Tag: collaboration

Toptal: The Suddenly Remote Playbook

Toptal is one of the great companies that I have my eyes on.  If you haven’t heard of them, here’s a brief intro:

Toptal is an exclusive network of the top freelance software developers, esigners, finance experts, product managers, and project managers in the world. Top companies hire Toptal freelancers for their most important projects.

I’ve had some interactions with the company in the past, and I’ve heard plenty of stories from other people.  These guys definitely know what they are doing.

And if you don’t believe me, here’s some proof for you.  The COVID-19 pandemic forced a lot of companies, teams, and people to work remotely.  Some were ready for this, but most had to make major adjustment.  Many are still struggling.  Toptal though is not one of them.  They’ve been doing remote work for a long time now.  Lucky for the rest of us, they’ve shared a lot of that in a rather concise, to the point, easy to read document, titled “The Suddenly Remote Playbook“. It is a playbook for sustaining an enterprise-grade remote work environment, from the world’s largest fully remote company.

It doesn’t matter whether you are just starting with the remote work, or have been doing it for a long time, I promise you, you’ll find plenty of useful information in there.

From the simple and direct quotes like:

People are the most important element of any company, remote or not.

To an impressive list of tools like:

  • Slack
  • Grammarly
  • Zoom
  • Krisp.ai
  • Google G Suite
  • Miro
  • Collabshot
  • Loom
  • Trello
  • Asana
  • Confluence
  • Zapier
  • … and more.

Strongly recommended for reading, studying, and implementation!

Google: How to do a code review

Google is sharing “How to do a code review” as part of its engineering practices. Unlike many similar guides online, I find this document to be a lot more comprehensive. It covers both the technical bits of the process, as well as suggestions that improve overall team communications and efficiency.

A particular type of complexity is over-engineering, where developers have made the code more generic than it needs to be, or added functionality that isn’t presently needed by the system. Reviewers should be especially vigilant about over-engineering. Encourage developers to solve the problem they know needs to be solved now, not the problem that the developer speculates mightneed to be solved in the future. The future problem should be solved once it arrives and you can see its actual shape and requirements in the physical universe.

Notion – an all-in-one workspace

Today I came across yet another interesting application – Notion. It can be a simple note taking app just for yourself, or a collaboration tool for a whole team, with knowledge base, tasks, and project management. There’s also a way to have other types of structured data, like CRM leads, etc.

I wish I had the time to play around with it right now, but I don’t. So I’ll leave it here for the next time.

P3.express – practical project management framework

When it comes to project management, there are many certifications, guidelines, and suggestions all over the web. But it’s often difficult to pick the right one. Some are overly complicated. Others are too simplistic and don’t cover even the whole project lifespan.

P3.express, however, looks good. It covers the project management process from the early days, when it’s not even clear if the project will proceed at all, to the tasks that need to happen after the project has been fully completed. The whole flow consists of 37 activities in 7 sections, with each one of the activities being well documented and explained.

This one is definitely worth a try. Especially if you ever felt like this:

Slack Tips

Tips and demo are probably my most favorite sections on any website, especially so for productivity tools. I’m glad to see that Slack Tips are now launched as well, with a collection of simple, yet powerful recipes on how to make everyone’s life easier.