Interview with Alex Rutkowski & Joel Friedman on remote pairing at GOTO Chicago 2014

Hi, it’s Mike with UGtastic. I’m here at GOTO Conf 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? The title of the talk was “The Best of Both Worlds: Remote Pairing in Action.” Or Pairing Without Pants. Pairing Without Pants, for sure. First, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. So, this topic, where is this coming from and what was the topic about? I mean, it’s remote pairing, but what about remote pairing? 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, and everyone at the company pairs remotely, and it’s a very new concept. Most people work in an office or they work from home by themselves. So, 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. Okay. So, in the talk, were you giving tips or just more sharing anecdotal experiences? 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.” 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. And the types of applications are you writing? Are they web applications, Windows applications? What platform are you starting from? Yes, they’re mostly web applications and some backend 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, so. That doesn’t die. But more for the developers who are working on the team, or are you saying that there’s developers in the team that are still working on different… Oh, no. The developers in the team, we mostly develop our applications for Chrome. Okay. And everybody’s probably, what, running MacBooks or are you a Windows shop? 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 room to maybe Google some stuff on yours. And, you know, everyone’s got their own kind of thing. So, 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. Right. And so, you’re working collaboratively. Your teams are remote. I mean, are you global remote or…? We are. We try to stick within the four US time zones right now because we try to stick with a consistent workday and core hours for everyone, but that might change in the future. But right now, we are spread across the entire continent of the United States. Oh, yeah. That’s interesting because it brings to the next question I was thinking about is office hours and having collaboration as a 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 9:00 AM 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 the minute. So, they 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. Yeah. 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 way they can pair and chat. What are some of the other tools that you use and recommend? So, we use, right now we’re just using OS X 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. It 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 Hip Chat. So, it’s persistent. You can search it. You can have different groups. You can email or IM someone directly. So, those are the biggest tools we use. Did I miss anything? For our task boards and for transparency between the different groups, we use Trello. So, that’s like 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. Right. And when you’re doing your… Do you have any questions about that? Are you interagent planning meetings and things like that? Or how do you structure? So, on a day-to-day basis, you know, people pair off and probably, I’m presuming, have a daily kind of… Stand-up. Yeah, stand-up or sit-down, whichever the case might be. But how do you structure work in a longer cycle? We so far have had minimal structure. Basically, as the business finds more features they need to add them to the prioritized 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 formality. Yes, yes. Low formality. And from your presentation, did you present any specific tips or pitfalls that you would… So, the biggest pitfalls are, like we said, the time zones and whiteboarding solutions. And when you’re working in an office with someone, it’s really easy to just draw on a whiteboard, kind of get that going. It’s a little bit harder remote, and mainly it’s only harder because those tools are, 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. Okay. As far as tips, we kind of, like, we just try something, see if it works, and just don’t stick to it. Don’t say, “You have to use this.” If it doesn’t work, try something else. Be open for experimentation. Don’t be too dogmatic, because a lot of this stuff is kind of new. I mean, the technologies are new. A lot of these things are new. I mean, you know, the whole idea of remote working is kind of new. 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. User groups with lots to say, interviews and more. 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