communications

On working remotely

Here are a few notes on working remotely from a person who has first hand experience with that:

In terms of communication I think remote employees are a massive benefit to a company, it is easy in an office to forget about proper communications channels because you can bypass them and tap somebody on the shoulder, which leads to confusion as people are now out of the loop and without information they need to work, this problem becomes even worse as your company grows. Working remotely is impossible without proper communication channels, seperate mailing lists for different working groups, bug trackers, project management tools and chat rooms for quick messaging. Everyone will be forced to use these as a part of their daily workflow which helps combat the usual lack of adoption with office tools, when I am working remotely I feel a lot more confident I know what I need to do than in an office. There are times when its easier to work face to face particularly with more high level discussions and planning so I make sure to use as much of my time visiting the office to get these done.

I wish more people considered it.

Group messaging is the next big thing

Download Squad suggests that group messaging is going to be the next big thing in mobile communications:

The next big thing in mobile communications seems to be group messaging, and that’s no real surprise. If we take a look at the currently entrenched communication platforms, not many of them do more than messaging one-to-one or one-to-a-few well. Sure you can have group chats using traditional IM protocols, but they are inherently transitory.

I have to agree with them somewhat. I don’t know if that’s necessarily going to be the next big thing or if it will be big at all, but it is something that is needed. Today. By many people.

Living in Cyprus, a rather small country with not many ties to technology, I am often much behind the needs of my friends from more populated areas. There is usually a three to five year gap between the time when my American and English friends form a new communication need, and the time when I do so. And more often than not, this gap is enough for a good solution to the problem exist before I even have the actual problem.

With group messaging it is different. At least in the last part. I need it now. Yesterday even. And there is nothing uniform, free, and convenient. Email and Skype are the two tools I use for those purposes the most right now. But neither of them, no together, they solve the problem. They are good enough for when I am (as well as other group members) are online and at their computers. But more and more often we really need a solution that bridges mobiles and desktops.

Features that I personally need are:

cross-platform client (Linux/Windows/Apple desktop, Android/iPhone/Blackberry mobiles, and also web)
server-side history with synchronization
offline messages (if the participant is offline, you should still be able to send the message and he should receive it when he comes online)
persistent groups (I don’t want to redefine same groups over and over by adding individual members to chat)
persistent chats (same chat can continue for days or weeks, while there can be more than one chat in progress with the same group, so archiving has to be smart)
UTF-8 and multilingual support
attachments and web friendliness (thumbnails for pictures and videos, highlighted URLs and email addresses, etc)
basic styling (mostly for quotes and code snippets)
ideally, integration with Google/Facebook/Twitter/Oauth or something else that would save me the trouble of yet another registration, pair of credentials, and all the hard work for contact/group building.

It’s not 00, it’s a +

I am getting tired complaining and explaining the difference between 00 and a + in the telephone and fax numbers. It’s quite simple actually and I wonder why the mistake is so frequent. So, here it goes in written form, so that I won’t have to explain it anymore – just provide a URL.

If you are writing phone number as 0035799513109, you are doing it wrong. It works for some, but not for everyone. 00 in this case is international dialing code. Many countries are using 00 for international dialing code, but not all of them, by far. For example, in Russia, the international dialing code is 810. So the phone number should be 81035799513109, not 0035799513109. See?

So, how are you supposed to know all these codes for each country and how are you supposed to provide your phone number so that anyone in any country can dial it and get where they are supposed to? The answer is simple: use ‘+’ for the international dialing code, followed up by the country code, and then the rest of the number. Each telephone company in every country will replace the plus in the beginning of the phone number with the appropriate international dialing code. Write the phone number as +35799513109. This will always work. And where it won’t, the person will at least know what to do with the number.

Software engineering is like cooking

During the last few month I’ve been explaining software engineering to management types quite a bit. Most of the “bosses” that I talked to weren’t technical at all, so I was trying to stay away from famous concepts, examples, and terminology as much as I could. Of course, that required some sort of substitute for concepts, examples, and terminology. I’ve tried analogies from different unrelated areas, and was surprised as how good cooking was fitting the purpose.

Before I go any further, I have to say that I am not a cook and that I don’t know much about cooking. But. I know just about the same as any other average human being. Which, sort of, moves me into the same category with my targets, or “bosses”, as I called them before.

Here are a few examples that worked well.

Continue reading Software engineering is like cooking

Social Networking – Do you know that you do it?

I came across a brief blog post titled “Social Networking – Do you do it?“. While the context of the question in that post was more along the lines of “Do you use social networking to promote your products and servers, and drive more traffic towards your site?“, it got me thinking. And, as usual, in a somewhat different direction.

If we are to ask “Social Networking – Do you do do it?” to a large Internet crowd, what sort of responses would we get? I guess, the majority will be somewhere in between “No” and “What’s social networking?“. I think that the majority of people on the Web have no idea of what social networking is, where to find it, and if they are using it already or if they should use it at all. And I also think that the majority of Web population do use social networking, either for their personal or business purposes.

Examples from the top of my head include LiveJournal.com – the most popular blogging platform in Russia, Flickr – one of the most popular image sharing services, YouTube – the most popular video sharing service, Odnoklassniki.ru – the most popular (in Russia) social network for people to find and communicate with their class mates, and a few other, similar services. A huge chunk of their userbase have no idea that these services are a part of social networking. “Oh, no, I don’t do no social networking. I use this web site to communicate with some of my friends and share blah blah blah“.

And I’m not sure if we need to push the term “social networking” any further. We are humans. That what humans do – social networks. Give us a communication tool and we’ll start networking with it. Then, instead of asking us if we use the tool for social networks, just ask us how we use it. Yeah.