In today’s inaugural episode of the Wide Teams podcast, I interview Marty Haught of Haught Codeworks. I also talk a little bit about the purpose and goals of the site.
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Show Notes:
00:30 – Purpose and Goals for Wide Teams site
02:12 – Introduce first of many interviews conducted at RailsConf 2010 in Baltimore, MD: Marty Haught, a software architect and engineer from Longmont, Colorado
02:28 – Interview Begins
02:41 – Marty’s introduction and background
03:05 – History with distributed work
04:00 – A day in the life with Marty and distributed work
- Morning Stand-Up
- Talker, Campfire, Skype Apps
- Pair
- Apple Remote Desktop
- Client Discussions
- Centralized Feedback
06:35 – Challenges of remote work
- Network Connectivity
- Video Bandwidth
- Timezones
- Client hesitation that distributed teams are effective
- Discipline with distraction and staying on task
- Acclimating to being remote
08:39 – Benefits of remote work
- Efficient
- Easy to limit distractions
- Team can stay focused with few client and co-worker interruptions
09:54 – Tool wishlist
- Better screen-sharing tools
- Better interactive screen-sharing tools
11:56 – Advice for future remote workers and groups
- Trust your teammates
- Standardize your tool-set
13:25 – Wrap up
14:37 – End
About the Author: Avdi Grimm
Avdi has been leading and participating in dispersed software development teams since 2007. He works from home in Southern Pennsylvania, and loves the fact that working remotely enables him to spend more time with his wife and five (soon to be six) children. Related Posts
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Why Talker instead of Basecamp? I’ve heard another shop mention Talker before too.
The reason we used Talker on this project is to learn more about the tool. It has some interesting options for plugins and pulling in feeds. I think Campfire is more mature, especially if you have Propane, but I think Talker is a nice alternative. It’s also slightly cheaper but honestly that doesn’t matter much.
One update on my interview, when I said Apple remote desktop, I was really referring to Apple screen sharing that was introduced in 10.5. Also, I’ve used TeamViewer as another pretty decent screen sharing alternative, http://www.teamviewer.com.