#trac

My Development Setup/Flow

Developers seem to love to hear about how other developers work, so I thought I’d try to capture my entire environment, from end to end, in a single post. This will change (has changed) over time and depending on the project/company/whatever, but this is how things are for me right now. A couple of points up front:

  • I work for Automattic, so a lot of this is influenced by our internal policies/security/workflow.
  • I don’t always use all components of this “system”. I’ll try to detail when I do/don’t use certain parts of it as I go.

OK, here goes.

Note: This turned into a little bit of a summary of how we work internally at Automattic as well. Oh well, maybe it’ll provide some inspiration, I think we do some pretty cool things.

(more…)

Challenges You Will Face When Working With Remote Teams

For a number of reasons at a number of times in my career, I’ve found myself working with variously-distributed teams of one kind or another. Perhaps the “office” is a building that spans 2 square miles, perhaps someone was working from home for a day or someone was on a 2 week “vacation”, or even working for a distributed company with no real office. These were all different situations, but they all suffered from simliar challenges. I want to take a look at a couple of those challenges and some ways that you can help mitigate them.

I’m looking at this mostly as a member of a technical team of some sort, but I’m sure a lot of it would apply to pretty much anyone who’s not working face-to-face with their colleagues. Apologies in advance for this being kind of rambling (and very long). It’s a collection of all sorts of observations, links and ideas that I’ve collected over time. (more…)