The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Community, Building Remote-first Teams, and Web Performance Inclusivity (Interview)

Episode Date: September 8, 2017

Karolina Szczur joined the show to talk about community building, building remote-first teams, the hiring process in tech, product development, and the inclusivity factor of web performance.

Before we start the show, I want to give you an update on the last few weeks of the impact of Hurricane Harvey and the flooding here in Houston, Texas, where I live. First off, my family and I were safe. Our property is safe. We were not flooded. On Friday, August 25th, this Category 4 hurricane called Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Corpus Christi, which is four hours southeast of Houston where I live. They predicted it would stall out, head back into the Gulf of Mexico, strengthen, and then head northeast towards Houston, and that's exactly what it did. There's what's known as the dirty side of a hurricane. It's the upper right-hand side of a hurricane that carries the most moisture, the strongest winds, and that dirty side of a hurricane is the upper right-hand side of a hurricane that carries the most moisture, the strongest winds. And that dirty side of the hurricane stalled over Houston, Texas for two and a half days, dropping nearly 50 inches of rainfall on the greater Houston area.

Now, to truly understand the gravity of this, you have to understand that we normally get around 50 inches of rain in an entire year. With Harvey, we got that in two days. And this was in every way a record-breaking storm. Verified. It's verified. It's a record-breaking storm. There was massive catastrophic flooding all around Houston. Many of our friends have lost everything and several friends of ours, their houses are still underwater right now as I speak. And many listeners have reached out to me directly via email, Twitter, Slack, and I really appreciate it. Thank you very much for caring. Many have asked how they can help. Here are two websites where you can go and give money, donate cleanup supplies, or even organize a crew and come here to Houston and help someone clean up. The first is

youcaring.com slash JJ Watt. And the second is bayoucityrelief.com. Both links will be in the show notes. Thank you. Bandwidth for ChangeLog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at fastly.com. And we're hosted on Linode servers. Head to linode.com slash changelog. This episode is brought to you by Hired. Hired matches outstanding people with the world's most innovative tech companies out there. Hired uses an algorithmic job matching tool in combination with a talent advocate who will walk you through the entire process of finding a better job. You might be looking for a more flexible work schedule,

more money, or remote jobs so you can travel and see the world. You might be looking for opportunities at Facebook, Mixpanel, or Squarespace, or the many other top tech companies out there looking for engineers on Hired. You and your skills can be a valuable asset to any of these companies. You just have to take the first step. That first step is Hired.com slash ChangeLog. Go there, learn more. Our listeners get a special $600 hiring bonus when you find your next opportunity on Hired. Once again, Hired.com slash ChangeLog. Thank you. episode outside with Carolina Azor about community building, building remote-first teams, the hiring process and tech, product development, and the inclusivity factor of website performance.

So let's start off the conversation with community building. You know, I think that many of us may go to conferences, many of us go out into the community, whether it's local or, you know, go into regional conferences. And we call this thing community. Right. And it's this word. There's people who blog about it. Everyone's trying to build it. Everyone's trying to do it. What exactly is building community? What is community to you? Wow. That's quite a loaded question to be the first one I must say. I've actually given a talk about community building and trying to define community at HybridConf, I think, four years ago, and it took me months to research how people define community, and I'm still

unsure if I understood it correctly. But I think, especially in the tech industry, one thing that's important to point out is that community is something that's more than events and conferences. As you've said, it's nice to go to those gatherings and have fun, go to parties and meetups, see some talks, but community spans beyond that. And I'm really willing to focus on going beyond that in a sense that we create community every single day. It's not necessarily just running an event that's one day,

two days, or an evening. I want something that will actually last longer than that. So I really want to focus on creating, not only gathering people with same interests and same goals and same values together, but also creating rules for being safe in those communities. That's something that I'm really interested in. So I would say trying to define a community, I would probably say it's obviously a group of people that have same interests, same values, same goals, and they pursue them together and individually as well.

But it's also a platform that's safe for everyone who's the part of that community. And by that, I mean, most underrepresented groups. So it's interesting that you describe it on the second part as a platform to be safe. So you're assuming that when people gather together that the I'm also assuming this too. So I'm not saying this is only you, but based on what you said there, that it should be a place where people are welcomed. People are safe. You shouldn't feel like you are a part of a community in which you're threatened. Right. Like that would be anti-community. Definitely. Definitely.

Why do you think it happens so often now that it's that it's we're still kind of working through this gap of like safe to not safe? Do you think people are evolving how they describe and participate in community? What do you think is where do you think we're at with this? I think it's a very complex problem and I wouldn't be nowhere near actually pinpointing where the root cause is, but I think one of the things that I'm seeing is that the communities were never really totally safe or inclusive, but now we have that platform, which is the internet,

where it's so easy to just go and kind of troll someone or be mean to someone or be kind of harmful towards someone with a degree of being anonymous because those people who tend to do those things oftentimes are hiding behind, you know, avatars and fake names, etc. So I think it's just easier to be unsafe, in a sense, that people just use this platform to be ha ha ha, you know, like kind of, it's a joke or being abusive or being a troll. So yeah, this is just more pronunciated now that we have this great platform because people feel like they can hide behind it and no one will never know that they're a 15-year-old

really angry behind their computer locked in their room, for example. So I guess it has become easier to be abusive or be harmful. And some of the platforms that we use frequently, like Twitter, don't really have the necessary tools to fight the abuse. It's tough, I guess, to be Twitter these days because they are not, I guess, from I'm assuming our perspective, you and I perspective, and maybe even most of the listeners listening to this, have been potentially using Twitter for quite a long time. We would probably consider ourselves early adopters. We didn't join it when the voice started saying, hey, go to Twitter and vote for your favorite candidate or whatever, or get into politics or whatever. We were there probably originally whenever most of the Twitter scene was tech.

It was the technology scene, the software development scene, right? And they're in this position where they've grown over years and their business has not exactly stayed in alignment. And they've got this big Goliath next to them called Facebook that's doing so much better and growing at such bigger numbers. And they've got to be basically the police to some degree for stopping abuse like I haven't delved far enough into where abuse happens and how it's being fought on Twitter what what do you know about that subject and how can you enlighten myself and the audience listening um as far as I went with twitter and abuse um when i've started being a little bit more proactive on twitter and saying so to say massive air quotes controversial things as an actually

talking about equality and feminism uh so not really that controversial. I've started getting a fair bit of abuse. Recently, a tweet of mine got a fair bit of exposure. It was about GitHub's ElectronConf that I've pointed out because they had an all-male lineup, which is absolutely unacceptable in this day, 2017, especially with taking into account the history of GitHub. That was fairly public. And I only pointed it out in a snarky comment, but it absolutely exploded.

And first, I got a lot of support from the community saying this is absolutely unacceptable. But then it got deep, deep to 4chan and Reddit and Hacker News and Gamergate got to me and Trump supporters for some reason. I don't know, like weird, weird kind of people just trying to abuse me. And I've quickly learned that Twitter's handle of abuse is just completely useless. They have a way of reporting tweets and reporting users, but they, in my experience, they never act on them. I don't know if they shadow ban them at this point. I know they have a tool for that, but I haven't seen it in action, to be honest. So all you can do really is just block and mute them. But then someone else will join the conversation and bring up

some other tweets. Some clients aren't very good at supporting blocking. So you end up blocking someone on Twitter.com, but then it doesn't block in TweetBot. So you end up seeing reviews twice. It's just, it's not very good to be honest. It's not where their priority is. Yeah, that's tough because you've, I can't even attempt to break down how tough that is for Twitter, the platform to, to do that. Cause they've got, you know, they've had for, for years, third-party clients like TweetBot, for example, like I'm a TweetBot user. And I never thought

that if you blocked on Twitter, that TweetBot wouldn't recognize their block there as well. So it seems kind of weird that it's like that. That seems like a big engineering issue where they should just fix that. Honestly, it's just inconsistency, so to say. Sometimes it actually works properly, but sometimes some of the people still surface. It's very inconsistent. So I feel like it's either like third-party clients or just IPI problems. I can't really speak because I've never worked with Twitter IPI.

So I don't know how, how good it is. So we spoke to the, the sides of community where, you know, it's a platform to be safe. Let's talk about the side where you're trying to build. You mentioned that you don't have to be at a conference. Community doesn't happen exactly just face to face. It happens. I think you said every day. What did you mean by every day? you don't have to be at a conference community doesn't happen exactly just face to face it happens i think you said every day what did you mean by every day like give me an example of what

community building is every day or showing up to be part of community sure um so i'm really into the whole diversity and inclusion part of community work so on a day-to-day basis for me, it's mostly leveraging the privilege that I have and leveraging my exposure to publish articles and educate people how to build better communities or run better events that are more inclusive or being a little bit more proactive in the form of reaching out to people that I think could do a better job, for example, conferences that have only lineups or don't have code of conduct, and they could do better because sometimes it's actually, they just don't know any better, which isn't good enough, but you can educate them and kind of coach them into being better, so to say, but some of them

are just pure malice. I think lambda conf is one of the greatest as in the worst examples of that i recall seeing some dust about that one and yeah i wasn't close enough to know exactly what was going down and uh we tend to be when i say we i mean the change like our organization tends to be uh you know not so much not cognizant of the negative side of of things happening out there but we try to focus and shine a spotlight on the positive things happening and to that doesn't mean to shove the things that are negative under the rug and forget about them that just means that you know if it's negative or you know like the lambda con for example as you just, I went far enough to read into what happened there and to some degree, but I couldn't give

a firsthand account of like, this is what happened. This is who did wrong. This is how the retro activeness of this, and this is who was hurt, or this is who was the victim, or this is who, you know, I don't know all the details. I didn't know exactly what happened there. Can you kind of give maybe, maybe it's not worth going into what do you think is it worth going into um i don't know i mean at this point yeah probably not i mean if someone wants to see how bad it can get i recommend looking into it that's an example of the the worst you're saying that's definitely some of the worst cases of like mismanagement and conferences and just bad intention that i've seen lately and you mentioned

the tweet that you put out recently that with they got some i guess a lot of retweets or a lot of communication back and forth about that that the electron conference coming up had an all-male panel. Is that right? Yep. Is that still the case? I'm not caught up on this conference or the lineup. I'm actually going to Google it right now while we're talking here. Actually, what happened right after the tweet got some traction, so the way it happened is it was a blissful Saturday here in Melbourne, a wonderful city.

I was at breakfast, and it came to my attention that is all my conference from GitHub, which to me is just so disappointing. They should know better. They have diversity people and with their history, especially they should just not do that. But yeah, so I just kind of angrily tweeted that they should do better. Congratulations on this not very good lineup. And then I just went on with my weekend plans. And then after a day or two, I've realized it has completely exploded and GitHub has already taken down the lineup from their website, saying that they're going to get back on track with the conference

once they find a suitable lineup, which upset a lot of people. Wow, yeah. And there was no public postmortem or anything like that. There was just a change on the website, and they didn't announce anything whatsoever on their Twitter or blog post anything. And I've reached out to them, to the head of diversity of GitHub, and they've decided they're not going to publicize what mistakes they've made. So they completely didn't really, they really wanted to have like public record of it happening

in a way I guess. And they didn't want to say, oh, openly, we've made a mistake and this is why it happened. And we are fixing it right now. So to me, it was poorly handled. But I guess they're revisiting those choices. So that's beneficial to the community. How far back was this tweet? How current is this?

Days, weeks? A few weeks. weeks few weeks so it's uh i was on vacation last week so that's why i'm sort of out of the loop big time because like when i go on vacation i do my best to disconnect and uh so i'm assuming at least a couple weeks back because this is something i would have definitely heard about and as you'd mentioned uh and listeners you could probably go there now. ElectronConf.com. It says we published a list of speakers that does not reflect the standards to which we hold ourselves. We will be postponing this event until we can deliver a more diverse slate of speakers. the only artifact, essentially, the only feedback that we've gotten from GitHub about your tweet that essentially helped everyone else discover that this is an all-male panel.

It's GitHub. They should know better. Yeah. And I mean, to me, it's just so disappointing. Like, if you have standards that you hold yourself against, then that wouldn't happen in the first place. So where are your standards? Like, I just... Can we pause there for a second, though? yourself against then that wouldn't happen in the first place so where are your standards like

i just i just can we pause there for a second though because that's i hear that and so the first thing i think about is is can can people make mistakes can companies make mistakes i would say definitely i mean i make mistakes all the time with all sorts of things, but I think especially the irony that it's GitHub who had, like they had really public outings with diversity and horrible culture. So taking that into the account and doing this, it just, and I do hear accounts of people working there or people who have worked there so um right that just adds up that just adds up like i don't have anything against github personally as a product i think

it's a great product um i don't want to be mean to them publicly i don't want to you know like i don't want to go in a fight with github because that hobby. I just, the reason is that if you say that you have standards, then you have to live by those standards. Right. You have to have checks and balances. Yeah. You have to have somebody saying, okay, we're doing something, it's public, the community's involved, is the community represented? Yeah. And especially in GitHub's case, like every single developer and a lot of designers are using GitHub. This is a product that's basically representing our industry in a massive sense. So they have a responsibility to cultivate culture. This is their responsibility.

So something like that just shouldn't happen. And they have people in full-time roles working on diversity. And I don't want to blame those people because I know it's a big company, decisions get made and delegated down or up. And it might have been someone else's fault. I'm not here to blame anyone. I'm just saying that they should have known better. Well, let's break this down then. Let's use this as an example of how should they have handled this? You know, given what you had just said there were you know they represent the community in a lot of sense right like because they are who

they are they have a lot of responsibility what what do you think they could have done differently given the circumstances uh i mean every single time so when I run events, I mostly explicitly use a call for speakers process, which obviously invites everyone to apply. And we worked very hard at JSConf and CSUSConf Australia last year to make that process even better and to foster an anonymous process that will bring more women and more underrepresented groups into our conference, which is really tricky because again, the process is anonymous. So definitely not only having a call for speakers, which I think they had in some sense, that's a first step. And then secondly, obviously you have to have code of conduct. You have to have information about who is the organizer, despite the organization. Like I actually want to see the faces of people who are organizing this event

so I can see if the group of people that's organizing is diverse so I can look up their work. I can kind of be comforted with the fact that I know those people. So in this case with the faces, you're saying, don't just say GitHub's behind this. Say who from GitHub is behind this. Yeah. It's not even GitHub specific. A lot of conferences say it's sponsored by this company or run by this company and some people.

I want to know which people. So I definitely would urge conferences to actually publish about pages that actually talk about who specifically is behind the conference so that information is easily accessible because that that makes it easier for underrepresented groups to feel safe and feel comfortable with applying and then of course there are the anonymous conference speakers processes offering coaching or even pointing to materials that are already online about how to write a proposal, how to prepare your talk. Conferences that have other initiatives for diversity and inclusion are also great, such as having scholarships that, for me as a person from an underrepresented group, that's basically a guarantee that I know that people organizing this event actually care about diversity.

Like it's not copy pasting code of conduct because everyone caught up with that. So they know it has to be there. But to me, that doesn't mean anything at this point. Like anyone can copy paste it and they do nothing else. Like that's pointless yeah you see if i hear you correctly what you're seeing behind the the code of conduct that it shouldn't be oh let's go out there and see what the community you know what the standard is and let's copy it and paste it put on our site and boom check that box you're saying that it should be more intentional yeah yeah so i mean

again code of conduct has become a standard at this point basically there are very few conferences that don't have code of conduct but um my question as an organizer and as a participant in conferences as a speaker or as an attendee is how do you enforce it if something bad happens do you have a plan have you coached your staff on how to handle that right do you have um scholarships have you coached your staff on how to handle that right do you have um scholarships for underrepresented groups where you give out tickets for free um do you have gender neutral bathrooms do you have um food that caters to all of the diets that people have who are attending your event do you um have parties and side events that are not entirely focused on alcohol all of

those things so there's a list of things that i'm actually working on releasing um as an open source project kind of like an conference inclusive conference checklist to help organizers go through it but um yeah i would say that code of conduct is just literally tip of an iceberg. And a lot of women who have been working in progressing events and progressing inclusion and diversity events know and notice that as well, that code of conduct is only a beginning. And at this point, just having it's obviously not enough just to have it, but to educate the volunteers and or paid staff that are part of the conference, having a plan if something does go wrong and knowing how to actually act upon it. You mentioned you're coming up with either resources or an e-book or something like that. I couldn't recall exactly what you said there, but is there anything out there like that now? Is that why you're making it?

Is it because it's not out there currently any sort of inclusivity or safe space checklist? I would say there are a few resources. I always defer to Ash Strind's work. She has done amazing work in the diversity inclusion space. She's hosting a traveling conference called AlterConf that caters to underrepresented groups, which is a great event. So she has published extensive materials on diversity and inclusion in general and conference-wise as well.

There's the Geek Feminism Wiki that has a lot of materials in that space and just blog posts scattered around if you look for them um and then obviously you can you can look up some events that just have a lot of visibility and really high standards um such as gsconf eu that i'm part of gsconf australia and css confs as well usually hold themselves against the same standards. So we try to do basically everything that's, and this should be an industry standard and more, which is really hard work. But yeah, I guess a long way around this question, the answer is there is no centralized resource that would be an e-book or a really long article saying these are the things that you should be doing.

Go and do them, which is why I'm trying to start with a checklist that conference organizers can just look through and think which areas they should be focusing on. And then maybe in the future, I will publish a book. I have an outline of an inclusive events book, but I just honestly don't have the time and funds to focus on writing a book right now. You do a lot of writing on Medium and you seem to, it seems to me, if I didn't know you and I didn't have this conversation with you and I didn't have a chance to ask you, you know you what your process is for determining what next steps you might take on something like this, it seems to me that your MO for doing this would be to publish something that strikes a chord with the community, get shared around, and it's sort of a gauge to see, is this something I should focus some time on? And considering that, is that something you plan to do first?

Do you think you'd blog about it first? I know you've covered some of these things to some degree in recent blog posts, but just not maybe to the depth you're probably planning on. Yeah, I was thinking about a short series of posts. I know there's interest. I just honestly, to write a book, it takes months. It would take months to produce. And we all have jobs and we all try to have a life outside of months it would it would take months to produce and

we all have jobs and we all try to have a life outside of those jobs we have jobs what things to do responsible adults um yes i know right can't always have fun must must work not all fun yeah yeah so it's just hard to really juggle actual full time work, then working on a product and then some community building and activism and actually have some rest in the meantime. I am considering maybe trying other avenues such as Patreon and try to actually get some monetary support so I can take time off to do that. Right. Because I think it's worthy. But again, it requires kind of monetary support and focus on that to deliver something that's high quality. Do you have flexibility in your full-time work to be able to,

even if it was for a stint of like two months or something like that, do you have the ability to step away? Is that flexibility able to you know even if it was for a stint of like two months or something like that do you have the ability to step away is that is that flexibility available to you not really to be honest so even it's so it's not even a money problem it's more just a time problem and maybe even an energy problem like you have enough energy to do it yeah there, there are many, many things at play here. I'm in a really weird space right now, and I can predict a lot of changes in my life, personal and professional this year. So I guess I'll just see how I go. But I really I think it's really important and I would really love to focus on that. So obviously, the next step could be a blog post. The next step could be, you know, the things you just talked about, but you've got some hurdles happening there. We're here. We're right here right now.

What kind of actionable feedback or advice could you give to listeners that may be organizing a conference that could be do's and don'ts or must do's? I would definitely say that it's definitely difficult to get those materials that I've already mentioned to find something that will just straight up give you actionable advice. But I think there are quite a few events that are doing an amazing job. And JSConf Europe is one of them. CSSConf Europe as well. I recall amazing things being done by XOXO back in Portland as well. So I guess homework for a future conference organizer or current conference organizer and a meetup organizer as well would be just to look up those events, see what they've done,

and try to implement that in their event. Read what Ash is writing about diversity and inclusion at events because her writing is amazing and very, very actionable. So these are resources that aren't too hard to find, but honestly, we all just have to kind of sit down and be willing to do that job and not expect others to do that job for us because that's fairly common.

I get a lot of emails asking for free advice or free work in helping other events which is fine but i'm just saying this knowledge is out there we just have to sit down and actually um actually parse it find it um and try to implement it so yeah my advice would be uh look up some amazing events uh JSConf family of events, jsconf.com. XOXO, definitely work with Ashton and try to slowly implement any event. It's hard work, but it's definitely doable. After the break, Carolina and I talk about building teams, specifically teams that are remote first. We break down what that means, why it's important.

And we also talk about the dark side of being a remote worker. The impact of real-time communications like Slack, maintaining work-life balance, being able to work eight, play eight, and sleep eight. Something I try to do every single day. All this and more after the break this episode is brought to you by GoCD. GoCD is an open source continuous delivery server from ThoughtWorks that lets you model and visualize complex deployment workflows with ease. GoCD helps you automate and streamline your build, test, release cycle for reliable continuous delivery, promote trusted artifacts,

see how your workflow really works, deploy any version, any time, run and rock your tests, compare builds, take advantage of plugins and so much more. Head to GoCD.org slash changelog to learn more. So my background in terms of what you may know now is as a podcaster, right? Like running the change log, doing what we do here. But prior to this, before I was a professional podcaster, so to speak, like somebody who did this full time, I was primarily a designer, product manager, UX designer. That would be the camp I camped out in, right?

And I worked for this nonprofit called Pure Charity, still an awesome place to go, purecharity.com. And we started out there as a remote developer team. And part of the team was centralized in Rogers, Arkansas, and everyone else was distributed throughout. It just happened to be at the time, Texas and Missouri. So I don't know why those two states in the United States, but those two states. And over time, as the company grew,

we started to hire more people in what we call, in air quotes, in-house, right? In the localized office, everyone else was distributed. And it started to turn into this us versus them scenario. And I don't know how we got there, but we attempted to build a remote. I thought we were trying to build a remote company, a remote distributed company, and it didn't seem that way. And at some point it became an us versus them battle. And next thing you know, we're just, you know, it wasn't always at war. It just always seemed like there was some sort of anxiety between an us versus them scenario.

And it was like developers trying to make the product and business, you know, trying to dictate where it should go. All this crazy stuff. Right. But you've written this deep blog post on building remote teams first. That's my, you know, my story, so to speak, into remote teams. And I can probably go deeper than that with you. But let's open that up. Let's talk about building remote teams.

What are people doing right? What are people doing wrong? And what do you think about the story I just shared with you? That's a big topic. So just to give a little bit of background, I've been working remotely for at least six years, I think. Before I moved to Melbourne, I was living in K West Coast, which usually meant no overlap whatsoever. So late nights for meetings, some pajama meetings, all the fun times. And I kind of got into remote work by accident.

I was just frustrated by the state of the industry in Poland. I was frustrated by low pay and nothing interesting coming up. So I kind of ventured into looking for something elsewhere, other countries in Europe and US. And US was an obvious choice because technology industry there is just much bigger. So I had to learn quite quickly what remote actually meant and how to make it work for myself

and the teams I was working with. And wow, in terms of advice, at that point, there was almost nothing, no resources. I think the only thing that was available to read about remoteness was actually the book published by Basecamp's co-founder, the Remote Book, which I still would definitely recommend because it's great. I've read portions of it, but I've mostly listened to it. I'm an Audible type of person. Like I will buy four or five books from Audible and listen to them, you know, that week before I'd read a book. I don't know why I'm like that, but I've listened to it and it's a phenomenal book. I think it's also a good book about running a company in general.

It doesn't have to be remote specific. It talks about meetings and pointless meetings and pointlessly taking people's time without reason. And I think that you can apply that advice to any organization, not necessarily remote. So I think that was the only resource available at that time and then afterwards a lot of companies popped up that were remote first such as Buffer or HelpScout that I think still kind of lead that space right now they publish a lot of articles quite frequently about remote culture working together in general which I think is a great starting point if you're looking into

starting a company i think it's harder when you transition um so as you said i think that's a fairly common thing to happen that you have headquarters somewhere in the world and then you decide to hire remote workers and then there's this you versus them situation because they are so disconnected from everything that is happening on site that it's very difficult to make that work right there would be inside conversations that we would miss there would be meetings we weren't invited to because we were you know treated as as optional i guess because we were remote and i'm like well hey we need to be in those meetings too because if we don't if we can't give our feedback into where you're trying to go or the business decisions you're trying to make and we're developing actively developing and a non-existent product for, I don't know if that's exactly the reason why, but for whatever reason, our opinions and our professional opinions were not, you know, they were, they were sort of respected in the moment and then, you know, behind closed doors

thrown away. Like they would say one thing and then do another, you know? And I guess I probably shouldn't say some of this stuff on the air because this is a podcast and I'm kind of forgetting that. But that's what happens, though, right, is in this scenario where you where you build teams today, right, in today's world, technology worlds where you're building a product team, like building the web platform, anybody building things on the web, anything that touches the web, you've got to have a team that can be remote. And it seems like your position and things you're advocating for is building remote first, which is sort of this twist on it.

Not just remote, but remote first, as if even if you have a headquarters, you should still act remote. Is that right? Yeah, I definitely love the remote first approach mostly because it gives you tremendous flexibility. And right now I'm a person who is not married. I don't have any children. So I actually have a lot of time at my hands. I can make decisions fairly quickly and decide what I want to do with my day, my weekend. So that's fairly convenient. But I think remoteness is actually very helpful for people with families you can spend more time together you can be very attentive oh yeah towards your partner and towards your children i think it's it's great um of course there are

downsides as i've mentioned that article there are dark sides of a remote work that you have to be aware of and you have to manage the distinction between life and work quite a bit. But I think it's very empowering. And what really frustrates me is companies that advertise themselves as remote, but actually being something that I call like remote friendly rather than remote first. So they would say, oh, you can work from anywhere, but actually it's only within this country anywhere, which is a fairly popular thing to see not only in the US, but also Australia, which basically prevents you to like if you're an immigrant in Australia, so to say, it prevents you from traveling extensively to see your family, which isn't really a happy place to be in. Family is kind of important, right? Yeah.

So the reason why I say remote first is because a lot of people like to say like, oh, we're cool, we're remote, but they actually don't live up to the expectation that you would have often. Like they have a bunch of rules that would be hidden somewhere in the HR documents that actually prevent you from, you know, having deaf flexibility. Do you think some of these things are stemming from policies or tools available that makes it hard? It seems like your point there was

work anywhere, but anywhere in the US or anywhere in Australia, not to be able to live. I think you're originally from Poland, right? Yes. So you probably want to go back to Poland to see family. Oh, definitely. And you can't, it sounds like. I do, but I think in those scenarios, I actually don't know how much leave you get in the US, but in Australia, by law, it's four weeks per year, which is a fair bit.

But when you think that you're actually flying across the planet, the length of the planet, so to say, four weeks becomes nothing because it makes no sense to travel for less than two weeks. And then you can make maybe one trip per year or two trips. And it's all never enough to see everyone to visit everyone um so it becomes like a really kind of stressful position to be in because you can only go back once a year basically yeah you're sort of forced into it because of the distance traveled yeah and there's a cost yeah i think to fly from here to come see you in australia would be like at least 18 or 19 hours yeah so that's that's like a day like an entire day on a plane not any fun for one uh two just the time like who wants to spend 20 hours on a plane no one you get used to it but yeah and if you got like 10

days or 14 days of of leave as you said, two weeks, you said four weeks mandatory. But, you know, you can do that. You know, that's you're spending two of the days traveling just on the plane. And then you've probably got some time going to and from the plane and all the decompression that you've got to do. Prep it's ready to go onto a plane and like because you don't just get off the plane and start partying. Right. You got the plane and potentially maybe crash for like another 12 hours or something like that and recharge and then become a human again. Yeah. I had some trips that were entirely ruined by jet lag, like just entirely. Um, yeah, but answering the question, I think, um, the lack of full support for being a remote-first company is firstly policy.

I think in the tech industry, we have so many tools. We have amazing engineers and designers and managers. We are perfectly capable of executing on this. Some people just choose not to, and they just really like to micromanage people and control what they do as if they weren't adults, which is something that just blows my mind, and it just annoys me every every day when i think about it um but secondly there's something else

that i think goes unmentioned but i think it's important from the company's standpoint uh which is tax um so there are two problems from the from the company standpoint and from the employee standpoint if you're working remotely and you're in europe you're let's say you're working with someone from new york you're never an employee you're just a consultant who happens to be working full-time you get no perks you get no insurance or anything you just get paid on a given day um but that uh creates a problem for the company um taking into account recent legislation in u.. and other countries as well. You can't really hire consultants on a full-time basis. You will get in tax trouble.

And if you're an employee for, let's say, an Australian company, you can't travel outside of Australia for more than, I think, three months a year. Because then you get into tax gray area, as in, should you be paying tax in Australia or where you travel to? And it all gets complicated. And I think people who write about being a digital nomad or, yeah, I think digital nomad just makes it my favorite not word. You're not a fan, it sounds like. I'm not a fan of the whole fake glamour of digital nomad and just saying digital nomad although i i definitely enjoyed the lifestyle and i think

it's great that we have that possibility but i think when people talk about like it's so great you can have no responsibilities and travel all the time and see those beautiful places i think actually there's a lot of logistics to executing on it. Tax is one of them. And then security like insurance or in Australia, superannuation, which is basically your retirement fund. All of those things you have to take care of if you're working remotely as effectively a full-time consultant because companies who hire remotely oftentimes don't have an entity

in every single country where they have people from. So that's like less glamorous side of remote that might prevent some companies from hiring people remotely. Yeah. It sounds like some of these things may be out of the company's ability to control, though. Like you'd mentioned legislation for the United States or the law, which you mentioned in Australia, where you can't leave more than three weeks. Is it something that is there something that companies can change to be more remote first or at least more respectful of the need to be able to not only travel the world for pleasure, but also for just to see family.

I mean, just for the reasons why anybody should be able to, if given the right kind of job where you can not be in the presence of everybody else involved, be remote, which is that whole point. If you have that kind of job, then to allow that to happen to take place yeah i think i think as especially bigger companies have capabilities to have legal advice they have in-house legal advisors so they can figure out how long is it actually possible to be away from the country where you're actually employed at um and not get into trouble company-wise and employee-wise um and then just help those people go there and work from there i

just honestly based on trust despite of obviously overcoming those issues the legal issues and tax issues and so on i i think it's about trust. Like, let's not treat each other like children, like we are adults. So trust people that they will do their work no matter where they are. Of course, some people will fail at that, but then you fire those people or you have reviews, performance reviews with them

and, you know, you point it out that it's not working out. So there are ways of overcoming that and there are ways of successfully having remote first companies or remote friendly companies and letting people just have their freedom and be happy in their lives because that will create happier employees. And that's what we want, I think. But it sounded like you said you weren't a fan of the the advocating the glamorous side of it what do you what do you mean by that um i think i'm mostly not fun of the expression i think something about it it just sounds cheesy and horrible and i can't really pinpoint what it is. Yeah. Digital, digital nomad. Digital nomad.

Every single time I say it, it just icks me. I don't know. I can't really pinpoint. World traveler. I agree. I don't think that the term, like if I were that person, if I were doing that, I wouldn't call my, I think it's become common because that's the terminology people most associate to it. But I would, I guess the nomading is I don't know I'm not really sure because I feel similar to you how you feel but I don't feel exactly the same because I kind of get what nomad

means and it's like well maybe I wouldn't attach the digital part I just be like hey I'm nomading right now I'm traveling the world yeah definitely I think I don't have a particular problem with the notion. Like I've traveled a bunch. I've spoken at many conferences for two years. Basically, I had no home. I was in my country for maybe like six months and then six months traveling, which was great. But I think long term, it's not really sustainable. Like you not only spend a lot of money traveling uh secondly it gets really lonely and um i think it's cool to look at people's instagrams and like oh my god they're in all of those beaches in thailand as everyone is um like posting fancy photos but i think

especially you yeah you're a photographer like yeah i was i have to pause it because i was on your uh your i guess would you call it your exposure site is that what you would call it yeah i i think you know you're a great example of like phenomenal i was thinking like she's must have traveled all over and she's done all sorts of cool stuff and she takes phenomenal photos like i i was like totally gushing over your work it was it was really good oh thank you that's really nice and i'm a photographer myself i i put the i think on your on your site um what did you say about yourself you you crossed out the line hobbyist i think at one point you may have been a hobbyist photographer and now you're just a photographer i'm probably in the middle of hobbyist and photographer where I don't do it for a profession but I really enjoy it and I do take some pretty

good photos I think I'm in the same spot I don't make money out of it but I do love it and I do have too much too expensive gear stacked if your camera is more than a thousand dollars and your lens is a thousand dollars it's probably you're definitely not hobbyist anymore you're yeah extreme enthusiast yeah that's definitely accurate yeah i mean i think my problem with it if i have a problem with digital nomads or yeah people traveling all the time is that um we tend to see only the positive side of that um like it's so nice to be in all of those locations and you can take great photos that will make everyone that you know really envious but i think it's actually quite hard to maintain a work-life balance when you're traveling like that like you actually end up doing so much stuff that's let let's say, touristy or just trying to explore that you end

up working nights or you end up working too early too much. Right. And you burn yourself out even. Yeah. So I think from that perspective, it's actually not very healthy. I personally love the idea of just of just taking a few months off and traveling. And I hope I will be able to do that in the near future because I think trying to balance work and pleasure when traveling extensively is extremely hard. And I know I can manage it. I'm capable of that, but I think it's challenging. And I honestly rather enjoy one

and put the other one on hold, so to say. This is something that you touched on in the blog post we're going to link up in the show notes. It's the heading where it says work-life balance. I'm sure you're probably not looking at it, but I am. Work-life balance as a remote worker, and you're kind of describing some of the dark sides. And this is one of those dark sides. But others you mentioned, I guess to counter the dark side would be to have a routine, create no work zones so that no matter where you're at, it's not always like in work time, so to speak. Because I know that for me, like you mentioned, you've been a remote worker or someone who's worked remotely for six years now.

I think for me, it's been since 2006. That's been 11 years, I guess. I'm in my 11th year of working either for myself or remotely and that's crazy like 11 years I've not gone into an office only one in one year of those 11 years and this was for like maybe five months that I have a in quotes real job where I went into somebody's office and worked in their office. So that's like a few months out of 11 years. It's pretty much like I've worked from home. You know, my home was my office, you know, state of mind. That's sort of tough to have that

needy routine and having a work zone where work happens there, where you don't get trapped and like always feel like you have to be productive, know definitely it's really hard to disconnect especially if you don't have um a big apartment or a big house then it becomes even more tricky i'm lucky enough to actually have a room that's a separate office huge advocate of that yeah yeah so i actually go there to work it's like work happens in there when i'm not in there i'm not doing the work so yeah you might be on the couch but you're actually just browsing twitter and doing nothing you're not working that's the problem laptops though they kind of go with you anywhere right so you yeah but you have to have the rule right you have to be disciplined enough to say if i'm going to be

working it's going to be in that room it may still be a laptop I'm not chained to that desk but I I do work in there and try to to make it a rule where that happens probably 90% of the time that's what I'd say to myself like there's one or two things that I do that aren't in this this room which I'm in now that's work related like I'll do some work stuff outside of that room but it's only a few tasks and I've sort of set a rule for myself so I know my boundaries basically is that I think having a boundary can protect you from the dark side of like always feeling like you have to be working or have to be productive yeah I think it's really

important um to make sure these are in place especially if you're a solo founder or you're running a podcast of your own or you're self-employed. You kind of have this urge, like, there are so many things to do. I have to keep working all the time. And you're working from home, then you basically can't disconnect ever, which really negatively impacts your life, your mental state, the level of burnout you have. Yeah, I think it's really important.

And it's also really important to find things that really make you happy and really make you disconnect. For me, that's going to yoga. For me, that's going to a coffee shop with a book, no devices, and enjoying a cup of coffee with a book, which is really nice. That sounds fun. Yeah. Going to a coffee shop with a book and no devices

so that's that means you're leaving your phone at home too right or is that is that a no-no i usually have it with me but i don't use it so you act like it's not there good job i just don't care i love reading paperback books i think they're superior to digital and i'll keep my opinion forever um yeah i just i just think especially you know in a remote scenario it's so easy to find yourself like oh when was the last time i left home especially in winter not for me but i know people who actually ask themselves that question yeah and i say well that's not very good like you should at least go for a walk or like go to the store go to a coffee shop meet up with someone because you have to compensate for the lack of human interaction or interacting only with one or two people

i think you need the the vitamin d2 from the sun you gotta have that like if not then you got uh bad things what happened to your skin? I don't know. Right. Are you turning into Batman? I don't know. Something. Yeah.

Change colors. Who knows? Or lack of color. Who knows what? But like the close to community, that conversation we had there, I'm going to ask you this question. So you got a couple companies mentioned here on, on the, on your blog post, but you'd mentioned a couple during this conversation,

help Scott was one of them. And I believe buffer was another, what other companies could people look to, to emulate both one as somebody who's an employer or running their own company or two looking at employees within a company and saying, dude, can I model similar things? Can I follow their blogs?

Who is out there to model? I would say hands down Basecamp on not only remote, but just company culture in general. These are my go-tos. I would say definitely read whatever they're writing. They have amazing amounts and quality of advice, but not every single time you're able to adapt that to your company. Like not all advice is actually universal. I think it's just important to stay in touch with your employees.

I think actually remoteness is one of the biggest tests that you can have on your organization in terms of your culture and how empathetic you are and how good of an employer and employee you are, because that really tests your communication skills as well. So, yeah, I think just keep keep talking to your employees, keep making sure that the right processes are in place, but not too much process because that will actually hinder productivity. So, yeah, just make sure that you're listening to your employers and take their feedback, what's working, what's not working. Record your all-hands meetings and publish them or publish transcripts in an email or in Slack or whatever Basecamp or whatever tool that you're using. Just make sure that everyone is getting the same pieces of information.

That's how you are actually inclusive and that's how you make sure that everyone is on the same page, which is what you want when you're running a company. I guess that's kind of like universal advice that you could apply to an organization. But yeah, there are a lot of materials out there and I'm sure anyone who's interested in that topic, there's a lot of posts on Medium as well about remote teams that you can find and kind of take inspiration from and just test some approaches and see if they work or not. You mentioned tools in that last bit there. Are there any particular tools that promise to make teams productive, but in the end simply hinder them? Is there anything that like, I know Slack is kind of getting a bad name. We just, in a recent issue of ChangeLaw Weekly, we linked out to a post that was basically how we quit Slack, you know, or why we quit Slack. And this whole real-time communication, being remote, you know, without the, without people being around you, it's,

you feel like you have to be attached to some sort of like digital tool that communicates or allows you to communicate. And I feel like Slack sometimes can get a bad name for that because it sort of is real time. You know, if you're not there, then you're missing the conversation, you're missing out. And that's the fear of missing out is a big issue for a lot of people, right? So not to name that one in particular, but are there any tools that are being used that hinder teams

rather than actually make them more productive? I actually would totally name Slack. That's the first one that comes to mind for me because I love that product. I think it's a great product, and it's really helpful when you need a piece of information and you need to pick someone and talk to them, but you don't really want to go on a hangout or whatever other software that you use for video calls i think in those scenarios it's great but at bigger organizations where they

have 600 channels because people just make jokes and make silly channels that are useless yeah like you have to go to a certain channel to tell the joke or something like that. Yeah, or just people make useless channels that are, I guess, kind of a part of emulating the water cooler conversation culture, but on Slack, it's just, at some point, in some organizations, the amount of Slack channels

is just ridiculous. And even if you have 10 channels or 15 and a 300 people company, there's a lot of conversation happening. And if you're a person like me that doesn't like notifications or unread indicators, you get freaked out when you see that red dot. Yes, the completionists. Yeah. Cannot have checked out a must complete list. Is that who you are then? Yes.

That's horrible. I hate it. Jared's the same way. If he were on the show today talking right now, he would be cackling and laughing because that is totally him. He cannot have badges. They must be done. The list must be completed. Yeah.

It's not a good space to be at. But I think, so it's partially great, but on the other hand, it's really distracting because there's just so much conversation happening that if you want to stay on top of it and you have the fear of missing out that you have to rig it right now, it becomes really destructive for your work.

Well, if you're such an advocate, though, for being remote, how do you counter this Slack movement and the way remote teams are communicating? What are some patterns that are productive or healthy to be remote first but not force everyone into this real-time, must-be-following-along-to-not-miss-out form of communication like Slack? to be remote first but not force everyone into this real time must be following along to not miss out a form of communication like Slack. What alternatives or what other ways do you suggest people to do?

So I think in remote teams with not a lot of time zone overlap, that problem is less pronounced because you only have two hours and then everyone goes quiet. At least that was my reality for years so i actually got the entire day of uninterrupted work which is great but also horrible if you actually had some trouble and you needed some help or a piece of information that was missing um so i guess that problem is somewhat mitigated but i think maybe to try to avoid it um i definitely do like um email as a medium and i do like um i don't actually use basecamp personally but i think posting check-ins

like daily check-ins what have i done today and this is what worried me and this is what i've succeeded at on basecamp in a form of a daily check-in is actually really valuable because you can stay in touch with your entire team and know how they're feeling personally and professionally. And you don't have to do it on Slack where it gets lost anyway and gives you a massive FOMO. So I think maybe getting back to, so to say, our roots of like less instant methods of messaging, like, instant methods of messaging,

like, I don't know, Basecamp or other tools or just email. So you're advocating for the oldest form of communication we have on the internet to be the primary. I wouldn't say it would be the primary, but I think if something is really important and no one should miss it, then it should not be in a Slack. Right. So don't put statuses like that that are important

for other people to use as artifacts to checking with team members to put them in some sort of like place where they can get lost in the shuffle yeah definitely put them into a base camp or an email or something that is you know not so fast-paced definitely yeah that's tough i mean especially with the time zones like that's that's one thing that i didn't really consider is like if you don't have much of an overlap then that means that your co-workers could be you know their time off or their time to you know not be working basically so you don't get in quotes bugged by anybody or have distractions. You can be totally focused, but if you're in the same time zone, then you're sort of caught in this situation where, well, they're working, I'm working, maybe we're working together.

Maybe we're working independently either way, you know, we should be meeting. We should be talking about what we're doing. Right. And so the next thing you know, you're, you're, you're on Skype, you're on a hangout and, or even the Slack call and you're wasting time potentially you're on a Hangout, or even a Slack call, and you're wasting time potentially with a meeting. Yeah, because it's so easy to just grab someone. You kind of assume that it's necessary, but oftentimes it's not.

And we just fail to respect other people's time and their headspace as well. We just kind of, hey, can you come and have a call with me? Or just in the office scenario, same thing. Someone just comes to your desk and starts talking to you. And two hours later, you've lost that time and you have to get back into your zone, which we know takes some time as well. Smaller teams, though, don't have very fast-paced Slack. So I would say like 10 people, 15 people plus might be a fast Slack in terms of real-time communication. But maybe smaller teams may have only a few members.

So it's a little less fast-paced. Something I had said at the end of this inclusion we had in the recent Change Law Weekly for the blog post that was titled, This is the Story of Why We Quit Slack. I said at the end, it's sort of like this devil advocate approach. Like, can we just exercise better self-control? Cause for me, I personally don't have an issue with Slack. We,

the change log is a remote company. We're a remote team. Everyone, no one is in this office with me besides me. So, you know, we're a remote first company. We operate around all the things we just talked about.

But I don't feel chained to Slack every day to stay in communication with Jared or other team members. Maybe it's because we're smaller and maybe we have less communication to actually do. But I kind of feel like maybe it's just a self-control problem, you know, like the FOMO part of it what do you think oh definitely I think self control is a big issue here and we are quite bad at handling so to say especially now with all the notifications happening there were a lot of articles about like how notifications on the web is affecting our attention span and our control ability as well so I would agree. And also it's definitely easier with smaller teams to manage real-time conversations or manage a backlog of conversations. That's easier. But at scale, at bigger companies, it just becomes ridiculous.

It does become ridiculous. Maybe the bigger teams might be where it really becomes that way. Or even in communities, as we talked about in the first part of the show. I don't know about you you how many community slacks are you involved in several right now only one um a local australian one but it's so massive that i still don't read most of it i was in a few uh kind of like women and tech slacks but there were there was so much backlog i just couldn't possibly i just couldn't possibly keep up with it. So I just left because it was just only giving me anxiety. Yeah. It's just overwhelming to be honest.

Coming up after the break, Carolina and I talk about website performance and the impact it has on inclusivity. We discuss a problem that most Americans don't get, myself included, lack of bandwidth and the limited or slow internet connections out there. We have to be more aware of the weight and size of every page we deliver. And Carolina shares an insight about time you won't want to miss. Stay tuned. This episode is brought to you by Linode, our cloud server of choice.

Everything we do here at Changelog is hosted on Linode servers. Pick a plan, pick a distro, and pick a location, and in seconds, deploy your virtual server. Jewel-worthy hardware, SSD cloud storage, 40 gigabit network, Intel E5 processors, simple, easy control panel, nine data centers, three regions, anywhere in the world they've got you covered. Head to lyndo.com slash changelog and get $20 in hosting credit. So maybe to close, we could talk about something that I think pretty much anybody on the internet cares about

which is website performance um you work for a pretty interesting company uh Calibre doing a Calibre sorry Calibre you told me earlier and I still read it as Calibre and I'm sure that anybody else might but it's Calibre um doing website performance making the web fast for everyone and the the last web fast for everyone. And the last part there for everyone seems to be something that you're pretty and most people should be pretty interested in is being inclusive. So that means that the web should perform well for anyone, right? Given, you know, the last part of this show, what can we cover around website performance is like around caliber,

what you're doing there and making the website, making the web fast and including everybody in today's web. So I'm going to start with making a slight correction if you don't mind me. Calibre is actually kind of like an after hours project of mine. It's actually a company founded by my partner. I just end up helping out a fair bit because I'm really passionate about it. So I don't actually work full time on it. But it's something that I'm really, really passionate about. I love performance and I love advocating for the users.

So it really aligns with my values, so to say. And surprisingly enough, you've mentioned that everyone cares about performance. I can guarantee you that it's not true. Because if that was true, we would be really rich. Okay. Yeah, I think it's really surprising because you would assume

that everyone in tech industry should care about web performance. So JavaScript performance, front-end performance, back-end performance. But it's actually something that is oddly still not very popular, so to say. It's very hard to convince people to make a case for it, to make a business case to even sign up for a product

that's a performance monitoring tool, which Calibre is, which we find quite astounding, so to say, because, again, you should feel for your users and you should really care about them and that's a massive part of it. I think a lot of people focus on the user experience part and on the business metrics so sales, conversions and so forth but they fail to recognize

that sending two megs of JavaScript might not be optimal and might actually prevent people from using your product on a lower, you know, worse device than an iPhone 6, which is probably your phone because we are all developers and we all have money for a $1,000 phone or a $3,000 laptop. So I really like to advocate for stepping out of the bubble, the bubble of developers and designers and people who are working in the industry who are usually

well paid and can afford those high end devices to actually try to experience the web as it is elsewhere. For example, in Australia, the internet is fairly slow. The latency is absolutely horrifying. And yeah, you would be surprised because Australia is a very like highly developed country. One of the most livable cities in the world are here, Sydney and Melbourne, but still we have bad internet. So you kind of take those things for granted and you don't care about performance, but you really should be doing that so yeah i guess long way around what you just said um i wish more people would care about performance uh but they really don't and uh we really have to do a lot of um advocating and writing articles explaining why this is important and why we should

care about it um that's not really business, but just kind of a part of trying to include everyone into the community of internet users. Yeah. I don't know how I gapped that I thought you worked there full time. I guess my looking into you in preparation for this conversation was like, that's where she works. I just tweet about it a lot because I think it's a great product and it's like my little pet product. So to say after hours product,

um, but I'm really passionate about, so I guess that's how you can gather. Yeah. I was like full-time gig. This is what you're doing. I was like, all right,

it looks cool. I mean, you, uh, it's certainly a nice site. I imagine that you're the designer behind it is that correct um i did do a fair bit of design lately but you know it's really difficult to um basically run a company that's at like early stages but quite high growth and trying to do so many things because you basically end up being

like the marketer the salesperson the front developer the designer oh yeah so you've got to hire the people to do things because you're so busy doing all the things yeah so it's a really interesting yeah it's an interesting space to be at um but yeah long story short i really i'm really passionate about web performance i always was and i think it ties back nicely to my overall notion to be more inclusive. Because I strongly believe that performance is a pillar of user experience. And user experience is one of the most important things that we should care about in our jobs. And it's not as far to go to like oh we need animations that's what user experience is no it's how fast i can use your app it's how much data you're using on my plan and how much i will

pay for it oh yeah those are those are the rough words so i can you mentioned that australia has slow internet well the u.s has slow internet when you exceed your bandwidth. Okay. And that's the caveat there is, is I was on vacation recently, went over the amount of data that I had accounted for me. And so then they took me from 4g to 3g and even 3g was really, really slow. Like I think that they lied. I don't think it was 3g. I think it was like zero G or something like that was the thing because it was impossibly slow. And it helps me have empathy for what you're talking about, because all too often are we in a bubble of fast Internet? At least that's my experience here in the United States, Houston, Texas, where I live. But then, you know, going over that data limit and being throttled, I was like, how in the world do people use the web? And then, then I'm thinking about, okay, if I'm paying for data overage, now I'm counting, you know, I wanted to know, you know, like just leaving my phone idle, is it consuming data? You know, cause like I had

maybe four gigs left of the additional five I bought for, you know, way too much money to have an additional five gigs. And I was just thinking like people really should care more about the weight and size of every page viewer, every request, everything you do checking email, even it was, it was-boggling. I couldn't take it. Yeah, I think it's really important to step out of the bubble of fast internet, expensive devices that are high-end and high-speed internet.

It's really important to gain that perspective and user empathy. And yeah, I mean, so often you see up-updates for iPhone for like 300 megs for a bug fix. It's just mind boggling. And I think the page width in web apps and websites is one thing. And then another thing is actually the parse and compile of that code, which also takes up the device's CPU and on mobiles and tablets that becomes cumbersome. So we just fail to think about those things.

But there are quite a few people in the performance world like Addy Asmani and other Chrome developer relations people that are doing amazing work on that and trying to build tools to help you audit your apps and websites and try to advocate for understanding performance better. It's just that performance as a topic is still not gaining enough traction because it's just not glamorous and you can't prove, well, you don't want to hear the arguments for a business case behind it. And I think that's the reason why I guess people are not prioritizing it enough. But I think we absolutely should.

Yeah, I don't understand. I guess unless you step out of that bubble, only then if you're trapped or stuck or forever in that bubble, it's hard to see the outside. And the outside being slower internet, you know, less performable devices, things like that. It's really hard to even consider that it should be a concern because you're in a position of, well, progress, right? I want the Touch ID. I want these new whatever the things are, you know, like the latest processor or the newest, coolest screen that goes edge to edge or whatever it is that's attracting us to that future, to that innovative thing.

And so we're attracted to this constantly moving in the name of progress scenario when there's so many people still catching up or using devices that cost less. So therefore, they perform not quite as well as, you know, an expensive iPhone six or seven or something like that. Like you mentioned, you know, it's just it's just so hard to to have that empathy. But I think it definitely takes that to change. How do we force people to get that? Well, I think I think there are there are two ways that you can do it. You can first start tracking performance actively and see how you're doing. And you probably will be negatively surprised, which I guess is a good thing because there are tools nowadays, open source tools like Lighthouse or paid services like Calibrate that will actually give you actionable advice that you can just sit down with your developer and implement and it will be better. And you can see the improvements in

performance metrics and probably business metrics as well. So that's one thing that you can do. And then another angle that is just educating people. So keep posting business cases of, you know, performance gains that actually cause more revenue or less, more conversions or less dropouts rates. And just remember about the fact that at the end, as designers and developers and project managers, and so on, we are kind of in charge of people's time, which is the most valuable asset. So by creating an app or a website or writing an article, we are taking someone's time that they're spending in our app or reading our thing. So I think that's a very responsible, like it's a mission. It's something that we do every single day, but maybe we don't think about it that way. But it's a very important

and kind of like a loaded thing that we do, but we don't realize what responsibility it carries. So I think we should be really wary of how we use that time, which ties back to, well, let's make it a performance so someone can come into our app, do their thing,

and go about their life because that's ultimately the thing. It's not about keeping them in your app and just engagement. That's not what it should be about. It should be about them achieving their goals and moving on to actually enjoying their life. So that's what we should be helping them do in terms of user experience in general,

which web performance is a part of. Yeah. I like that it said they're being in charge of their time. I'd never really considered that aspect of it myself. I mean, that's the number one resource we all have, right? Like someone right now is dedicating some portion of their time to listen to this conversation with us. And you're right. You have to totally respect that and feel responsible for making sure that that time is well spent in a podcast sense like this.

In the participation of building a service or a website or a web app or a native application, whatever it's really hard to understand, like, the next update for this app is 100 megs or just a download or an install. It is 100 megs. And when you're on a limited data plan or you're throttled, no one really not. I shouldn't say no one. It's it's hard to to make the case that this shouldn't be 100, it should be 50, or can we make it smaller? Because it's like, what percentage of the world does this really impact? Or does it impact me? So I don't care, right? I move on. And that's, I think, is the hard sell of this kind of situation. If it doesn't impact me, I don't care. I mean, I care personally, but it's like,

that's the mentality of whomever might be in charge of making change you know i think some of the people are just liking the overall context of internet connectivity um so they don't look at those stats because stats are boring or i don't know they have other things to do but only 50 of people are actually connected right now so only 50 are using the internet actually connected right now. So only 50% are using the internet. To me, that's just mind blowing. So my question would be, what is preventing the other people of getting connected? And then in some countries, downloading a Facebook app update, which is like 200 megs or 300 megs would be there's like months

wage to buy that data on the plan in their country. These are stats that you can look up in doing some research or reading the Akamai Internet Connectivity Report, which is quite lengthy, but very fascinating. And you can learn about those things, like how much data does it take to load the Verge 100 times? Well, a lot, because it's a very heavy website. And in some countries, you would have to work seven hours for that or 24 hours.

Keep it, right? I would never even do it if it cost me a month's wage. Biggest corporates probably, you know, online ads, display ads. Huge amounts of JavaScript. We've talked about that with Brendan Eich on an episode of Request for Commits. The, you know, web performance, the way to the website, all these different things that happen, the performance of the device because of all the JavaScript running in the browser that doesn't really impact the goal of the page. It's just there to display an ad so it can sell you something. Yeah. It's technically sustained

that website, but you know, you get what i'm trying to say yeah so i think i think if people maybe had more context and how connected we are currently and how the devices look and how is how expensive it is to have a plan and how much data you get per month um they maybe would be more careful about what they ship to their users. I don't know when Verizon's on TV and they say Verizon Unlimited, it's like when you say something, it's true kind of thing. It's like, well, hey, Verizon's Unlimited or Sprint's Unlimited or AT&T's unlimited or, you know, name your internet provider slash internet connector, ISP, wherever in the world, unlimited,

you kind of feel like everybody else has the same access, but they don't. And that's the part that I don't want to be the Debbie Downer, but that's the part for me is like, it's just such a hard battle to fight, but I'm glad you're fighting it because you seem very passionate about it and we need people fighting for it. That's the part for me is like, it's just such a hard battle to fight, but I'm glad you're fighting it because you seem very passionate about it and we need people fighting for it. That's for sure. I'm trying. I'm trying.

Do you get that though? Like that because you know, one advertiser says unlimited and then the next thing they, that that becomes the accepted norm. Yeah, definitely. I would say in like some of the first world countries, yes, but in Australia there's no provider with unlimited data as far as i know and even back in poland there isn't one you can get data very cheaply but um unlimited isn't a thing that's a shame because i would say

when that not being accessible isn't the shame the shame part of that is that if you live in the bubble, right, and you don't look outside the bubble, it's hard to recognize that that isn't the scenario for someone else. You know what I mean? So like if for me, having Verizon Unlimited is accessible and I never look outside the bubble to see if it's accessible to you, I can't empathize with your position or your scenario, your circumstance. If I don't look outside that bubble, I never get that perspective. And we need that. Definitely. I think actually everything that we talked about today ties back on kind of trying to

challenge yourself and question yourself in a way. Like, is the thing that I'm doing actually the industry standard? Should it be the industry standard? Is this inclusive of everyone? Am I making the web a better place? Like, I think that should be a part of our daily job as designers and developers and builders of the web. And oftentimes I don't see that happening.

So I wish more people were kind of challenging themselves in that way and asking those questions and kind of advocating for not only their users who are actually maybe paying their money, but just underrepresented communities. I couldn't have said it better myself. And that's the perfect place to leave this conversation. So thank you so much for your time today. It was, it was so awesome to meet you, have this conversation and dig deep into all these passions you have, and certainly open my eyes to some new scenarios. And I like the idea, challenge yourself and we'll leave it there. So thank you very much. Thank you for having me. All right. Thank you for tuning into the change law this week. If you enjoy the show, share it with a friend, read us on Apple Podcasts. And thanks to our sponsors, Hired, Linode, and GoCD.

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