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Ask HN: What remote work tools do you use with your team?

by Trystans on 3/8/22, 2:01 PM with 4 comments

I'm currently working in the development team, we both work from home as the epidemic is serious outside. But we just found it is harder to collaborate efficiently than we work together at the workplace. Any useful tools for us to collaborate on developing projects during remote work?
  • by john_cogs on 3/8/22, 3:13 PM

    GitLab has an All-Remote Guide that might be helpful to you and your team: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/guide/
  • by flatiron on 3/8/22, 2:28 PM

    Honestly I live my life in Slack. I've been fully remote for close to 5 years over two jobs. Both jobs were the same (even though the first job at apple only adopted Slack a year or two after I started)
  • by cameron_b on 3/8/22, 3:04 PM

    Preface, a large part of my job is running a 30k user Zoom account, so take that for what it is worth. TL;DR: pick one of ( Zoom, Teams, Slack, Discord ) and take time to learn - grok - it together, then find your rythm.

    There's a lot of talk here about Meeting time vs. Project time or Manager schedule vs Programmer schedule ( with good reason, given PGs take on it )

    What I have seen is that teams will need to find their own cadence for sync points given their familiarity with collaboration tools and the particular work they have.

    There is a story about marines in training that goes something like this: At first as they move through unfamiliar territory, they talk all the time. They call out things they see, the call out directions to look and walk, but as they become cohesive they become silent.

    Build a "basic training" environment for yourselves. Learn Git completely if that's your toolset. Grok something excellent together [ jira, AWS, Gitlab], and do it in the context of some voice/video chat tool. Zoom or teams or discord or slack, and explore how to track the things you are doing in the conversation you are having. Zoom and Teams ( depending on what else you use ) have chat and app integrations to keep your workflow documented in your conversation. Share you screens to see exactly what you're looking at together, share control of someone's computer to teach, annotate on a code review. Etc.

    Explain that this is contextualized exploration. Meet more than you want to and then cancel meetings down to the cadence that works for you.

    You may want to meet twice a day if you're tackling smaller chunks of tickets/backlog or have devs newer to the project, or once a day may be a burden.

    Set agendas ( or hire a scrum master or similar, even better ) to keep your sync points productive, establish your next period of work and get back to the good stuff.

    Keep documentation of your meeting notes in a Teams channel / slack channel / Zoom team chat and check back on it.

  • by Prosee on 3/9/22, 2:38 PM

    we use Slack for communicating and Pylon for coding.