DONN FELKER

Lessons Learned From the Software Industry

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Staying Sane and Productive While Working Remotely

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Here’s some tips I can give you after working remotely for nearly 10 years.
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Image by jnyemb via Creative Commons

Read REMOTE by Jason Fried and DHH

Read (I highly advise listening to it on Audible): REMOTE: http://37signals.com/remote

Alot of what I say is regurgitated in the book above. When I listened to the book years ago I thought to myself “Whoa, OMG, these guys think the same way I do … I’m NOT ALONE!!!!” – so I’ve been recommending it for ages.

Stick to a Schedule

Schedule. Schedule. Schedule. Stick to a schedule when starting out. It will save you.

I get up at the same time every day, just like if I had a on-site job. I take a shower, get dressed and wear a collared shirt (think Golf shirt) and pants (usually jeans). I do my hair, and “get ready for work”. This is PURELY MENTAL. It prepares your mind and gets you into the mindset of work. Futhermore, being presentable goes a long way in a video call!

Preparation

I then get the tea/coffee ready, grab some snacks, some water in a water bottle and head off to my “office”. This again, is mental. I grab drinks and snacks so that I do not have to leave the office for awhile.

Distractions are abound in your house, you need to limit your exposure to them.

 

By preparing these small things you are getting yourself into the mindset for work. Let’s be100% honest here, there is no way in hell you can be effective with an interesting movie blaring in the background and working in 2 hour chunks through the day. You need to be in the mental mindset and have a schedule.

Now, work your 6, 8, 10 hours or whatever you deem a work day. Get up and use the restroom, sparingly. When you eat lunch, spend 30 mins to 1 hour. Prepare your lunch before work if at all possible. Again, this is to limit distractions.

Make Time For Exercise

During lunch, fit in a workout in the garage if you can (or go to the gym/fitness group/etc – see below). Health is important. You don’t commute, so pick up some freaking weights or run or row, etc.

Don’t have equipment?

Go for a run. Do Calisthenics, etc.

If you need help here, I can help you – I have tons of fitness programs I do on the road, visiting family, in my garage, all with no equipment. I’m no Hulk, but I’d say I’m “in shape” somewhat, so it must be working.

Eat Healthy

This is key! Eat healthy! Tip: Eat ONE salad per day. I don’t care when. Only requirement: Do not soak it in dressing. I recommend Olive Oil and vinaigrette or some variation. Not ranch or thousand island or any of those heavy variants. Eating one salad a day will do insane things for your health and mindset. Doing this alone will make positive changes in your diet and health.

Understand and Recognize Cabin Fever

Cabin fever is real.

If you live in a city, get out for lunch at least once a week. Go to a taco shop, meet a friend, have a lunch date with your wife/girl[boy]friend/husband/etc.

Get out of the house.

Plan to work out of the house 1-2 days a week.

Time Block Your Tasks

List a couple of tasks that you want to complete that take about 2-4 hours to complete, go to a coffee shop or coworking space and get it done. It will do an insane amount for you mentally and creatively. Do that a couple times a week. I find that sometimes doing one task at one coffee shop and then going to another place (library, etc) and doing the other one will also help break the monotony.

Outside of Work (AKA: Social Life)

Outside of work – do something that requires you to get out of the house. Join a fitness group – yoga, pilates, CrossFit, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, etc. You’ll get that social connection that way. I highly recommend it to be fitness or martial arts related.

Fitness and martial arts communities are very tight knit and you’ll find a vast array of individuals you can connect with that have differnet backgrounds. Through these groups I’ve become friends with Lawyers, Doctors, Dentists, stay at home mothers, Insurance Reps, Students, you name it – they’re all there. Fitness and martial arts crosses all boundaries. It will be worth your while. Trust me on this one.

Create Some Mental Space

Try to meditate. Not into meditation? Try the free 10 day guided meditation from headspace.com (download the app and try it out).

If you haven’t noticed yet, this is all mainly mental.

Communication when Remote

As for your typical day to day work routine …

You are going to have to communicate about 3x-4x as hard as you did before.

That’s the way it is.

Being remote means you have to be way more proactive.

Don’t hear from your boss/teammate/etc and you’re stuck?

Pick up the phone. Text. Call. Blow up the slack channel. Anything. i.e. – Clear your own road.

When you’re remote you’re not visually there and sometimes you have to be loud before others respond. Voice your opinions.

The goal is to communicate very well.

TLDR;

Its all mental.

You need to create a schedule, stick to it, take care of your body, create the proper mental mindset and cultivate it (day in and day out). You need to create “out of band” social connections so you don’t go crazy. Do that with a fitness/martial arts group. Break work into chunks and get out of the house a couple times a week. Lastly, communicate the hell out of everything. If you’re not sure if you communicated enough, do it more. Annoy people if you have to, you’re remote and sometimes people forget about you if they can’t see you.

Follow those simple steps and you’ll thrive in a remote atmosphere and you’ll end up enjoying life 10x more than you ever did before.

Finally, if you ever have a question about remote working – email me – I’ll help. I’ve been through probably almost anything you’ve been through working remote.

Killing Your Project Quietly – The NIH Assassin

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nih-syndrome
Image by daviddoctorrose via creative commons

NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome is a condition in which developers (or business owners/managers) feel that they need create something themselves instead of using a perfectly viable existing solution.

This usually manifests itself in the form of “That costs to much, let’s build it ourselves and save the money.”

Funny thing is … this usually costs exponentially more in the long run.

NIH Syndrome can kill your project/company faster than you think.

Let me explain why…

Let’s assume you’re evaluating an analytics package for your web or mobile application.

You have two options here –

  • Use an existing off the shelf product (Google Analytics, Keen, MixPanel, Localytics, etc – there’s a ton out there). These range anywhere from free up to a couple hundred a month – anywhere in that range.
  • Build an analytics package yourself (cost: You think its free, ohhhhhh not so fast – it’s not).

You opt with option #2 – build it yourself. RE: None of the existing analytics packages provide the functionality you need so you decide to build your own.

Bad move.

 

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Most likely an existing product/service will do the job for 80%-90% of the companies out there, for the majority of their use cases. With a little tweaking you can get everything you need out of it. You just need to understand the tools.

Most business savvy and time conscious companies will decide to use the existing service instead of building it themselves. These companies realize that they are not in the market for creating a new analytics package. Unfortunately, not all companies are that fortunate.

I’ve consulted for companies where engineers go rogue and build everything themselves because they feel their solution is superior.

This is a problem.

Unfortunately these diversions are exactly what end up costing the company tons of time and money and it could have all been avoided if the proper questions would have been asked. When NIH Syndrome rears its ugly head often enough the team becomes so distracted with their own creations (aka: Shiny Object Syndrome) that the engineering department begins to slow down product development due to the new distraction that has nothing to do with their market.

How do you know if you’ve developed NIH Syndrome?

I tend to use this steadfast heuristic as a baseline for all NIH syndrome based evaluations.

If you ever find yourself saying or thinking …

“We don’t need that, we can build that ourselves.”  or “That costs too much, we can build it ourselves for cheaper.”

Then you most definitely suffer from NIH Syndrome…

You may also suffer from NIH syndrome if you insist that you must …

  • build your own analytics package
  • build your own status page
  • implement your own encryption algorithm
  • build your own blog solution from scratch
  • build your own internal testing tools when existing ones work better but you lack the understanding
  • build your own monitoring software
  • build your own API protocol
  • implement your own CSS language
  • build your own logging framework
  • build your own router

Sure, there are exceptions to the case, but if you’re a small company then there is no reason to be building solutions that do not serve your target market.

When is NIH Syndrome not a syndrome?

When the existing solutions truly do not match your business needs!

If you find that the existing solutions are far more cumbersome to use than building something new and you can validate that with numbers (time vs effort vs ROI, etc) then go for it.

So… how do you go about validating if something is worth building vs using an off the shelf solution?

Evaluating Off The Shelf Cost vs Build It Yourself Cost

Every time you start to think “I can build that” or “Thats expensive, let me build it” perform this quick task:

Ask yourself this – How much time do I think it would take to build, support, bug fix and feature enhance a custom solution that matches the existing off the shelf product? Take the number of hours, multiple it by $100/hr (yes your time is worth that much – at minimum) and then look at that number.

I bet you its over $5,000 at a minimum if not $8,000-$10,000 or more! For some solutions its probably closer to 25k-50K.

Furthermore, that number is for your quick and dirty approach not a polished app like the ones you can buy on a monthly subscription.

Now look at the the price of the existing solutions. Take that number and multiply the monthly price times 3 and times 6 (You’ll be able to figure out if a solution works well for you at 3 months and most definitely by 6 months).

Lets say the off the shelf solution is $150 a month. I know what you’re thinking “Whoa, thats a lot” .. not really when you look at the numbers though!  150 * 3 = $450, 150 * 6 = $900

How much money would you rather spend? $900? or $5K-$10K?

I’d rather spend the $900. I’m sure you would too.

The Hidden Gotcha

gotcha

Here’s the hidden gotcha about NIH Syndrome – if you do decide to build something yourself you also lose all inherient momentum you’ve gained working on your product. All of your engineers time, effort and mental energy gets put into this infrastructure component instead of pushing the product forward.

When you suffer from NIH syndrome, not only do you lose money in the long run by building it yourself, but you lose money by losing market share and attracting new customers.

The next time you begin to get the feeling of “we can build that ourselves” (for any reason) go back to the cost section above and run some quick mental math. Remove the emotion and make a logical decision and use something that exists so you can go back to serving your customers by building your product, not a new shiny object.

 

Standing Desk – Three Years Later

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Its hard to believe its already been 3 years since building my standing desk for $22.

I gave a two-week update about 3 years ago, which you can find here.

I’m still using it daily and here’s what I’ve found on top of the regular productive boosts/etc.

70/30 Standing/Sitting Split

I work about 70% of my day standing up. The other 30% is sitting down. Initially, I had to take it down and put it back up each time, that was a pain. But I eventually grabbed my spare monitor, set it up on another file cabinet I had and I used that as my standing desk. When I no longer want to stand I’d move my laptop and wireless keyboard and mouse to my desk. Total transition time – between standing and sitting: 30 seconds.

 

Wear Comfortable Shoes

metcons

Personally I’m a minimalist shoe kind of guy. I wear Nike Metcons as my day to day shoe. Wearing shoes helps my feet become less fatigued through the day and helps ensure my feet are not banged up from being on them the majority of the day.

Use an Anti-Fatigue Mat

gelpro

 

Personally use a GelPro and I find it to be the best one I’ve found yet (other friends who use standing desks agree with me as well). This will help save your feet, lower back and posterior chain from major fatigue.

A Footstool is very helpful

Here’s a very simple utility footstool that works very well. Simply put the footstool on the ground and alternate putting a foot on it every once in awhile. This helps change things up and helps reduce fatigue.

I’m Ready for a Real Standing Desk

I was originally very apprehensive about spending hundreds of dollars on a standing desk.

What if I did not like it? What if it was the wrong size? What if my body didn’t agree with standing up a lot?

Well, I know that I’ll be standing and working for probably the rest of my lifetime after doing this continually for 3+ years.

There are soo many options out there for standing desks now. It’s hard to decide which one to choose. For me, I’m going off of intuition, some recommendations by other standing desk folks I know and some online reviews and gut feeling. I know, not too scientific, but … I can’t really go into a store and try them all out. That said, I’ve been working on a $22 stand up desk for 3 years so anything will likely be a major upgrade. Based upon those inputs I’ve decided that I’m going to upgrade by the beginning of the year to either an EvoDesk, Standesk or something I have not even found yet (soo many options out there!).

Considerations

A couple of things I needed to consider (and you will too if you’re looking for a standing desk) were:

What is the height of the desk? At full extension, is it tall enough for you? I’m tall, so I need the desk to have some excellent vertical height.

Programmable Memory Controller
A programmable memory controller has a few buttons that remember certain heights for quick operation. For me, this is a requirement because when I’m ready to work I want to just get to work – I don’t want to hassle with up/down/up/down/left/right/select/a/b/start combos just to get it at a perfect height. I want to tap a button, have the desk to go proper height and then I no longer have to worry about it. This minor thing may not seem like much and may be a way to shave a few dollars off your purchase price, but trust me … this is a luxury that you’ll be happy you splurged for.

During my hunt for a standing desk here were some of the options I considered –

Standesk

The Standesk claim to fame was a cheap standing desk. Unfortunately to keep the quality high the prices have gone up, but it’s definitely worth considering.

 

EvoDesk

To me, the EvoDesk one seems to be the “nicest” out of them all, but I’m noticing some reports of instability at tall heights. This is a concern for me. There definitely are better ones in the market but for the price and options it seems like a good deal.

 

IKEA Bekant

The IKEA Bekant was recently released and because of the price point I was considering this one first. However, after looking into it I noticed it did not have a programmable memory controller.

bekant

Varidesk

I’ve tried the Varidesk but I felt it was too low for me (I’m 6’4”) and it was too clunky and took up too much desk space. I’m a minimalist and I like to have my desk clean and clear. The Varidesk simply too up too much space. However, some of my friends have reported that they do love theirs – so definitely evaluate that option if you’re looking for a standup-sitdown option that is cheaper than a full blown standing desk (or just use the $22 IKEA desk like I did).

 

Should You Get a Standing Desk?
This is 100% up to you. However, I feel its a great investment for your health if you’re going to be working at a desk a lot (more than 30% of your day). If you’re like me and you’re very apprehensive to spend $700 on a stand-up desk, simply build an IKEA $22 Standing Desk like I did. I’ve been working with this one for over three years now and I still use it (though I will be upgrading soon).

Don’t have an IKEA near you and still want to try out a standing desk?

Grab an end table from around the house and put it on top of your desk. Place a couple of large books or a box under the monitor until the top of your monitor is at eye level. Make sure when you’re using your keyboard your elbow creates a 90 to 100 degree angle. That’s it, try it out.

Did you buy a standing desk? If so, which one do you have?

You Need a Status Page

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Yes, yes you do. You need a status page. No doubt about it.

If your company has and API or a service that developers and customers consume you need to be able to give them an easy to find website where they can view the status of your system. If you don’t, you’re failing as a company. You’re failing to provide the proper service to your customers and developers.

What do I mean by that?

Simple. How the heck do I know if your servers, databases, etc are up and running properly? For example – If my API requests to your cloud endpoints stop working, or my SDK to your system just stops. Is it my local environment or is it yours? What if is your system? What if your database is down and the service I’m using goes down with it? How can I get notification updates? How do I know what’s wrong? I’m a paying customer or developer for your system – I rely on your system and I feel I deserve to know what’s going on. I’m not alone, most other developers feel the same way.

As a company, I’m sure some of you are thinking “Well, we will just update our twitter account.”

Whatever.

Twitter updates suck. They work, but very few people immediately think “Wow, my app is broken and can’t connect to ABC Companies API. I should look at their Twitter stream.” Pfft. Yeah. Right. Emailing support sucks too, and for that matter, anything that cannot quickly provide a snapshot of your system status system sucks too. What most developers end up doing is looking for a status page of some sort.

When GitHub goes down. How do I know? It stops working. What do I do then? I go to status.github.com – wow, problem solved – I realize they’re down. If not, well, then I have more troubleshooting to do. Maybe it is my system, maybe its my DNS, who knows, but at least I know that the problem is not on your side!

When Gmail or Google Docs goes down how do I know? Simple. I go to google.com/appstatus. If something is wrong, an icon will be present in the matrix of apps and I’ll know if what I’m using is broken. This helps me identify if my connection or system is acting wonky vs their system.

So, how do you go about setting up a status page?

There are quite a few services out there and open source options too. I advise the hosted solutions as they’re the easiest to get rolling with. But first let’s handle this nonsense –

But I want to build it myself and host it myself!

Sure, you can build your own but it’s a major pain in the rear and I don’t advise it. Inventing everything yourself is a sure fire sign that you and/or your company suffer from NIH Syndrome. If something costs $100 a month and your time is worth $100/hr (trust me, it is) then if you cannot build it, maintain it, update it, etc for less than 1 hour a month with all the same features of the solution you’re evaluating, well … you’re losing money and you will have made a very poor business decision.

So let’s consider the “NIH” option as irrational and let’s get reasonable here.

Ok, I’m not going to build one. How do I set one up quickly?

We have a couple of hosted options I prefer and one open source option I like too. Let’s chat about the hosted solutions.

Companies like Docker and Runscope (as well as many other companies) need a service that they can use to easily relay information to their developers and customers about the status of their system. Both of these companies use different tools, but either is fine.

Status.IO:
Example – Dockers Status Page
Docker (a super awesome container company) has a status page located status.docker.com which shows you the current status of the Docker APIs, Forums, Website, etc. You can see the API resonse times, uptimes, you name it. All of this is powered by Status.io – a very good status page hosting company. Sign up here.

StatusPage.IO
Example – Runscopes Status Page
Runscope (an API Monitoring and Testing company) has a status page located as status.runscope.com. StatusPage.IO is packed full of features and is very similar to Status.IO and used by many as well. Sign up here.

Cachet
Example – Cachets Status Page
For those either hellbent on hosting it themselves or for those who are stuck inside of an enterprise conundrum, this might be a good option for you. I suggest forking the GitHub repo, then making changes in in that repo so you can easily merge in upstream changes at a later time. Download it here.

 

Which One Do I prefer?

Good question. Definitely not Cachet unless that is your only option due to some corporate mandate you have to deal with.

Personally the feature set and price point of Status.IO is perfect for me. If I were to recommend anyone to use one it would be them.

Start Now and Become a Better Service Provider

Simply sign up to either of these hosted services, plug in the various components that need to be monitored (both sites have good docs) and then point your DNS to status.yourdomain.com. Please note, status.yourdomain.com is the typical status page domain that developers will attempt first. Some support experts advocate having another domain such as – yourcompanystatus.com which hosts your status page in case your DNS provider takes a nose dive too (so you’ll need another DNS provider for that new status domain – if you go down that route). I’ll leave that choice up to you.

Just having a status page alone puts you ahead of your competition ten fold and makes your company more developer friendly, respectful and professional.

 

* API Uptime Tip: On the same topic of uptime, Runscope offers tools to help notify you when your own API (or API’s you rely on) start acting up. It’s a service I’ve personally recommended to many of my clients who have an API presence and is worth every penny in my mind (no, I was not paid to say this. John, the CEO, is a personal friend of mine and I truly believe in the product).

The Single Best Thing You Can Do For Your Career

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If you’re looking to break out in your industry and looking to take yourself to the next level there is one thing that can help propel you into opportunites you never imagined. What is it?

Public Speaking

It’s true. No doubt about it. I attest most of my success to a fateful day in 2008 (May 31st to be exact) when I spoke at Desert Code Camp in Phoenix. That was my first public speaking event in a professional setting, ever. The topic?

Intro to Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control
You can find the slides for that talk right here on slideshare.

I’m serious, that’s my first foraye into speaking. The slides are terrible and embarassing, but everyone loved the talk at the time. In fact, the people liked it so much that when I signed up to speak there I was able to see how many people were going to be at my talk in advance. The web app that code camp was using at the time had that feature (it was a different one than Desert Code Camp uses now, but similar). Long story short, my talk went from the “small classroom” to the medium room, to the large room to the auditorium at a tech college I was speaking at. Fun fact – the presentation was at UAT to be exact and thats actually where I went to college.  I was very familiar with the auditorium and knew how many people it could fit. At the time I went it was 172 people.

How many people were there when I presented? Well over 172, there was standing room only and it was one of the most popular talks of the day. This is not a humble brag, but I am actually saying this for the exact opposite reason. I’m saying this because when I got on stage, I was scared shitless. To this day I remember walking on stage and then walking off, going outside, calling my wife and telling her how I did, going home and falling asleep from the sheer exhaustion of stress and terror that I just experienced. I do not remember any of the talk whatsoever. Kind of crazy how the mind will do that to traumatizing events.

Terror? Stress? What? Why? You may ask. You had a popular talk. You might think. You’re right, I did. People loved it and I got a lot of professional attention because of it, and it helped my career. The important thing to note here is that this was my first professional talk, ever. The most people I’d ever spoken in front of prior to that event was maybe 10-12 people, and that was during a work lunch when you go around the table and talk about something (such as a team building event). 172+ people? ABSOLUTE TERROR, PANIC & FEAR.

The thing is, public speaking has often been rated in many publications as the one thing people fear far more than death itself. Thats a pretty bold statement. More than death itself? I don’t know about you, but I love life. Sure, its full of stressors and other things that are out of my hands at time, but I love being alive. I’d much rather get in front of people and talk than die. But … thats the reality of the situation – people are scared to get in front of crowds and speak. So scared that they’d rather die. Think about how many people you know that say “OMG, there is now way I could do that, I’d die”. Yeah. Exactly.

That one day led to many job offers eventually. Not just full time offers but consulting offers and offers to do bigger and better things. From speaking I ventured deeper into blogging and then into more writing in general. I kept speaking and eventually got noticed by some consutlingn firms. I worked for them for awhile and kept speaking as well. Companies usually love when you speak in public. You’re a public face of their company (in this case, part of the engineering deparment). Eventually I got enough offers for external contract jobs that I decided to jump and go work for myself as a consultant. I did that six years ago in 2009. I went full time independent consulting. How? All from speaking.

If I had never got in front of people and spoke about what I knew I’d never be in the situation I’m in now. I’m foreever grateful to those who gave me the opporutnity to speak, to hire me and to bring me on to help their team. Thank you.

Fast forward many years later from my initial speaking engagement and I’ve now spoken to crowds of 400-500 people at times with no fear. As with anything – the more you do it, the better you get at it and eventually you actually kind of get used to it.

I challenge you to go out and speak. Find a local user group, a code camp, a meet-up of some sort. Just go out and share your knowledge. Don’t be scared. Will you know everything? No. Will there be someone in the crowd who knows more than you? Yes. Regardless, you need to get out there and do it. You’ll be glad you did. It will open doors you never knew existed.