Posts by John Tornow

Speaking of working remotely from home ... Glenn Fleishman has a new (free) e-book: Take Control of Working from Home Temporarily.

We're in a time of unprecedented uncertainty. In the middle of a global viral outbreak, you were told or asked to work from home—and you've never or rarely had to be productive where you live before. What to do? We're here to take some stress out of your life with a new, free book that details how to set up a home office and balance work and home life for those not accustomed to it.

Some great suggestions on working from home by Matt Stauffer:

Today, I want to talk about remote work—especially right now, as so many people are unexpectedly being told/allowed to work from home—and how so much of it happens in less-than-ideal environments, and what we can do to make the best of it. I'll assume you're working from home, but many of these tips apply in other less-than-ideal remote work environments as well.

I agree with many of his tips. I've been working from home now for over 4 years and it took some getting used to in the beginning. Now I can't imagine anything else.

While working from home takes some getting used to and people may not be as productive as before we have to remember that we're still in the middle of a global crisis, and that doesn't make working easier regardless of your work location.

MonoLisa is a new coding-focused font by Marcus Sterz:

As software developers, we always strive for better tools but rarely consider font as such. Yet we spend most of our days looking at screens reading and writing code. Using a wrong font can negatively impact our productivity and lead to bugs. MonoLisa was designed by professionals to improve developers’ productivity and reduce fatigue.

I’m still partial to Operator from Hoefler & Co, but MonoLisa looks very well done.

Speaking of Github, this week it was also announced that Github (aka Microsoft) has acquired the de-facto package manager for JavaScript, npm.

Nat Friedman, on Github's blog:

npm is a critical part of the JavaScript world. The work of the npm team over the last 10 years, and the contributions of hundreds of thousands of open source developers and maintainers, have made npm home to over 1.3 million packages with 75 billion downloads a month. Together, they've helped JavaScript become the largest developer ecosystem in the world. We at GitHub are honored to be part of the next chapter of npm's story and to help npm continue to scale to meet the needs of the fast-growing JavaScript community.

On what's next:

Looking further ahead, we'll integrate GitHub and npm to improve the security of the open source software supply chain, and enable you to trace a change from a GitHub pull request to the npm package version that fixed it.

That sounds very cool. Excited to see that piece come together.

For this Mac-loving tech kid that grew up in the 90’s, I still cringe any time I hear Microsoft doing anything. But this is not the Microsoft of then. They’ve done well with Github so far. They’re doing amazing things with the cloud. I need to get over it. Hopefully this is a new great beginning for npm.

New this week: a brand new native iOS and Android app for Github. From what I can tell these are completely native apps. Maybe there’s some web embedded stuff in there, but if there is, I can’t tell and it’s super slick and fast. As it should be.

The app seems very well designed and thoroughly considered. Handy for managing Pull Requests and Issues on the go.

Very nice looking app for debugging network requests. Reminds me of the beautiful and powerful Paw app. I love that these little development and tech tools are being so well done lately, rather than having to use some awful cross-platform Java app. via Brent Simmons

Excellent video from Kurzgesagt on YouTube:

It's the number one trending video on YouTube today for good reason. This video clearly explains what we know so far about the SARS-CoV-2 virus and how it affects the human body.

(via Kottke)

Harry Stevens, at The Washington Post, with my favorite explanation from over the weekend of why this virus is so dangerous and how it spreads:

[...] these simulations vastly oversimplify the complexity of real life. Yet just as simulitis spread through the networks of bouncing balls on your screen, covid-19 is spreading through our human networks — through our countries, our towns, our workplaces, our families. And, like a ball bouncing across the screen, a single person's behavior can cause ripple effects that touch faraway people.

The visuals in this piece are excellent.

To no one's surprise, Apple announced today that this year's WWDC will be online-only due the "current health situation."

We are delivering WWDC 2020 this June in an innovative way to millions of developers around the world, bringing the entire developer community together with a new experience," said Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. "The current health situation has required that we create a new WWDC 2020 format that delivers a full program with an online keynote and sessions, offering a great learning experience for our entire developer community, all around the world. We will be sharing all of the details in the weeks ahead.

For a number of reasons, I’ve spent quite a bit of time in New York over the past few years. I love this city and I’m grateful for every moment within it. Travel is going to be a bit light for a while, so I’m remembering my wanderings around town from afar for now.

A few months ago walking between meetings I stopped for a bit in Madison Square Park. The views and architecture on this one corner are wonderful: the Empire State Building to the north, Flatiron Building directly behind, and the Met Life Tower buildings on the park’s eastern border.

The building next to this tower, the Metropolitan Life North building, was originally supposed to be 100 stories tall and the tallest building in the world at that time. However, construction stopped in the Great Depression at just 30 stories.

I love the way the buildings appear through the trees in the winter.

Ben Thompson interviews Matt Mullenweg about Automattic's distributed workforce. Ben and Matt are two of my favorite people on the web, so it's delightful to hear them discuss this topic. The interview is behind Ben's subscription paywall, so if you're not already subscribed, you should!

Mullenweg:

People are surprised when I say this, but I think in-person is really key. And so we just flip it, so instead of saying you have to be an around your colleagues 48 weeks of the year and do whatever you want for a month, we say be wherever you want for 48 weeks out of the year and for three or four weeks a year we're going to bring you together. And that might be once a year for the whole company, and then your individual team, which is probably five to 15 people, you'll see them two or three times a year and you can build that trust. There's nothing, no technology, VR or otherwise, that has the same effect of breaking bread across the table or sharing a drink with someone, for building trust, for building communication, for getting to know someone.

Working remotely in a distributed company shouldn’t replace all face-to-face communication and interaction. It’s just not the default.

And, later:

I think that when you become a truly distributed company versus just trying to recreate your meetings and everything else you do online, you start to realize how much more valuable it is to move things to be asynchronous versus synchronous because that opens up a ton of flexibility, autonomy, and agency between all of your colleagues.

Bingo. Synchronous communication (where everyone must stop and do something at the same time) is my number one productivity killer.

Great list of resources and updates on Om Malik's blog, in a 'live blog' style approach.

Like everyone else, I have become anxious about the Coronavirus Pandemic. It is hard to discern the actual impact, especially since social media is conflating facts with fiction. I have begun keeping a document that is full of links to articles, research, commentary, and videos that come from experts — scientists, immunologists, viral disease researchers, and sources that could only be said to be biased toward logic and caution. In other words, I am paying very little attention to the self-proclaimed experts who are investors, car company chiefs, or anyone else who thought Corona was just a beer till about a month ago.

Instead of keeping it on Google Docs, I have decided to share it here on the blog, and I will be continuously updating it with new links. I am no expert, but I have a pretty good sense of who to ignore and when to pay attention.

It’s been a busy week for remote working fans and first-timers with all of the safety measures being put in place for COVID-19. Here are some of the better links I’ve found recently:

• Matt Mullenweg: Coronavirus and the Remote Work Experiment No One Asked For: "This is not how I envisioned the distributed work revolution taking hold."
• Austin Kleon: A working from home manual in disguise:  "Here are 10 tips taken straight from the book, along with excerpts and quotes"
• The Staying Home Club (that’s stayinghome.club, nice): A list of all the companies working from home
• Ian Sanders: How to Work at home
• Gitlab’s remote working guide
• Protocol Source Code’s remote tips from Amir Salihefendic

More to come, I’m sure!

Update March 13, 2020:

Coronavirus and working from home – a primer to get your team started
"If your work happens in front of a computer, it can happen remotely. Yes, face-to-face interaction is the best way to transmit complex ideas, details of the tasks, hilarious jokes, and deadly viruses."

Kevin Roose: Sorry, but Working From Home Is Overrated
I think he’s missing the point here. Working from home shouldn’t (and doesn’t) mean working in isolation. Communication, breaks, and personal health should be focused on whether working in an office or remote!

I’m really enjoying Tot, a new utility from The Iconfactory. It's a simple little window with a few scratch pads for text, organized by color. Tot appears to be a very basic app on the surface but features an exceptional level of design quality and attention to detail. Interesting pricing model too: free on the Mac, $20 on iOS. During the week I have about a million little text windows open with all sorts of scratch information. On iOS I've struggled to find a similar solution for these quick notes and pieces of text. I don't need to keep them forever, sometimes just a few minutes, so it's nice to have a little scratchpad that syncs. Tot also uses a small subset of Markdown, which is really handy for basic formatting. Even better: the library for handling Markdown was open sourced on Github. Worth the $20 price alone just to fund this library's development.

Dear photo blog, my old friend. It's been over a year since we last spoke. You may have thought I no longer have been taking photos. But fear not! I'm still capturing pieces of the world around me with my camera but I just haven't shared any. This year will be different and I'll do my best to post a few as I go. In the mean time, here are a few posts from the past year that never got around to being shared.

Dallas has some lovely classic architecture in some areas and dreadfully boring corporate architecture in others. The Commerce and Main Street areas of downtown have some wonderful examples. These shots were taken during an early morning walk around town last spring.

Included is, perhaps, the most Dallas picture of all: a Lamborghini parked outside of one of the oldest buildings on the street.