MARTYHAUGHT

We had a great time last night at the November Boulder Ruby Group meeting. Tony Arcieri started things off with a detailed talk on DistribuStream, an open source peercasting system he (and others) developed in Ruby. It looks pretty good and it’s amazing how few lines he needed in Ruby to get it done. Anthony Eden also paid us a surprise visit. He was in town doing some training with UCAR.

The second half of the meeting was the telecommuting panel. Originally this was going to just be a presentation by myself at the request of Alan Sobel. However, after posting his request to the list, Chris McMahon suggested we do a panel. Even though he lives in Durango, a seven hour drive across the mountains from Boulder, he was interested in driving up to our meeting to participate.

Chris and I worked through the core points of what the panel would touch on with the time remaining before the meeting. He even set up a wiki space dedicated to the panel. BTW, if any of you are interested in gaining access to this wiki, please contact me. One cool thing that happened with the wiki is that Nathan Witmer posted his notes from the panel on the wiki. Nice.

The panel turned out to be Chris McMahon, Gordon Weakliem, Anthony Eden, Kevin Weller and myself. The group was nicely diverse each with different sized teams and approaches to working remotely. You could see the common themes in what worked for us in general as well as the differences. Here are a few things that struck me.

First, there was a good amount of focus on version control systems. Git came up as being an awesome tool for distributed teams. I wasn’t quite sold but I can see where some of what it does would be much better than svn. For us, svn works just fine. We don’t have the merge nightmares that other teams seem to suffer. It may also be that we have a strict approach to branching and committing on our project that saves us more. We also don’t go off and silo ourselves in isolation from the rest of the team for days on end. We’re constantly updating our repos several times per day. I usually make a couple commits per day as well.

Second, keeping in contact is key, which might go without saying. The use of voice communications seemed vital to keeping in sync. IRC/IM/Email only isn’t good enough. We do a morning stand-up with the whole team on a Skype conference call. We’re a small team of 8 so that works. I’m not sure about a team of 20 or 40. We use campfire for our ‘at work’ channel and group chat. I think works really well. IRC certainly could serve the same function as any other chat room technologies. I know some mentioned they had issues with Campfire and FireFox. I personally haven’t suffered these but it doesn’t surprise me. Sadly, FF 2.0 on OSX hasn’t been as solid as previous versions.

Third would be the trust factor. I don’t think we explicitly talked on this topic but we touched on points very close to this. In my team, 5 of us have worked together in the past, some of which stretched back to 2001 and earlier. We know each other well and have built a level of trust. I think this is important when you’re all remote. With the newer team members we’ve introduced them slowly over time and spend a lot of time getting them used to working with the team. Pair programming is vital for this.

I would say that telecommuting has come a long way but we still have some issues to overcome. I think having ubiquitous video conferencing will be the holy grail, especially if it doesn’t hinder your computer’s bandwidth or processors. I don’t really expect anything like that for another 4+ years at the best. However, I am hopeful the more efficient/performant desktop/screen sharing will become available. I’m exciting to see how Leopard’s desktop sharing works. VOIP is already killer for the voice aspect. I wouldn’t be surprised if we need to get our own Asterisks server. If we do conferencing and other cool features, via Adhearsion, would become available.

Anyway, it was an enjoyable evening and continued on to the local pub. That was only dampened by the loud trivia game overtaking our conversation and driving us out. On a cool note out of a table of 9 of us, four (Anthony, Chris, Tony and myself) had played upright and electric bass. How often do you encounter that!! I was able to slip back into my musician memories of the distant past. :)

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