Remote Pairing At GOTO Conf Chicago 2014: Mike Hall Interviews Alex Rutkowski | GOTO Conference 2014
🚀 Alex Rutkowski and Joel Friedman share their insights on remote pairing at GOTO Conference 2014. Learn how they use tools like screen sharing, video calls, and chat platforms to collaborate effectively. 🌍💻 #remote.pairing #startup.work #global.collaboration #time.zone.challenges #effective.collaboration
The Interviewer
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
The Guest
Alex Rutkowski, Joel Friedman
remote pairing at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
The Conversation
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Hi, it's Mike with Eugtastic. I'm here at GOTO Conference 2014. I'm standing here with Alex and Joel, who just gave a talk about remote pairing. Actually, what was the title exactly of the talk again?
Alex Rutkowski, Joel Friedman
remote pairing at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
The title of the talk was "The Best of Both Worlds: Remote Pairing in Action. " Yeah, or pairing without pants. Pairing without pants for sure. Another good time.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
First, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. This topic, where is this coming from and what was the topic about? I mean, it's remote pairing, but what about remote pairing?
Alex Rutkowski, Joel Friedman
remote pairing at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
Well, we have both been working for a company that is a startup that's entirely remote. For the past year, we've been working there. Everyone at the company pairs remotely, and it's a very new concept. Most people work in an office where they work from home by themselves. We wanted to expose people to this style of working that allows you to have interaction with people, but also allows you to have a more flexible schedule and work from your own environment.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay. In the talk, were you giving tips or just more sharing anecdotal experiences?
Alex Rutkowski, Joel Friedman
remote pairing at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
Yeah, so it was more like the latter, where we talked about the anecdotal experiences, the tools we use, some of the ones. It's not like we're saying, hey, use this exactly. It was, you know, we tried this. It didn't work, or it worked well. This is why. And all the stuff that just helps make our day-to-day lives easier, so we can focus on actually writing code.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Oh, and the types of applications are you writing? Are they web applications? Windows applications? What platform are you starting from?
Alex Rutkowski, Joel Friedman
remote pairing at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
Yes, they're mostly web applications and some back-end stuff, too, for our clients. And we aim to get everyone using them on Chrome, but still are stuck with some IDA users as well. That doesn't die. But more for the developers who are working in the team. Or are you saying that there's developers in the team that are still working on, like, different... Oh, no. The developers in the team, we mostly develop our applications for Chrome.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay. And everybody's probably, what, running MacBooks or are you a Windows shop?
Alex Rutkowski, Joel Friedman
remote pairing at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
Yeah, so we actually have a pretty standard setup where everyone has a MacBook Pro and two Thunderbolt displays, just so when you're screen sharing, you can kind of have the other person's screen up and also still have Ubuntu, maybe Google some stuff on yours. And, you know, everyone seems to be pretty happy with, you know, some Linux flavor. Some people might prefer actually using Ubuntu, but Mac's close enough that everyone can be happy with it.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Right.
Alex Rutkowski, Joel Friedman
remote pairing at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
And so you're working collaboratively. Your teams are remote.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
I mean, are you global remote or...?
Alex Rutkowski, Joel Friedman
remote pairing at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
We are. We try to stick within the four US time zones right now because we try to stick with a consistent work day and core hours for everyone. But that might change in the future. But right now, we are spread across the entire continental United States. And that, you know, that's interesting because it brings to the next question I was thinking about is office hours and having collaboration is it strictly developers working out between themselves? Or do you have, like you said, an office hours kind of... So right now we pretty much are collaborating the entire day. We start at 9am central and then just kind of go to the day ends. But obviously, like sometimes our team is an odd number because someone's out or someone's got something going on or just wants to work by themselves for a little bit that day. So we kind of make it work. We are, as we get more people on the West Coast and our team becomes this collaboration of people across multiple time zones, we are kind of having to move to that, the core hours concept where like, "Hey, try and be online between these hours so we can pair then. " And then either pair with somebody in your time zone at the other end or maybe just work on learning something new.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Alex Rutkowski, Joel Friedman
remote pairing at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
And that's interesting. You were saying about pair with somebody in your time zone where I wondered if there was some kind of striping maybe across time zones where because people just overlapped more, they collaborated more. We haven't gotten to that point yet, but we are growing so rapidly. We've gone from one to 25 developers, 50 employees over the past year. And so if we start to get bigger contingencies in each time zone, that might be somewhere away that we go. And you alluded to some tools that you use. You described that every developer has two monitors so that they can pair and chat.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
What are some of the other tools that you use and recommend?
Alex Rutkowski, Joel Friedman
remote pairing at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
So we use, right now we're just using OSX screen share for screen sharing. I know there are a lot of other tools out there. One of the other ones we've liked was Screen Hero. As you said, you've used that before. We also use what's called Zoom for video conversations. It's similar to Google Hangouts that you can just quickly add people and people can drop. Seems to be a little bit better on your computer in the long run. And then we also use Slack, which is just a kind of like IM chat where you can have groups. Oh, it's like the hip chat. Yeah, it's very similar to the hip chat. So it's persistent. You can search it. You can have different groups. You can IM someone directly. So those are the biggest tools we use.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Did I miss anything?
Alex Rutkowski, Joel Friedman
remote pairing at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
For our task boards and for transparency between the different groups, we use Trello. So that's kind of an online Agile task board type system where you have user stories and you can move them across and see what people are working on.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Right. And when you're doing your, are you using iteration planning meetings and things like that? Or how do you structure?
Alex Rutkowski, Joel Friedman
remote pairing at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
So on a day-to-day basis, you know, people pair off and probably I'm presuming you have a daily kind of head, stand up or sit down or whatever the case might be.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
But do you, how do you structure work in a longer cycle?
Alex Rutkowski, Joel Friedman
remote pairing at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
We so far have had minimal structure basically as the business finds more features they need implemented. They will just add them to the prioritize column more recently because work is piling up basically in different areas. We want to keep our task board more clean. And so we've tried to move more towards one week iterations, but still minimal process. We have a brief meeting where we move some cards over into the next week's work, but not a lot of, in previous jobs, we've had long strip planning meetings and things like that. And we don't want to get into that. So we just keep away from it. So try to keep it a little low, low formality. Yes. Yes. Low formality. And, uh, and, uh, you know, from your presentation, did you present any specific tips or, or, um, pitfalls that you would? Um, so the biggest pitfalls, um, are like we said, the time zones and, uh, whiteboarding solutions. I, you know, and when you're working in an office with someone, it's really easy to just draw on a whiteboard, uh, kind of get that going. It's a little bit harder remote. And mainly it's only harder because those tools, um, are either like iPad specific. And so they require having an iPad, whereas things we use like zoom and slack are free. So it's kind of like, let's have this low overhead.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay.
Alex Rutkowski, Joel Friedman
remote pairing at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
Um, as far as tips, uh, we kind of like, we just try something, see if it works.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Alex Rutkowski, Joel Friedman
remote pairing at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
And just don't stick to it.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Alex Rutkowski, Joel Friedman
remote pairing at GOTO Conf Chicago 2014
Or don't, you know, don't say you have to use this. You know, if it doesn't work, try something else. Be open for experimentation. Don't be too dogmatic because a lot of this stuff is, is kind of new. I mean, the technologies are new. The whole idea of remote working is kind of new.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Well, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me. I really appreciate it. Thank you. It was great talking to you. Enjoy the conference. Will do. [Music] Music playing. Music playing. Music playing. Music playing. Music playing.