity 3D. So if you've got some time at home and you've been wanting to learn Unity, you want to make some awesome games in C Sharp with an awesome tool,

then this is a great way to do it. They've got tons of courses. They're super high quality. They've got a vested interest in you learning Unity. So it's a great way to get started. And so you can go there right now and sign up for three months and just chow down. That's really cool. And this is because of people being stuck. Yeah, that's awesome. Yep. And so for my tip of the week, I got one from Ali who gave me another Git related tip. So you can go to the GitHub learning lab at lab.ivery course, but there's all kinds of them in there where like just getting introduced to GitHub Actions. So there's the canonical Hello World reference, but there's an introduction to GitHub.

So if you're new to GitHub, there's a course on that. There's learning how to secure your workflows with GitHub. Let's see what else we got here. Going from theory to practice, security essentials, managing conflicts and pull requests. So yeah, then they've got courses on languages. So you want to get an introduction into Python, whether it be beginning level or intermediate level. They've got courses on Node and Ruby, TensorFlow if you want to get into machine learning. Yeah, so all kinds of great courses there. I felt, you know, should be made because in the last episode, I shared the get work tree tip that Sid shared with us. And I made the mistake in my explanation of it is saying like, oh, hey, if you wanted to like create the branch while you're, you know, creating that command that you could have it track master. And Sid

pointed out that what I meant to say is that you're creating the branch based off of master. And so, uh, you know, I was like, oh yeah, that's a great call out. Uh, so I did mess that up. So thank you, Sid, both for the tip and for the correction. And obviously, thank you, Ollie, too, for the great GitHub lab learning tip. Very nice. Well, I almost gave this one to Outlaw for this episode, but then he remembered the one from Ollie. This one's actually really cool. And this came from Nick Craver.

It was a tweet that he pushed out. And so think about if you have a build pipeline that gets kicked off whenever you have new commits or something. He actually gave a little tip in his tweet that was just awesome. You can basically force an empty commit. It has no files. It has no actual changes to it. But throwing this commit in there with a message will kick off a build pipeline that you might have set up. So if you wanted to do that, it's basically do a dash dash allow empty,

dash dash allow dash empty on your get commit message, and that will do it. I take issue with this one, though, so I'm glad I didn't. I'm glad you took it and not me so that we could have this conversation. Because it kind of like, okay, yes, fine. You could do this.

This would work. And I'm not going to discredit that. But it kind of smells of like, well, then there's something wrong with your build pipeline. If your only way to kick off your build is by submitting a commit, Like that seems like a code smell or in this case, like a DevOps smell or something like, you know what I mean? Does that make sense? Maybe.

Get ops one day because that whole kind of premise is, is built around you kind of checking in and committing and rolling back. So I don't know if that's specifically what he was kind of referring to. But in that case, it's something where you do have this kind of separate repo that you're kind of using in a weird way specifically for deploying and rolling back, but it's separate from your normal code base. We should do an episode on that one anyway.

Was he referring to GitOps though in this? I didn't think he was. He didn't mention it. He just said if you need to kick a build. But I mean, it kind of depends on your environment too, right? Like I know Amazon has their build pipeline locked down hardcore, right? So maybe people don't have access to go just kick off a build using, you know, the UI or something like that. So maybe

this is a way to sort of force it. I mean, if you have the ability to kick to, to automatically merge in a commit, be it empty or not into the, the branch that's going to get automatically built and deployed or where like that, I mean, how, how is that better than having the ability to like a button where you could just click a, yeah, do a build? Yeah, I don't know, but I thought that was kind of cool didn't know it existed but you can actually commit basically nothing so that that's uh there's a good tip now here's the one that's actually really awesome and so this comes from our friend chris riley who showed this to me so he was putting together some stuff using do, and he really wanted to be able to do something similar to what I did with the Blazor video that I did on YouTube a while back to where you have your source file sitting on Windows, and you can modify them, and then that's linked inside the container through a volume mapping. And any changes you make outside on the file system, those will get carried over into the container and it'll all work, right?

Well, there's a bug in volume mappings in Windows that occasionally acts like the file is not even there. So you could go to cat this file five times in a row, four of the times it'll work, the fifth time it'll be like, nope, file doesn't exist. And it's some sort of bug in however the volumes are actually getting mapped into the container. So he had this problem and he's like, man, this is not going to work. Well, he came across Visual Studio Code has an extension called Remote Developer. Remote Develop, I think is what it is. Remote Development.

This thing is amazing. So you install this extension and it actually installs three other extensions. One for SSH, one for containers, and one for something else. I don't remember what it was. WSL. There you go. A Windows subsystem for Linux for those who don't know. But here's the really cool part. So check this out.

Let's say that you have files. Let's say it's a Ruby app. So I'd done some FluentD development, right? And I had done something similar to where I was mapping in a directory that had the source code so that I could modify it in Visual Studio Code on my system and be able to see it and run the Ruby app inside Docker, right? You don't have to do that. You can basically click in the bottom left corner, say, hey, I want to open up Visual

Studio Code in this container type space. And what will happen is Visual Studio Code will have all the tools that you have installed in Visual Studio Code, but you'll have access to the file system that's inside that container. So you can actually work just like it's installed on your own system inside this container interactively. And if you made changes to it, you could always Docker CP that stuff back out. Now, from what I understand, this also works with SSH. So if you made changes to it, you could always Docker CP that stuff back out. Now, from what I understand, this also works with SSH. So if you needed to work remotely on some Linux system or some other system that has SSH installed, and you want to be able to access the files or whatever over there, you can launch this thing in remote development mode, have access to

the file system, use your Visual Studio Code tools that you've already got installed and work with it there. Dude, this is one of those things that kind of changes the game when you start doing things like this. It's pretty amazing. And there's even a little video on the second link there. There's a little video at the bottom of the page that shows you what they're doing with this SSH version of it. So yeah,

killer, killer stuff. That's awesome. I never thought about using, using it for a local development like that. It's cool. Yeah. It's basically as if you install visual studio code inside another Linux

environment and just go to work or in whatever environment set up, right? Whatever Docker environment you got going. Super duper cool. All right. Well, I lied because I do have one more tip that I've been sharing. I was sharing for you. Guys. Because this is relevant given everything that's going on.

But starting this week, so we're a couple days late, but it is now a thing, this exists in our lives, Metallica Mondays. That's right. 8 p.m. Eastern, Metallica Mondays. Metallica will share a live concert on their YouTube and Facebook

page every Monday. So that is now... Isn't that cool? Yes! Right? Isn't that awesome? So now you can relive some of these great moments. I like it. That's awesome.

Yep. Alright, so we'll have a bunch of resources we like. I like it. That's awesome. Yep. So, all right. So, you know, we'll have a bunch of resources we like. All these tips and obviously the notes will be available for this one. And, you know, in case if a friend happened to share this episode with you, you know, through a link or whatever, like if you haven't already, you can find us and subscribe to us on iTunes or Spotify or Stitcher or whatever your preferred podcast platform is. And if you can't find us on that, hey, let us know and we will correct that. And if you haven't already, like as Joe mentioned earlier, we would love to get a review. They really do mean a lot to us. You can find some

helpful links at www.codingblocks.net slash review. And I had to say it that way because my lawyers contacted me and they insisted that I not say it in any other fashion. Yep. Yep. That's about time. So yeah, while you're up there at codingblocks.net, check out all our show notes, examples, discussions, and more. And send your feedback, questions, rants, and pet pictures to Slack. And make sure to follow us on Twitter

at Co-Otting Blocks or head over to co-ottingblocks.net and find all our social links at the top of the page.