#258: Thriving in a remote developer environment Transcript

00:00 If you're listening to this episode when it came out April 4 2020, there's a good chance that you're listening at home or on a walk. But it's probably not while commuting to an office as much of the world is practicing social distancing and working from home. Maybe this is a new experience brought upon quickly by the global lockdowns or maybe it's something you've been doing for a while now. Either way, being effective while working remotely away from the office is an increasingly valuable skill that most of us in the tech industry have to quickly embrace. On this episode, I'll exchange stories about working from home with Jason Phillips. He's been writing code and managing teams from his home office for years, and has brought a ton of great tips to share with us all. This is talk Python to me, Episode 258, recorded March 30 2020.

01:01 Welcome to talk Python to me, a weekly podcast on Python, the language, the libraries, the ecosystem, and the personalities. This is your host, Michael Kennedy, follow me on Twitter, where I'm at m Kennedy. Keep up with the show and listen to past episodes at talk python.fm and follow the show on Twitter via at talk Python. This episode is sponsored by brilliant.org and linode. Please check out what they're offering during their segments. It really helps support the show. Jason, welcome to talk Python to me,

01:26 I appreciate it. Glad to be here. Yeah, it's great to meet you. And man, what a cool topic. And wow, I think it's pretty timely, remote work. You know, this has actually been kind of a for many people, the holy grail of the tech space. But now it's becoming the requirement of the like all work, right? This is probably well held and had right of how many how we can bring work integrated into our lives in a way and we've been achieving for balance. And oh, I would love to get a job from from home. And although this is a real challenging environment for us to be with him with this, this is also giving us a new way to figure out well, one, I can work from home. And then two, I can also integrate work into my life in ways because now that I have to do it under emergency, I'll know how to do it when you know everything's back to quote unquote normal.

02:09 Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about this. When things go back to normal, maybe an italics ease or whatever, like the new normal, whatever that is. I think that a lot of what we're going through now that's painful and disruptive. A lot of it's going to stick though, what do you think?

02:25 Yeah, I think just like how other major events in the last 20 years, you know, a lot of things that happened after 911 stuck with us, especially around security measures. But also even just different ways people engage with each other, there has been a lot more community in different ways. And then the rise of the web has kind of enhanced that the downturn of 2008. It's kind of changed how everyone thought about stocks in and investing. And there's been a lot of more casual talk, especially among folks like me, where it's like, Alright, yeah, 401k, cool, don't money in, it'll be there someday. And so Oh, I can do all these different strategies. And I think this will be that of how do we bring work and productivity into a place that's not the office and still deliver value? And then how do we use that to achieve this Nirvana of balance that we all seek so bad? So yeah, I think a lot of the things we do now will stick, I think there will be a lot more flexible office hours, for instance, I think there'll be a lot less of the you have to be butts in seats from eight to five, it'll probably be 10 to six, or maybe essential meetings, things like that. I also think that when folks do go back to in person, though, there will probably be a different push for it. Because we've all been clamoring at some point, generally speaking to get out of the house safely again,

03:39 yes, it will be nice to have human contact. Again, it's I've only been out in public extremely limited for moments for weeks now. And it's actually I'm I'm doing fine. Our families found a rhythm to just kind of stay home. But I definitely would like to get out and see people again. Yeah,

03:56 yeah, I just started venturing out to kind of get back parts of my routine of taking walks. And it's cool in my neighborhood. We all we see each other coming. We go across the street from each other. We wait from across the street. It's very socially distant. But yeah, that just the the freedom to be able to like dive in and do the things that I never realized was such a routine for me like browsing target. Yeah. The other day, I was sitting here like, it's been a few weeks as I've been the target. And that's a weird thing for me to call out. But it's just that much of how my normal routine was disrupted.

04:28 Yeah, one of the weirder things for me was I always have my car keys and my wallet in my pocket and stuff. And I just looked at my wallet. The other day I like I haven't put that in my pocket for like eight days. Like there's no reason to have it because I literally am not going anywhere. It's just you know, there's a really little weird things you're never expected like symbols of Yeah, life's not quite normal.

04:50 Yeah, even when I got my car the other day. I was like, Alright, cool. I'm finally gonna produce let's go and let's stock up and I realized I had only put maybe 100 miles on Car this month, because I came back from vacation. We've been shut down for a couple weeks here in the Bay Area. And it's like, Okay, well, wow. And normally, I try to limit my driving and do things within foot distance. But I like to go on some drives, you know, kind of clear the head. I can't say the last time I actually before yesterday, unlocked my car got in and went somewhere

05:18 guides. These are weird times. But I do think the topic that we're going to cover is particularly timely, because there's so many folks who, for various reasons, either they have always wanted to do this, but their culture of their organizations like no, no, no, we don't work from home, everyone comes to work, or a business. We're like IBM, or whatever I like for traditional formal sort of company. Or they themselves were not necessarily comfortable with it. But now they've been thrown into that. So it's gonna be a lot of fun to talk about. I was thinking about reaching out to about this topic before the COVID stuff kicked in and hype. Well now we definitely I definitely got to reach out to Jason because this is definitely something that everyone is starting to experience. So before we get into the main topics there, let me just sort of get your background for everyone's a little bit. How did you get into programming,

06:13 ah, programming. So I think it was age nine, when I first kind of really was amazed by computers. You just go to library every Saturday, as long as I did all my homework and all my chores for the week, I can go play zork on an apple, two GS for 45 minutes every Saturday. Good Ozark. And that's where the traditional I fell in love with computers as a child kind of comes to a halt for a bit because I did not start programming then it actually started playing around with programming in high school. We had different majors in our high school. So I was in the art program, and had a couple friends who were in the mega tech or math and computer science section of the school. And so I trade with them. Here's some art utensils, we can go shoot photos, and they were like, hey, we'll show you how to program Cubase like and we made our own like Mike Tyson punch out clone. So I will use the word clone very loosely. You threw punches. And it was a head bear. But there were no real graphics outside of like colorful shapes.

07:13 Sure, but you What's so funny is like, even like the incredibly rudimentary thing, it's sometimes so satisfying, especially in the beginning, you're like, Oh, my gosh, it's doing it. It's doing it. Look at it, right. It's like you have this magical power.

07:25 It's great. Yeah. And then once we figured out that we could actually, we didn't even know it was the collision detection at the time. We were just like, Oh, we can make something move when something kind of touches it. And then we'd like, take a break, go play Doom for a couple hours come back, like, Oh, we could do something else. So that was like the first real taste. And then in college, I jumped in. I was like, Alright, cool. Let's do this. Computer Science math dual major. And about midway through I dropped both. Okay? I think it was the ZIVA calculus three definitely threw me for a loop and discrete math. I was like, Okay, I'm burning a lot of cycles here. This is interesting. Do I still like this? Oh, let's find something that's a bit more still creative driven. So I went to a hybrid program that had still some programming, but we were working on 3d modeling as well. So I was like, Oh, well, you know, it won't be as much like, you know, write a program, put it on a floppy disk and print it out for the instructor, I'll be fine. And then I realized that the program Physics for like a tire or a car or a basketball, and I was like, this is actually much harder. What am I doing here? Yeah,

08:28 I don't know. Like people out there listening. If you've ever tried to do physics and hit detection and 3d graphics from scratch, I've done it before. And it is supremely more work than it should be like conceptually, right? It's

08:41 a lot. Yes. You know, once we got it down with like, skeletons and sculpting structures and making characters like alright, cool. I was like, all right now, program is math function that's going to make it actually walk and move realistically. I was like, This hurts. Yeah. And then somewhere around that time, on the tail end of school, I was, I took time off to go on tour with a DJ group, as a tour liaison, and backup DJ, and was for a DJ school in New York. And when we got back, I was like, Alright, cool. I think I'm gonna stick with this music thing. And I started freelancing on the side as a web developer. So I was like, hey, do you know this HTML thing? I'm like, I could figure it out. I've written some other code easier and 3d graphics, that's for sure. I was like, Hey, can you help me with my e commerce site? I could figure this out. As long as I don't lose you money. I think we're okay here. And then I kind of shifted gears and started doing a lot more freelance work and working through ad agencies. And then spending the rest of my time in Barnes and Noble. I would take a stack of 10 books, pick the three that spoke to me the most and buy those and then the other seven, I will work through the code examples until they closed and that was my cycle for like the first couple years until I really got underway, with My professional programming career

10:01 that is super cool that, you know, reminds me a lot of when I was younger, I didn't have a formal computer science education. So it was always get a book and just study it and get another book and study this predates like really online course online video. Right? So a book was kind of the the only option besides going to school or something. And looking back, it's super valuable. It sounds like you must have gotten a lot out of as well.

10:24 Yeah. Because at a certain point, no circumstances what How did I end up working full time, I didn't actually finish my degree. And it took me a while to kind of shift into Alright, I do like this programming thing. I didn't like it that way of kind of academic. Let's write an IO class for the entire class today. Like, I don't want to go that low level.

10:44 Yeah, let's implement quicksort. Right. It was memory again, right? Wow.

10:48 It was like, you know, all right, or, you know, let's, let's start working on pathing algorithms. But we're not doing it for animation. We're not doing it for a game. We're just doing it to do it. And like, ah, any application here. And I think that's what a lot of the kind of book knowledge and freelancing really gave me was application, and kind of creative output for all these technical things I was learning. And like you mentioned, you know, all my learning wasn't really there. Yeah, I mean, most we have webmonkey. Yeah, this is about 2003 2004 2005. Maybe w three schools was there. Yeah, there was dynamic trial for all your dhtml. But back when we used to call Joshua dhtml. Right on the cusp of what the web 2.0 with all of its gradients, but yeah, and there was also with getting books, there was a community aspect to it at times that when I look back on that and realize then, of you know, you walk into a Barnes and Noble or, you know, when they were still around a lot more borders. And you go to a certain book section, there were people of like Michigan, who were looking for books you were looking for, too. So I met a lot of folks who were kind of doing the same thing. I was like, hey, I've just got to get this flash thing. So I can go get this interactive job and do ActionScript all day. And so it also built up a little programming

12:03 network. Yeah, yeah, this predates meetup.com and all that stuff. Right. Oh, man meetup.

12:08 When meetup first launched, it was I was like, Alright, this is what we've been looking for.

12:13 It's here, it's here. It's maybe on pause again. But it's still here. Yeah, super cool. So what are you doing day to day,

12:19 so these days, I'm a director of engineering for Bootcamp, academic systems at to you. so my team in particular focuses on building platforms for students to take online education classes, through continuing education schools, as well as the student support and instructor platforms for anything from delivering homework and assignments to actually managing the lifecycle of a student from onboarding through graduation.

12:44 Yeah, it's not going to be the same because there's a lot of people who originally thought no, there's no way we can do this remote or online, or async, or whatever. And now, everyone's doing it because it's better nothing. So let's figure this out. Right?

12:57 It's really going to come down to we're seeing the successes of other platforms in this space as well. You know, folks doing all types of meetups on things like Instagram Live, and or Twitter with Periscope, or Facebook live right now. And you know, even

13:13 right, some people even Twitch,

13:15 yet twitch has been a real big kind of push, especially as they went beyond gaming folks doing like tutorials online, like, Hey, watch me do Photoshop, or, hey, let's walk through what it takes to build this someone who was writing Python services and connecting to that via protobufs with go Lang, and was like walking through folks through that project over a period of weeks. Things we didn't have even a decade ago, even five years ago. And so now you're seeing that plus the engagement of like a DJ doing a party on Instagram for 30,000 folks who are all clamoring for to be engaged with and I think we can marry those models and there's gonna be a lot more of how that spreads out.

13:53 Yeah, absolutely. This portion of talk Python to me is brought to you by brilliant.org. Brilliant mission is to help people achieve their learning goals. So whether you're a student, a professional brushing up or learning cutting edge topics, or someone who just wants to understand the world better, you should check out brilliant. Set a goal to improve yourself a little bit every day. Brilliant makes it easy with interactive explorations and a mobile app that you can use on the go. If you're naturally curious, want to build your problem solving skills or need to develop confidence in your analytical abilities, then get brilliant premium to learn something new every day. Brilliant, thought provoking math, science and computer science content helps guide you to mastery by taking complex concepts and breaking them into bite sized understandable chunks. So get started at talkpython.fm/brilliant, or just click the link in your show notes. You and I both have been doing remote work for quite some time. Let's get started. Like how did you get into remote work? Are you currently in kind of a distributed team or do you do a part time or what's the story Yeah, so what's your experience with it?

15:01 We're fully distributed, it kind of started out when I was freelancing and consulting, and would do projects off and on. And then for a period of time only consulted. And I was as remote as I possibly could be, I didn't want to be in the office with folks and say, Well, if I'm being an office, I'm also just signed and get some benefits with it. But I want to be at home, manage my projects, and kind of work from there. And that first period of doing it, I would say roughly around 10 years ago, wasn't that successful. I had a hard time understanding kind of how to balance the work, how to balance my own self discipline. And with my current role, we started out remote, it's been distributed. And from day one, everyone on the team has been somewhere between we had QA folks in Hawaii, we had our senior leadership in New York, my direct boss was and still is in North Carolina. And we've just been fully distributed. And so from there, I kind of got a first taste ground up of what is it like to be in a situation where everyone's already kind of figured out their culture? In particular around? How do we engage remotely, I think that was something that I struggled with, personally, when I was consulting and trying to stay remote, is I just, I didn't really have a frame of reference for how to do that successfully. Because I've always worked in an office. Sure, well,

16:20 that is very challenging. And I want to talk about schedules and workspace and all that because, Boy, that's important. But one of the hardest, I would say one of the hardest situations for remote, it's where it's 80%, the company is in person. And then there's that group of people, potentially you included who work either part time or maybe full time remote, because the company itself, it doesn't have the culture or the mechanisms to really make you feel part of it. Right. Like, there'll be a meeting and it'll be 10 people sitting around a table. And they'll be saying, well, and then you'd look at this and then that like, but there's no camera on it. I don't even know what you're talking you know, like they're just not right. It's it's your sort of like on the side and they'll let you be there. Right so it sounds like this coming into a true distributed company made a big difference to you.

17:13 Yeah, cuz even though the company did have offices in New York and and a couple other places, everyone was pretty much zoom first, or choose your, your conference tour choice.

17:24 So Skype GoToMeeting, whatever

17:26 right is like, Hey, you have a question? Cool. I can talk in five minutes when I just hop on a call real quick. And yes, even you know, being in a physical office, when folks are like, Hey, I have a question cool. is like, I'm gonna stand over your desk right now until you answer or if there's, it's not, as always accommodate, or even like, hey, let's go into office real quick, or, hey, let's talk in 15. And so there was that big push from the beginning of a any question we have, we can solve by hopping on zoom. In an instant, when it came to celebrations, we made an overly big deal or celebrating birthdays, anniversaries, someone got a new puppy, he's like, hey, let's, let's add you to the puppies channel in our chat. Alright, so there was a lot of a lot of embracing around being as present as possible, even though we're not in offices. And then when we did have meetings where there was folks in a conference room, you know, we just had a culture where everything was as digital as possible. So instead of someone saying, hey, if you flip to page 12, or this person's doing x, and you kind of miss out on that context, the context was as much on the screen as possible. And then when we did talk about things that were in the room, and kind of always made sure that there was at least a camera that could pan around if you went to see folks, things like that. So I think we did a good job in the beginning of figuring out and continuing to grow with, what does it mean for someone to be present here? And then just continue asking ourselves that question, rather than what does it mean to get something done? Which is a totally different way to look at it?

18:52 Yeah, it sounds a little bit like people tell you, if you're going to give like a presentation, use sort of bigger gestures than normal, because you're far away on the stage, you want to come across like interactive and whatnot. And it feels to me like you're kind of doing that in the we're going to appreciate all of the people on this team in a human way, digitally, right? Like adding them to the puppy's channel. And doing these, like extra special making sure you celebrate anniversaries and whatnot is it's a little bit like in this medium, it has to be a little more expressive and like explicit. Does that sound right? Yeah.

19:25 Yeah, you definitely have to make sure you one, kind of make sure you have the culture to meet people where they are and how they like to be engaged. That's also a big challenge more so in a remote environment is wise. You have to be explicit and deliberate about reaching out and being inclusive. You also have to meet people where they are and then office, sometimes folks go along with office politics or the BBC model. So if everyone's eating lunch together, then Hey, I'll jump along and have lunch with you things like that. When you're online, or you're remote and you're not in that office setting. Someone may not want to get that shout out on the chat. Because they're a little bit more introverted, or someone may not want to be added to that channel, because while they have a new puppy, they don't want to see other people's puppies, whatever their choice is, right? So there has to be a bit more intention and kind of deliberate motions behind engaging people, but also making it as personal as possible, even while you make it as universal.

20:20 Yeah. And I really liked what you said about the, hey, I've got this problem, can you just help me real quick, or in a few minutes, with zoom or screen sharing or whatever, I found that when I worked on a company where we had before I started my own company, before we were was on a team, and we're all trying to work on something that people would get stuck, it was super cool to be able to just say, Give me five minutes, and we'll fire up screen sharing. And 15 minutes later, you're back and running. It's like, the whole team is basically available and present from, you know, just a few minutes of click share screen, right? It was really, really powerful. And I think even being in an office, maybe you get that but maybe not maybe they're that person is in a meeting or they're you know, they're I don't know, oddly seems more accessible when it's just a matter of push a button to show you my screen.

21:08 Yeah, there's also I think the be tangible aspect of no one gives up control. In a pair programming aspect. For instance, unless you have a two keyboard setup, there's always one person who's driving and kind of in the passenger seat, but kind of directing the show, and the person who's actually driving the vehicle, right. And when you're remote, whether it's programming or working on the deck, everyone still has full control while sharing what they're working on. So there is a little bit of, I still get that feel like I'm contributing more as well, because I'm actually still active in that piece, as well as you are or as well as the rest of my team.

21:45 Yeah, that's a really good point, especially if it's something like Google Docs, or something where you can literally all type at the same time, a little harder with source code. But I guess with things like with VS Code, live, share and whatnot, we're kind of getting towards that realm.

21:56 Yeah, live share is probably the closest we've gotten thus far. It's solid for a couple of things. I wouldn't say it's great for like a 30 person Code Jam. But, you know, for the odd, hey, I'm gonna send I'm gonna send a teammate a link. It's definitely a lot further and closer to the gym than we've been in years. Yeah,

22:13 that's pretty cool. So when you think about, like, different companies, different industries, different cultures? Are there some that stand out that you're like, this, these groups of companies or people would be really good for remote work? And I just don't see how this other group is going to do it? Like? Do you see it working better in some places than others?

22:35 Yeah, I do think service industries are going to have a lot to overcome, to be a bit more remote enabled. There's just a lot of logistics, you know, you take a restaurant, for instance, even outside of the actual service staff in front of house and back of house, there's a lot of the staff that kind of, still today relies on a bit more of a closer touch point to the actual restaurant, whether it's inventory, or you know, closing books, just because of the nature of the relationships, I guess that they've always had, or at least that of what I've seen. So I do wonder how some of the service industries are going to further adapt to this remote work model

23:12 once I think that are ripe for anything that requires like, I've got to touch these physical things to like, take inventory or whatever, to build a car. You name right. It's, it's gonna be super challenging. But I suspect, you know, like in the build a car example, a lot of the engineers that work on CAD, they could work remote. Right, but the people who actually attach the bumper, maybe not so much.

23:32 Yeah. And I think there may be, especially as robotics come more and more into the pipeline of and the assembly line of making a vehicle that there is probably some control for how do we turn these still manual roles into ones that can be just as demanding, but less physical, and also enable a person who has the tangible physical expertise to then run that remotely? Like they don't have to be a programmer to be able to connect one part to the car, but do it in a remote aspect? You know. So I think, as we start to reimagine what still has to be physical labor, and who actually has to do it will unlock I think a wealth of industries to be able to adopt to a more remote model, once I think that are ripe for it right now are like libraries. Okay, I think there's no reason these days, that we can't adopt a more remote structure to libraries, still keep the physical locations as like the cultural centers and the learning centers that they are. But allowing our library and other books staff to really be able to, like manage and curate entire collections, but also not have to do so from that location, five, six days a week. They can then be you know, save some budget to be open during the peak hours when people really are engaging in person in those places. And then save all those off time hours. To be still at work, but maybe not have to be in that physical location that this kind of running the expenses of running the library

25:07 much higher, I can definitely see a place for more digital there. Like, it's still hard to go on my Kindle and check out a book at the library. They told me it's possible that last three times I tried, it's like, well, I'm not sure it's still possible, right? It doesn't seem to want to work. But yeah, that's pretty cool. Obviously, the programming space like, we've been living that world for a long time, right? We've already built up tools that even when we were together, simulated that we were not like source control, and slack and GitHub and whatnot, right? Like, it's, it's kind of natural to just take that stuff with you and behaves the same.

25:42 Yeah, it's and as we've adopted even more tools for decentralization, it's also opened up a lot more of that remote nature too, because it also allows for a lot more asynchronous work. So I can, you know, you and I can work on something and get, and I can be eight hours away in the world. And we could still be able to have full copies of all our work that we need, rather than kind of decentralized models of before where it's like, Alright, well, everything's in subversion. But someone's got a branch checked out. And that server is only

26:10 that file.

26:13 Right. So it's only running that server from like, 9am to 9pm, for some reason, or the VPN cuts off at like a certain time, like there was all these barriers that you're like, I must just be in the office that we can kind of break away from now. And I think we can adopt those models in other places. And I think retail is probably going to be another one, that's going to be hard. But there's going to be a mix of enabling folks to say, Hey, I can work remote from XYZ timezone and still manage the production line. And I really don't have to be in the office. Like, I can just make sure I connect with my peers, I can see the swatches and samples, I can do everything I need to do especially if you consider with AR now. And it's really starting to come to the point where we've all said it would be four years now of like, Hey, I can try this on foot. I can try this on person, I can see what this looks like as a digital swatch. Before we run it on production, you could probably manage most of that. Yeah, cycle off site. Now,

27:07 I think you're right that AR and VR, may well be the thing that that helps, like the next layer of people feel like they can't do that become much more. Like if you control a robot through virtual reality on the production line. You don't have to be there, right and the car won't crash you periodically in a horrible accident, right? You safer, remote ads, it's great. So when I think about remote work, it seems to me like one of the important things and they all kind of blend together is around having a routine and having a space that feels like work. I hear a lot of people complain that remote work means you're always working, or remote work means you're always accessible, or things like that. And that can be challenging. So maybe let's start with some physical spaces, like, maybe describe what it is you do for setting up your space to feel like you're at work.

27:59 Yeah, so I think for me, I always try to make sure I have a separate desk that is as space wise as far away from either my bed or my sofa as possible. When I lived in a one bedroom apartment that was a bit harder than the living room. But it was still off enough that the only thing behind what was behind it was my washing machine and dryer. So it meant that I really meant it was the work in chore station because it's like you don't get to do work or me to to wash clothes. But currently, you know, I am fortunate to have two bedrooms. So my second bedroom is my main office area. And it also houses all my sneakers. Nice. Yeah, I should probably do something about all those sneakers. But I've kind of morph this space into something where I can really just break away from the rest of the apartment and just get to work. So I have with IKEA got two table tops, pyre combined 20 bucks, a couple of legs and is made sure I can set up everything I needed for work. So I have my mic. For conferences and recording I have my big main screen, I have a second screen for some code, I have a station that can monitor my work machine goes on the bottom, my personal machine goes on the top. So it's also a bit easier for me to physically close the laptop for work and say work is over. And then when work is done, I just don't really come in here as much. Unless I'm working on a personal project or writing some code for something on the side. Then I just make sure to do all that here. So then that seems my sofa time to really be in for relaxing and enjoying entertainment saves my bedroom for really being just as for all the little tech gadgets and electronics that I love buying my bedroom only has a cable for charging my phone and a speaker

29:44 nice that's it's good to put it down and get away. I've got a similar setup here. So I'm lucky that my have a detached garage in my house and above it I've got this little area that we finished off and so I get to actually leave my house walk across the sidewalk, go up the stairs into this area. And this is like the work space, right. So I didn't even have people even though if they're home, they're generally not walking through and it feels like I get to go to work here and you can't see it that way. Everything is padded, it's like a studio and I got my microphone. So I think it's really important to have a space that you can go to because it's so easy for things to distract you and interrupt you. Especially if you share a house with somebody had to happen to be running around, then it's like all sorts of chaos. So having that space, even if you don't have kids just go into there to say, I'm at work, I'm doing work. Now I'm not like on my computer and kind of watching YouTube, and then I'm kind of fiddling with work, like I'm at work, and then I'm gonna be not at work. That's

30:42 awesome that you've kind of built in like a mini commute. And that too was was that deliberate for you to like, say, I'm going to make sure I can get as much separation as possible. We bought this house about 10 years ago. And when I saw it, I'm like, Oh, yes, this was just like, this whole area was just like wood, no insulation, nothing. I'm like, somehow we're going to finish this space. And this is going to be the office and it has the little sidewalk I walk across. It's awesome. My commute now involves going across the sidewalk, periodically, there'll be a squirrel that'll freak out and run by But otherwise, it's a very easy commute. And it's really good. Yeah, that's also I've been mimicking having a commute by making sure before I actually jump into my office to do work, I take a walk around the block, Is this enough to separate me from because one of the first bad habits I had, when I first started working remotely was I would literally roll over, cut on a meeting, keep my camera off, and take the meeting from bed. And then that became I would code from bed. And then that we can I would have one on ones with the team I managed from bed. And then I realized I wasn't really setting myself up to be as effective. But also it meant that I never got away from work. And so then it was like I move into the office. And then for a while before I came back to to you I left briefly went to a different spot, worked there for about 10 months and had to commute into San Francisco. And once I came back, I was like, man, I don't have a commute, but I actually miss going to get a coffee, I miss seeing folks at the bus scene in the world. Yeah, so I would actually walk to the express bus to record or meet a couple folks I used to all commute in with. And then when they got on the bus, I would walk back to my house, make a cup of coffee, and then start work. And I needed that for the first couple months to kind of get me back into this routine of separation between the rest of my house for living and then this space for work.

32:35 This portion of talk Python to me is brought to you by linode. Whether you're working on a personal project or managing your enterprises infrastructure, linode has the pricing support and scale that you need to take your project to the next level with 11 data centers worldwide, including their newest data center in Sydney, Australia, enterprise grade hardware, s3 compatible storage, and the next generation network linode delivers the performance that you expect at a price that you don't get started on the note today with a $20 credit and you get access to native SSD storage, a 40 gigabit network industry leading processors, their revamped Cloud Manager cloud not linode.com root access to your server along with their newest API and a Python COI just visit talkpython.fm/ linode. When creating a new linode account, you'll automatically get $20 credit for your next project. Oh, and one last thing they're hiring go to lynda.com slash careers to find out more. Let them know that we sent you. People say you don't get much work, working, much exercise emotion when you work in an office. But it's even like worse if you work from home. Right? If literally commuters walk across the sidewalk, you don't get much exercise unless you make a point of just like getting out of walking or something. Right?

33:51 Yeah, it was. There's also an interesting thing where there's also you don't realize how much physical motion you actually do have in an office, even though it's you can be pretty sedentary in an office life. Because you're walking from conference from the conference room, you walk over to insert name here his desk to figure out what's the latest update on this book on this bug report?

34:11 Like right, well, I'll get lunch or something. Yeah, right.

34:14 walked back from work, to lunch walk to have an interview, everything you do is you have to move somewhere. And when you're at home, you literally don't have to move. You can bring water to your office, you can bring snacks, if you wanted to, you could veg out for a good 12 hours straight and then realize you hadn't moved the single inch. Right. So it's rough. It takes a little bit of being deliberate to get those steps in when you're remote. Yeah,

34:42 so I totally agree. What about time of day? I think probably if you work on a team like you are, it makes a lot of sense. Like we have a daily stand up or I'm gonna have my one on ones or whatever. So obviously you're gonna have to be there. But for me, I don't have any reason to have a schedule, right or if You're an independent contractor, and just like you have a project, and you just got to deliver it, I see that it would be easy to just Well, I slept till 11, I didn't get started. And then I had to work late, and I felt like I was working all the time or something. And like, what's your thought on that?

35:13 I think for me, I've always had to have some sort of structure for work time. And then that'll kind of blend into my routine. And even for folks who say they thrive on not having a set routine, that is a routine, right, the lack of routines or routine is like, it's you just wake up, you're like, I'm gonna take on the day. For me, it was important once I realized that I had to peak hours, or to peak times of working. And those are all outside of the hours of 1pm to 8pm. Like I really get in the morning, and I really great late at night. And so I try to front load all of my morning work with the things that are most important for that day. It's a day where I have a lot of one on ones, I make sure I have all of them before 1pm. So I can give all my team, all my teammates that I manage all my attention. If I have some important meetings, I try to make them before 1pm as much as possible. And it also reserves the rest of my day, especially since I'm on the west coast and a lot of other folks on the east coast to say all right, from 4pm, on their time is 1pm on for me and I can actually just sit and be productive. Think through problems, figure out what's next prototype some things with no interruption

36:22 that is so interesting, the no interruptions, and I totally agree I worked for half a year for a company on the east coast of the US while I lived for a year in Germany. And that eight o'clock in the morning until I don't know what time it was mid afternoon when those folks woke up. It was glorious. It was good, all the stuffs done. And then you know, I actually ended up having meetings after dinner, because I had to be on that schedule a little bit. So I would take the morning Morning, go for walks, go into the city and just chill out. And then around noon, I'd start working, have dinner with the family and then go back for some meetings because some of them were on the west coast, the US which is like they're just getting up at that time.

37:01 Yeah, I think one of the great things I've really enjoyed about my team is that we create a social contract around the important hours. You know, some engineers on my team, they're great in the morning. Some others are like, Look, dude, don't talk to me until I've had lunch. And I've picked up the kids from work. I mean, from school, and then I can we can get to work and we can have a meeting. And so we just kind of have our own hours that we make sure that at least six hours of spread around time no matter where you are. And then everyone else still has the freedom to be as honor as often as they need to for the rest of their days. And it's really helped us all to be able to say, All right, cool. There's at least this 11pm 11am to 1pm timeframe, in almost any time zone where at least three or more teammates are all like at peak on. And we can kind of make sure we get together, we collaborate and we get all those things done during then. And then links up before the before and after times is like, hey, it's your time. As long as we're all on during this block. You know, you can kind of structure your day as best as you're going to be productive for you.

38:06 Yeah, I think that's great. And you know, it's with this remote work, right? You have that possibility, right? You don't necessarily have to commute, you don't necessarily have to be in the office at the same time. So if it's better for you in your life, that you can easily take your kids to school and be back at nine or whatever, right? Like you should, you should work that in and you should make that a benefit of what you're doing, I think and it can be if the company supports it. Right? The team supports it.

38:33 Yeah. And I think my team is were pretty diverse. No matter how you slice it. Some of us apparent someone's not someone's live alone, some of us don't. We're all across different time zones. And the one thing that's always been great is folks are able to integrate their lives as much as they want to. So we'll know when one of my teammates is going to pick up his daughter from Camp. She'll like wave high on a camera with a runaway. She's like getting ready for school. Yeah, another teammate, you know, she was like, hey, look, dropping off, gonna go pick up the daughter's taking the ballet, I'll be back around like 5pm. And know that there's at least two other teammates when she gets back when she wants to finish her work day. That's good to still be here to kind of collaborate and work with her. So that flexibility, I would say should be one of the biggest parts. You kind of big into this remote work lifestyle. Otherwise, you could be bringing more stress into the home instead of kind of relieving some of the stress you want to by not having to leave

39:29 Yeah. Do you guys do anything for temporarily getting together in person for like team building stuff, like when I worked for develop mentor, we were all over the globe, like Europe, all over the US, Canada and other places as well. And we would periodically have these retreats for a week where we'd meet up in the French Quarter or Toronto or Florida or something, or in London and just spend a week together. Even though it was maybe one week, a year. It really helped create a much better connection. You know, when it came to that video call later, like a lot better.

40:09 This year, we're revamping how we do it to be a bit more regional. So we can have kind of regional meetups and then maybe one huge one as time and everything else allows. But in the past, we've done an annual meeting roughly every January, where we would all go to actually a different, there's always been a different city in Florida every year. But it was a great time for like the admission staff to get to know the engineering team and say, Oh, so you're the folks who like building this, you know, education software thinks,

40:37 right, because they're never gonna beat on screen sharing with you Like, why would they Right,

40:41 right. And you know, a lot of our functions are interdependent, but not, don't directly have connection or contact points as much. So they've always been a great way for us to put names to faces and kind of really get to see each other and just keep that human aspect of, you know, everyone's beyond like a screen name in a chat in a chat room or a number from dialing into a conference that we're all. We're all people and we all like some of the same stuff. We all like different things. And we get to be together and kind of laugh about all that together.

41:13 Yeah, that sounds great. And Florida is a lovely place to go in the winter when you want to get away. I mean, you're in the Bay Area, so it doesn't get too bad. But if you're in Minnesota, Florida sounds really good. And

41:24 that is true. And we've got some some fun workouts. I think one of my favorite times was when we went to think it's Emily Island in south of Jacksonville. Does it Jackson? Oh, yeah. That was crazy fun. We were just on a resort. And I think that year, we also had a go kart scavenger hunt. Sounds awesome. And during the scavenger hunt, was a bunch of like, kind of Wipeout style stations where you had to do some sort of physical activity to like, get a clue to go to the next station. And at the end was a carnival on a golf course.

41:57 So I thought being like that crazy. Show, I think from Japan, where you got to run across like wet, spinning things. It was.

42:05 Yeah, it was it was like that, just a tad smaller and mimicked. But there was all sorts of crazy things. And then, yet the end was just this huge, like potato sack kind of slide and Carnival with all this Carnival food and a dance floor. And it was just fun to see everyone else out there element, But to your point, kind of again, have a imperson touch point that continue to build that team culture, so that we didn't feel too isolated from each other. And we can kind of, it's much easier when you can actually have a connection with someone when you do have to have the tough conversations or the tough emails or you have emergency situation that you all remember, you're all people when needed. There's just a different connection built there. That makes it Yeah,

42:47 it's not just that frustrating thing, or that that person messed up the build, or that person is always asking you to do something, and you're busy. And you're like, No, that was the person you were laughing with. And you both fell off the Wipeout thing. And so yeah, sure, whatever, I'll help them right. It's like really isn't it makes a big difference? At least it did for me. Yeah, it

43:02 definitely did for me, and especially with the admission staff, just because we've, we've always known that they're always on the frontlines doing a lot of the work, you know, working with our students, and we just never really got to interact with them. And I was like, This is cool. I mean, and they're all kind of more centrally based in two different locations. And so for anyone who's not near those offices, you just really didn't get to have touch points. So it was great to interact with everyone. Definitely one thing that any point going forward in my career, as I'm continue to be in remote environments, got to have some sort of annual, at least physical touch point for everyone to kind of get

43:39 together. Yeah, you know, it's interesting for me, now that I'm doing my own company, obviously, I'm working with authors, and some other folks helping out with like, transcripts, or marketing or video editing or whatever. It's not the same where we go and have like a retreat or something. But conferences, like pi con, or other conferences, those were the places and I'm really bummed that this year, like all the conferences are canceled. It's like, it's like my retreat. My Geek holiday has been canceled, basically,

44:06 yeah, this the lack of a conference season this year is going to be particularly hard, I think for a lot of programming subcultures and cultures, but then wider ones in general, even though I'm not an iOS developer at any shape, or form. I used to love being around just being around the WWDC conference, just the excitement of the buzz of all the data engineers and getting a little hint that like what's coming down the pipeline for OSX so I can make sure my computer's okay.

44:33 Yeah,

44:34 or, you know, going to like things like forward j s or pi con and it's, you just get to the same thing we're talking about getting to know folks in your work community is like that times a million because it's from everywhere. And I do think that conferences also going back to an earlier question is going to be ripe for different models in the future of mix of online and in person, especially for those that have been distributed for a long time over the web. Like a lot of open source communities have been good about kind of cultivating that community, I think there's gonna be new opportunity for. All right, this year, we'll probably like try to figure out how best we can do the least the talks. But the next year, how do we fully enable a kind of interactive model? That's not just hundreds of people on a classroom link?

45:27 Right? It's, it doesn't feel the same to just say, well, we're live streaming it like, that's, honestly, I don't go to the conferences, primarily for the talks. It's all the other stuff that's never gonna appear on the live stream, you know?

45:38 Yes. Like, the talks for me a lot of times are like the kind of knowledge slash memo line on the check justification. But the people that people's like the personal like, I, this is why I want to go, yeah, and just having conversations you don't get to have every day meeting folks from all walks of life, and just, you know, being an environment that's going to be for that time period, just about that community. See, I think conferences are going to be right, for that shift. And I think it's going to be interesting, after this year to see how we get that back.

46:10 It's gonna be really interesting, because it's one report, it's also really hard to create that feeling amongst many people. So it's going to be super interesting. You're right. All right. Well, we're getting a little bit short on time. So I do want to talk about some concrete tools that folks can use. So there's, we've already mentioned zoom. Right? we're actually talking right now on Skype, just because that happens to record slightly better multitrack stuff. But what are some of the tools that you guys find useful and that you're using day to day,

46:44 I would say Slack, or any sort of social chat form, we use discord for, like, non work stuff, like follow the same rules, but this is just for us to kind of personally Connect. I do like slack for a lot of the work stuff, it's made it super helpful to keep track of all sorts of different conversations also be able to just reach out to someone. I like discord for its voice feature, which I think is bar none against any of the other kind of chat platforms today, maybe close second to zoom. But if you want to, if you're looking for a mix of like a teams or a slack with dead easy voice, that's super clear. discourse. Oh, wow. Okay. It, I mean, even to the ease of being able to go from I can, you know, I've been in a discord chat room with a couple of colleagues and we were like, brainstorming over something we're going to do for a presentation. And then I've got to walk away from the computer, maybe to go get laundry or something, and not to just switch to the phone, and it actually works seamless. Just, that is when I became kind of converted, and one of my teammates is like, finally you get it. But some sort of like interactive chat application, I think is essential for sharing information.

47:57 I totally agree. And I also would like to throw out I feel like video calls, they add a lot to it, right? If you don't get to sit down and if it's always just chatter, it's just email. It can feel very sterile, right? It could feel like you're, you're typing out, you're just gonna share like, I need this from you what have you done, like or whatever, right? It can be very much like that. But when you get this sort of, I can see you it still helps be a little bit more real, I think.

48:24 Yeah, and I always suggest that at for as much as your budget allows you get a solid, at least 10 ADP camera like external if you're going to be doing a lot of of like screen sharing it and kind of screen breakout just it plays a big difference.

48:39 Yeah, we're talking right now on 10 ADP each and it, it looks nice, and it makes it much better than just a disembodied voice.

48:46 Yeah, it's you get as much of the face to face combo as possible there. And you also have one less thing to worry about on your laptop because you know, some some machines you know, some laptops that had their web cameras for some reason on like the, the anchor point where you been so it's like the cameras in a weird place and I get to move your laptop a different way. external camera just makes it super easy. And also just a guarantee that you have a certain amount of quality that's always in my kind of remote work

49:14 tool kit. You know, while you're on that, what do you think about microphones?

49:17 microphones? I think definitely if you can spring for an external one. Do you so you don't have to go get like $1,000 sure microphone

49:25 even like a headset or something. Right. can go a long ways.

49:29 Yeah, thing. Yeah, I mean, there's numerous benefits, though. One of the main ones is it keeps as much of the desktop noise off as possible, which keeps your voices clear because a lot of us don't realize how much we clack on a keyboard or tap on a desk. The second piece is just the clarity of the vocals. When you you don't want to sit you know right up on your laptop the entire day. Especially if you do are fortunate enough to have a separate space where you can sit in a chair that's comfortable and work at a desk. Kind of when it Keep your laptop at bay. So it helps with that as well. And, you know, headset, I think is the first piece, it also helps you to block out ambient noise. So there's cars going by or other stuff to keep you from being distracted.

50:12 That's a good point, I've never really thought of that it's a little bit of a noise reduction, even for ones that are just like even earbuds

50:18 or whatever. Yeah, again, it doesn't have to be like the top of the line like $10,000, helicopter headphones, but just something that gives you that's comfortable to wear, that makes your voice as clear as it can be, and allows you to just be focused enough and in tuned enough with the conversation that's happening. And if you do spring for maybe a desktop mic or something, you just want something that's directional that can that's really meant for vocal recording, that can be clear. And again, just kind of make sure you still have that same quality,

50:47 right, like, I'd recommend ATR 2100. That's like a $65 mic as a USB option. It's dynamic and directional. So a lot of the background noise is gone. And it's it's not that much, but also just like a little boom, mic even. I'm thinking of like all the times I've been on conference calls, and there's that person who you can just barely understand it. It's so scratchy. And you could only take 15 minutes of that, then you just can't possibly focus on listening that I can but it's really not joyful to focus on like straining to hear scratchy, really tinny, distant speaking, right?

51:24 Yeah. And you always want to make sure you're coming across clearly, right? You always wanna make sure you're being heard and understood. And nothing is more disruptive. Well, there's things that are more disruptive, but almost nothing is more disruptive to a conversation and someone to repeal, you have to say, Can you repeat that? Or huh? Yeah, did you say is disruptive to the flow. The other thing is that I think about a lot too is that if you have pristine conditions, right, your internet bandwidth is 100% fine. And your machines running normal, no hot fans are nothing. The better your equipment, the more kind of you you set that baseline level. So if your internet does start to drop out, your quality is not going to be as hampered, versus if it was already kind of a tinny voice are very scratchy. Then if you have, you know, some sort of interruption, your voice is probably not existed at that point.

52:13 Yeah, it's really rough.

52:14 Always try to aim for Okay, what's kind of my clear baseline. So then I actually know over time, even if zoom tells me that my internet is unstable, I can still be heard through the robots.

52:28 Yeah, absolutely. You know, what I the sort of thinking of as you're describing the microphone and the cameras, I feel like that is your digital representation. Right? Like, if you went to an office, you would put on non wrinkly clothes, you would brush your hair, take a shower or something right, you would go in a semi presentable way. And that's this is sort of the digital equivalent, right? If you come through like ultra scratchy and barely audible, like, you are not presenting yourself well to your colleagues, or the people you're meeting with who are partners or whatever, right? Yeah,

53:00 that's definitely true, it is, to a good extent about managing your image and what you're bringing to the table. And then, you know, the other aspect of that, too, is that caring about the image also shows how much you can kind of really be set on knowing that people can see you, they can understand you, they can get everything that you want them to get out of it. Because again, you don't want to be on a call and also be misunderstood. Or maybe because your cameras like really, really dark, they don't really get to see your facial expressions. So something you say might not might lack the physical cue, that would give a given cut a different context to it. A lot of those things can pop up, right, same as it does like when we're purely in text. So I think everything will roll with mics and cameras, it just helps you to bring the best view into the office, it helps you to make sure you can get the best view across in terms of the points you want to get across. And just kind of crease that level baseline. So when things do happen, you starting from a high point of quality and not from like a barely, barely visible. Here degraded

54:01 version is what like a lot of people come in for good, right?

54:05 Yeah. Back to that that tittie version. As you can tell. I've had a lot of issues with broadcasting over the years.

54:12 Yeah, your sounds great. What other tools? You guys sounds like you guys might use zoom?

54:17 Yeah. So we use a lot of zoom a lot of slack. We use discord for like, kind of our social water cooler stuff. I think after that, for me, it comes down to personal what Well, one thing we have started using to great success is this tool clockwise, which Okay, I haven't heard of that. It attaches to your Google Calendar. And we're all on the, you know, the Google corporate email. And so it'll look at different meetings and say, Hey, this person's day is very fragmented. And all of you are free from one to two. How about I move that meaning to that point, so that you will have a bit more of a longer clear a block of just free time. That's been that's cool,

54:58 hugely amazing. Kids like defragmenter for your calendar.

55:02 Yes. And it is amazing. That sounds killer. I was like, yeah, sure, it'll figure out my calendar. And then every week, it's like, hey, last week, you had 22 hours of undisturbed time. Like, I didn't know I had 22 hours. So

55:16 yeah, that's cool.

55:17 It's definitely helped. And you definitely need some sort of strong calendaring approach. I don't know if it has to be any particular model. But you do have to have some sort of philosophy for yourself, like, what is your time? And how do you manage it? And how do you block it off on your calendar, when people know they can pin you distribute? Right? Like, for me, I have a reminder every Monday to block out all the times of the week that I should, and then I use calendly, to

55:42 let people book times for me, but there's probably some better thing for an organization, right? Like this is for like, external people wanting to book times with me. So it's not like we share like office 365 calendars or whatever, right?

55:55 Yeah, and I think, for us, like I sort of clockwise and a few other tweaks, it's made all the difference for us to be able to manage our calendars internally. Also, that for me, the biggest single tool I have is my notebook, okay, because it's important for me at a certain point to just cut them, cut the computer off and walk away from work for the day, I found that to do apps, and of every variety, I've tried Wunderlist, I've used to do IV, I've used notes, I still use things for like larger, kind of larger picture initiatives. But as far as workflow, this is nothing that's as immediate to me as pen and paper. And being able to manage that, look at it as a glance, be on a meeting, write notes in between the lines, close the book, keep the book with me. And it also helps me kind of get all my thoughts down. But again, away from the computer, right? For me, it's really about the boundary between my computer being for work. And then when it is for play, it's my personal and I don't put work stuff on that, to let me manage everything away from those things as much as possible.

57:00 Well, I'm guessing GitHub probably plays an important role or some form of

57:03 Git. Yeah, GitHub is our is our repository of choice. We were all in on GitHub, we use circle ci for our integration builds, we were using containers for a lot of stuff. And I think we were revamping some of our processes around like our our Docker clusters, or cluster of Docker images. Rather, we use JIRA pie like 90% of the software engineering world at this point. JIRA is another powerful tool that if you have the right workflow for your team culture, it just unlocks productivity in spades, you know, like, we have tools for allowing our stakeholders to create tickets for us, that ensures that we have the ticket model flow inserted properly, we have our swim lanes set up so that you know it's a bit more visual to each of us as engineers is also visible for all the business folks, when they just want to know the status of something real quick, save us a lot of iterations to get there. But once we did, it's like, okay, no one touched the setup is perfect. Let's leave it as is. And yes, code is our editor of choice that in, we run pretty much everything inside of our VS Code. And sometimes we'll hop on live share now with zoom and just kind of chat and be on video and do some pair programming together, which is fun.

58:18 Yeah, that sounds really powerful. Nice. Do you try to get away to coffee shops or libraries or other, like get out? I mean, right now, that maybe is not such a possibility. Because I mean, like, California and Oregon are both locked down. Like neither of us could go to a coffee shop. But in general, that a thing that you would try to do.

58:36 Yeah, one of the biggest things I tried to do to get more steps back in was to kind of give myself breaks with rewards. So if I, in the beginning of there, if I stay home, and I I'm gonna make all my lunch and winning, then it was like ordering in. So now it's, hey, if I do order out for lunch, I have to go pick it up. And I try to make it somewhere I can walk to I get the hidden steps in. I take walks around the neighborhood I there's like two different coffee shops, I'll walk to depend on the day of the week. It's important for me to kind of make sure that like every, I'd say roughly every two and a half hours in the day I until I hit about 6pm I will take at least a 15 minute walk. Other times I have folks on the team will be like, Hey, is this a presentation meeting? Can we all can we like walk and talk. And so also just take one meetings, which has been also another like kind of thing I wish I could do more of when I was in an office of like, hey, while the eight of us is go walk to go get coffee and have our meeting at the same time. A little harder with eight people walking down the street in a busy city. But virtually, it's amazing. You can still be tuned in as long as you're not viewing something that needs to be shown on your screen. And you still get those steps in.

59:46 Yeah, that's great advice. I really like that because it lets you get that outside feeling and yet you're not you don't feel stuck in the meeting but you get the meeting accomplished. It's beautiful.

59:58 Yeah, it's you get everything you need out The meeting. And you also don't have to feel guilty about being off camera and or being outside because you as a team have set that expectation,

01:00:09 right? It's like putting you in my pocket. So the cameras off or walking, right? Or

01:00:12 it's like, Hey, I'm on mute for a sec, there's a car going by, which sometimes depending on I know, for me, sometimes I have to do that anyway, because I live near an interstate. And if my, at my window open because it's warm, or we're just gonna hear a lot of honking. So, again, it's all about adapting to the team's culture and kind of what you all agree upon. But you can fit a lot of these physical things in and kind of getting fresh air getting some vitamin D, while still being super productive.

01:00:39 Yeah, that's super cool. All right, I guess one final area, maybe we could touch on since you're kind of in the thick of it and definitely have some background just briefly is what is like training and continuing education look like for like remote work,

01:00:55 remote workers? That is a great question. I think first and foremost, as you adapt to being remote, you figure out what is the best type of way you learn, some people love go at your own pace, kind of Udemy style courses. Some people live like live synchronous courses, or a mix between. And I think once you find the model that works best for you, then you find the sources, right? These days, there's online boot camps, there's the Udemy is of the world as the Coursera has, there's all these sources for a free ad or excuse me, for PE courses and coursework that you can, you can adopt in getting ebooks works well, I think podcasts have been great. I actually miss the kind of rails cast style of podcasts, you can find a lot of it on YouTube or on Twitch, which are also great sources for different communities for learning in different realms. But I think the podcast style for some of the learning was great, because you had the full video, it was episodic. And it was something that you could take with you to the gym, or that while doing something else that kind of gets you active. I really think that this online enhanced online enabled learning, no matter which model you take, is going to be hugely beneficial for folks who are working remote. And if you're in a situation where you're taking it alongside peers, especially something that's maybe in a program or some other practice, you've technically got some on the job training. Now you've got experience working remote with colleagues on something in that field. Yeah, that's not insignificant at all, especially if it's like a six month course or a nine month course. So there's also just hidden power in practicing for the job that you actually want or for the new role that you want while learning to do it. Yeah.

01:02:38 What do you think about creating like an internal cohort going through, like a Udemy style class, or like we have, you know, like, eight hour courses, right? And you can go through at your own pace? What do you think about saying like, Alright, this week, we're all going to spend one hour a day in the morning on this. At the same time, we can ask each other questions or comments or good idea, not good idea.

01:03:00 I think that's also a good idea for both personal enhancement and for team building. So there's a group at the office, they have a coffee and code group for the women identifying engineers at the company. And every, I think it's every other day, like I think two to three times a week, like ATM, they have coffee, and they just die one coat together. And even they build different web apps together, they learn new technologies together. And then they bring that into their teams. And that's helped them grow as individual engineers, but it's also helped them push their teams and a lot of different ways. For we build for our client, our clients, our students, we also have another thing that we call deal, drop everything and learn. And the whole idea is that even if we're all learning something different, we're all taking the same hour at the same time to just drop everything and just enhance ourselves. There's no limitation on what you can learn. If you wanted to take a cooking course during that hour. Cool. Just come back to the team and show us a new technique. Right. You know, tell us about a new saucy learned. If it's guitar, if you feel good about it, and you want to play a song. Like the whole point for us, though, is that any type of personal enhancement and learning is going to help you both personally and professionally. Okay, all those things teach you different types of discipline. That'll

01:04:15 apply, right? Sure. Yeah, very interesting. Take. All right. Well, I guess we're pretty much out of time. So we need to wrap this up. But it's been great to chat with you about it. I before I got here, though, I do believe I know your answer this first question here. But when you're going to write some code, what editor do you use? vs. code has been the tool right on. That's my favorite tools. And normally, I asked your favorite pie package and I know you've done a fair amount of Python, but I'm going to mix this one up a little bit and ask you for like a recommendation for a tool for remote work and it can be one like clockwise that you already mentioned or something else like for remote teams or people just jumping into what would you give them

01:04:56 I'd say some sort of clock or timer and What do you do pomodoro. Anything else, just making sure that you give yourself X amount of time of work, and an X amount of time of play, rinse, repeat until your day is over.

01:05:08 Nice, nice, great advice. Okay. final call to action. People out there are getting into remote work. Or maybe they're an organization, trying to figure out how their team is going to make this transition under an emergency almost. What do you say to him?

01:05:23 I say, first and foremost, remember that right now? Nothing is normal. It's okay. Just hold on to that. And know that that's true. And at the same time, know that you have what it takes to do whatever you've been doing in person, remotely from your home, create your space, create what works for you best, take the tips that Michael and I have shared, and create your own tips from those and ultimately create your own system. Awesome.

01:05:46 Great advice, Jason. Really great to chat with you. And thanks for sharing your experience with everyone.

01:05:51 Likewise, Michael, appreciate it. You bet. Bye bye.

01:05:53 This has been another episode of talk Python. To me. Our guest in this episode was Jason Phillips. And it's been brought to you by brilliant.org, and linode brilliant.org encourages you to level up your analytical skills and knowledge visit talkpython.fm/ brilliant and get brilliant premium to learn something new every day. Start your next Python project on the nodes state of the art cloud service. Just visit talkpython.fm/ linode li n o d, you'll automatically get a $20 credit when you create a new account. Want to level up your Python. If you're just getting started, try my Python jumpstart by building 10 apps course or if you're looking for something more advanced, check out our new async course the digs into all the different types of async programming you can do in Python. And of course, if you're interested in more than one of these, be sure to check out our everything bundle. It's like a subscription that never expires. Be sure to subscribe to the show, open your favorite pod catcher and search for Python. We should be right at the top. You can also find the iTunes feed at /itunes. The Google Play feed is /play in the direct RSS feed at /rss on talk python.fm. This is your host Michael Kennedy. Thanks so much for listening. I really appreciate it. Don't get out there and right