| | 1 | = Tips on Working Remotely = |
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| | 3 | Here are some things that I've learned after working at home for almost five years. |
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| | 5 | * Have regular (weekly) conference calls to keep everyone up to date. |
| | 6 | * Use an active web-based discussion forum for technical specs and discussions. |
| | 7 | * Schedule regular trips to meet and work with the team (every six months). This one is important. |
| | 8 | * Leave yourself a comment trail for your bugs by establishing strict guidelines for code style, bug tracking, and commenting non-obvious changes. |
| | 9 | * Establish solid and clear goals to keep your workers individually motivated. If you just feed them tasks all the time they will get bored fast. |
| | 10 | * Constant, ongoing, automatically archived communications (Conference/messaging systems like FirstClass, Basecamp and Campfire for free or cheap). |
| | 11 | * Common view of the project state and plan. A simple text-based task list that's committed to SCM just like source, or a milestone system as used on Trac. It's just important that everyone agrees on what's being worked on now, when it's done, and what's coming up next. |
| | 12 | * Common coding style. A commenter on my blog posted his [http://www.artlogic.com/careers/styleguide.html here]. It's easy to get locked into pointless arguments about the One True Brace style, tabs vs spaces, etc., so refuse to. Decide once and it's the law. |
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