This is brought to you by members. Become one to help keep the site running.

I Love Remote Work

Joan Westenberg talks about the promise of remote work admist the current crackdown on it by many companies. On my end, our family only runs because I can set my own hours and work at home. All summer I’m home to be around for our kids, otherwise we’d have to pay for childcare all summer and thus need to make hundreds a month more to pay that bill.

It would also impact my marriage as we put aside one day a week to grab breakfast without kids and connect with each other.

When I lived outside Vancouver I regularly got requests to work for some company in the city. The big sticking point was that I was unwilling to spend my time commuting unpaid. I always wanted them to pay for commuting time, or let me work from home. That was never an option these companies would go for though so I’ve worked at home for 15 years and generally loved every minute of it.

When is text best?

CJ Chilvers on when text is better than video. I watch a lot of video, but I also read a lot of text and I pay far more attention to most of the text I read. Even information heavy video often gets put on in the background where it’s first evaluated for its usefulness and much of it is lacking.

Far too many videos are 15 minutes long with 9 minutes of story and prep talk and 6 minutes of good information. While text can be the same thing, it’s far easier to skim and skip through the useless parts and get to the meat of text.

Thinking Analogue

I do the same thing as Ben Brooks. I keep a notebook between the halves of my keyboard and when I’m thinking through a hard problem I start writing. I sketch out database designs, vent about code that got shipped without testing so I’m dealing with bugs.

I even use it to vent about my marriage, then I often throw the ball for the dog for a few minutes and read what I wrote and realize that I’m making a big deal out of something small so I forget about my momentary complaint about my lovely wife of 21 years.

Taking time to write things down on paper forces slow thought and I love it.