Working remotely and the tools that make it possible

http://blog.braidapp.com/working-remotely-and-the-tools-that-make-it-possible

by mp3jeep01 • 13 years ago

48 18 13 years ago

blog.braidapp.com

mp3jeep014• 13 years ago

These are just a few of the tools that help us work together, even when we aren't all in one location. Caveat, the apps, AFAIK, are Mac specific.

ownagefool• 13 years ago

That sort of makes it _harder_ to work together unless you force all employees to use Mac, which I guess you can do.

A alternative list of techs that'll help (imo, despite being nothing like yours):

IRC
XMPP
Email
Skype (alternatives welcome)
Vagrant
Favourite bug / productivity app.
Your favorite wiki (if in doubt, use mediawiki)
VPN (assuming you have need to connect to the office, you probably don't if you're using github type resources)
Git

Basically, all the same stuff that'll help you work even if you're in the same office. I've worked from home for over 3 years, the #1 problem for me is the people in the office who don't use these tools.

mp3jeep014• 13 years ago

Fortunately I haven't had to use the cattle prod yet, everyone here was a Mac user since before we started. We find tools that work for everyone, it just so happened to be some were Mac specific, over time I'm sure this list will morph quite a bit.

thedufer• 13 years ago

To be fair, most of the actual collaboration tools (Trello, Flowdock, Hackpad) appear to be webapps. iMessage/Facetime is the big exception.

essdessy• 13 years ago

i used to use cloud app and slingshot, but since going retina on my mbp i use Droplr. And sometimes Dropbox's new auto screenshot to clipboard link is great.

idan2• 13 years ago

"Sometimes"?

I've been using cloudapp for the last year, but I'm curious about the dropbox thing.

There's also Servus (https://servus.io/) which is pretty much like cloudapp/droplr but using your dropbox.

stephencelis• 13 years ago

Slingshot's supported Retina since V2. Dropbox's auto-upload of screen shots is pretty good (they're using a private API to copy the link the your clipboard before the upload even starts, so it feels really fast), but if you share files outside of screen shots, Slingshot might still fill a need with file and clipboard sharing.

kevinflo• 13 years ago

Our team is split across the country and we've taken to doing a quick google hangout each day. Just a little face-to-face communication each day has helped immensely.

mp3jeep014• 13 years ago

Whoops! Neglected this one. Google hangouts definitely help us when we need more than the 1-on-1 allowed via Facetime.

mbseid• 13 years ago

These are some great tools. I would also like to recommend Scumr. It really helps our teams with our morning stand-up meetings. Notifies when we are the meeting starts, and when everyone is ready. Allows the meetings to be persistent too. Check it out: http://www.scrumr.us/

Full disclosure: I wrote the tool during a work hackathon. It has come a long way since then.

mp3jeep014• 13 years ago

Interesting looking tool, I'll definitely take a look. Finding a time that works every day for scrum becomes difficult across timezones, it seems there's always someone that "loses".

idan2• 13 years ago

Nifty. We are still doing scrums as an ad-hoc thing, and some tooling might make it easier. Since I'm on the far side of the world, Scrum time is about 22:30, and I can't always be online then, so something to let me "jump in" from anywhere with an email is nifty.

bifrost3• 13 years ago

I'd say its a requirement to have a VPN now as well. If you're not protecting your network transport, you're ignoring a lot of best practices.

tomp• 13 years ago

If they're only using web apps, there's no need for VPN.

bifrost3• 13 years ago

Because nobody has ever built "firesheep"?

I think that its unrealistic to assume that nobody is watching you (because we know thats untrue now) and that nobody bad is looking to harm what you do. It is trivial to inject an exploit into an unprotected webapp.

wotsrovert• 13 years ago

For pairing remotely, I use Screenhero. http://screenhero.com/

Working remotely and the tools that make it possible

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