communications

A Million Words Published at Work in a Remote Company

Sara Rosso shares some thoughts on what to document and share, after publishing over a 1,000,000 words while working at Automattic. Here’s the gist of it:

If you’re the go-to person for something in your company, consider how much of it is just gatekeeper information you could document properly to help someone else learn/grow from or work on independently.

Separate out processes and historical background from your strategic expertise. Processes and backstory are not really ‘what you know.’ It’s much better to be a person someone asks ‘why’ or ‘when’ to do something vs. the logistics of a ‘how.’ How can and should be documented for others to build off of regardless of your involvement. This should free you up to be more involved in the why, the new, and the next of your work.

If you’re repeating yourself in private chats or (gasp!) email on a specific topic, document it. That’s also what drove me to create this blog – being able to answer someone’s question with an answer you’ve already carefully crafted for someone else is a great feeling (and a great use of your time)!

Will someone want to know why you decided or executed something a specific way later? Share as much background as possible so colleagues are brought up to speed immediately. Share the setup & thought process you went through, where to find more information, and even the facts, ideas, or information you considered but deemed outside of scope for the particular project. My goal is to hopefully never have someone ask “where did this come from?” or “what’s your source?” or “did you consider this?” (when I had) and instead focus on enriching the discussion or challenging my ideas vs. asking me for information I should have provided in the original post.

Gather the best, most complete, or authoritative things you’ve authored and submit them as potential onboarding materials for new team members. Challenge them to ask questions and to find something you need to document.

If important progress is made, be sure to update your documentation, or retire in favor of something newer or more complete. We do this by linking from old posts to new ones, and all it takes is a quick comment and a link on an old post.

Why I don’t answer most phone calls

The question of the phone call etiquette has been coming up more and more often recently. Is it polite to call without a prior message or agreement? What time should one call? What’s the decision point for opting for the phone call versus some other communication channel? These, and many other questions are popping up frequently.

I came across a nice blog post – “Why I don’t answer most phone calls” – which discusses some of the reasons why this particular person doesn’t answer phone calls. It’s a good quick read, but here is a summary:

Because I’m busy.
Because my agenda and tasks are also on my phone.
Because a call leaves no trace.
Because your communication is worse.
Because repeating yourself is costly.
Because it’s awkward.
Because my memory sucks.

And I do agree with these points. Call do interrupt and are rarely timed well. Most people suck at communications, so calls drag on forever. Whenever something is discussed or decided, there is no trace of it. And my memory is horrible.

However, I do still answer phone calls. But my personal expectation is that a call is:

either about something really urgent,
or I’ve missed a text/message and left it without response for longer than the caller expected (beer for lunch? and it’s lunch already),
or it’s from a good friend or family, who I haven’t heard from in a while.

If it’s none of the above, I tend to get irritated and think much lesser of the world around me in general, and a person calling me in particular. :)

35 new ways to do your work right inside of HipChat

HipChat keeps extending the amazing list of integrations with other tools and services. This blog post – 35 new ways to do your work right inside of HipChat – lists some of the recently added. Included, among others, is even a multiplayer snake game.

Rocket.Chat – the ultimate self-hosted open source chat platform

Chat is becoming more and more important for team communication and collaboration (what is ChatOps?). Old school applications like Skype are being replaced with modern, web-based chat platforms, that provide group/room and one-on-one chats, file uploads, screen sharing, voice and video communications, API integration and more. There are plenty of solutions to choose from too.

Traditionally, self-hosted solutions were difficult to setup and maintain, and were lacking in integration options. So many teams choose to go for the third-party hosted approach. This is not very exciting for companies that deal with sensitive data though.

As mentioned before, at work, we are using HipChat. It’s nice, it’s free, and it integrates nicely. Lately, there has been a lot of hype about Slack, which I tried, but didn’t particularly like.

Today, however, I came across a very nice option, which seems to be a breeze to self-host and maintain – Rocket.Chat. It’s modern – written in JavaScript, it has a long list of features, and there is a vibrant community around it.

You can try the live demo, or deploy it to your infrastructure via a gadzillion different methods, or read the beautiful documentation. And there’s a rumor of HipChat and Slack import tool, so you won’t have to start from scratch…

Let me know what you think.

WhatsApp introduces end-to-end encryption for everything

WhatsApp introduces end-to-end encryption for all communications – chats, pictures, videos, etc. I’m sure it’ll help them get more individuals and businesses on the network, as well as probably ban the app in a handful of countries.

WhatsApp has always prioritized making your data and communication as secure as possible. And today, we’re proud to announce that we’ve completed a technological development that makes WhatsApp a leader in protecting your private communication: full end-to-end encryption. From now on when you and your contacts use the latest version of the app, every call you make, and every message, photo, video, file, and voice message you send, is end-to-end encrypted by default, including group chats.

The idea is simple: when you send a message, the only person who can read it is the person or group chat that you send that message to. No one can see inside that message. Not cybercriminals. Not hackers. Not oppressive regimes. Not even us. End-to-end encryption helps make communication via WhatsApp private – sort of like a face-to-face conversation.