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!

Text processing in the shell

Whether you are an experienced shell user, or just a newbie, have a look at this article for a collection of the great tools and examples of how to process text in the shell. It includes all the usual suspects: cat, head, tail, wc, grep, cut, paste, sort, uniq, awk, tr, fold, and sed. Great examples and real life scenarios for each are also provided, with the logic explained and more complex use cases broken down into steps.

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.

The Book of Secret Knowledge

The Book of Secret Knowledge” is a collection of awesome lists, manuals, blogs, hacks, one-liners, cli/web tools and more.  It is intended for everyone and anyone – especially for System and Network Administrators, DevOps, Pentesters or Security Researchers.

While you are at it, also have a look at: