Episode #51: Lonocloud

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In this episode, Aaron Brooks, Chris Houser, and Alan Dipert, of Lonocloud, share their distributed team’s hiring strategy, topic-oriented versus individual-oriented meetings, and yours/mine protocol while pairing.

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Show Notes:

Lonocloud
Aaron Brooks (twitter github blog)
Chris Houser (twitter github blog)
Alan Dipert (twitter github blog)

00:47 – Introduction & background

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  • Aaron Brooks: Engineer #2 at Lonocloud
  • Chris Howser: Working remotely for 2 jobs; at Lonocloud for 1 year,
  • Alan Dipert: Programmer at Lonocloud, no prior distributed team experience

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02:27 – Location

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  • Every time zone in the US is represented
  • Development team is fully distributed
  • 10-15 range

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03:41 – History of distributed team

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  • Hired remotely to be able to access different people
  • Lonocloud builds next generation multi-cloud federating infrastructure platforms
  • Emphasis on dynamic information policies
  • Distributed team working on distributed applications

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06:40 – Hiring developers

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  • Some people worked together previously and became available at the same time
  • Closure language community

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08:16 – Difference between remote work and fully distributed work

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  • Effort between teams with a central office/being fully distributed
  • Separate cliques between in-office and out-of-office groups
  • Fully distributed teams are all working towards the same goal
  • Shared pain of being fully remote
  • Unify around benefits of working from home

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12:08 – A day in the life of Lonocloud

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  • Daily developer call
  • Central server to log in remotely
  • Own development environment on their own screen; but can step in to see others work
  • Ad hoc pairing and splitting
  • More minds usefully contributing more quickly to a problem
  • Pairing, tripling as needed

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17:22 – Topic-oriented meetings versus individual-oriented

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  • People can chime in with input if they want, but don’t have to
  • Google Doc for daily agenda
  • Not ticket-driven

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19:34 – Tools

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26:05 – Yours/Mine protocol while pairing

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  • Context
  • Vocalized

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28:38 – Splitting up work

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  • Obvious fits
  • Dynamic
  • See what makes sense
  • Key person help sessions
  • People normally step up without obligation

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