Month: May 2012

Fully Distributed Teams: are they viable?

It has become increasingly common for technology companies to run as Fully Distributed teams. That is, teams that collaborate primarily over the web rather than using informal, face-to-face communication as the main means of collaborating.

This has only become viable recently due to a mix of factors, including:

  • the rise of “cloud” collaboration services (aka “web 2.0” software) as exemplified by Google Apps, Dropbox, and SalesForce
  • the wide availability of high-speed broadband in homes that rivals office Internet connections (e.g. home cable and fiber)
  • real-time text, audio and video communication platforms such as IRC, Google Talk, and Skype

Thanks to these factors, we can now run Fully Distributed teams without a loss in general productivity for many (though not all) roles.

In my mind, there are three models for scaling number of employees in a growing company in the wild today. These are:

Continue reading Fully Distributed Teams: are they viable?

Speed and lightness

Last week, I decided to give myself the present of a Plextor M3 512GB SSD drive, which was available at a nearly 25% discount on NewEgg for a limited time.

The price-per-gigabyte for SSDs has finally fallen to nearly $1/GB, and the rewrite cycle problems that used to afflict these drives is now becoming a non-issue with the Linux kernel’s TRIM implementation and the updated firmware on these drives.

So, I took the plunge. My main development workstation was a Thinkpad T400, maxed out to 8GB of RAM, and with dual 500GB platter drives (via Thinkpad’s excellent Ultrabay extension). I was running Ubuntu 10.10 for a long time. I timed the SSD purchase with the release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS — 10.10 no longer being supported, I figured I’d do a clean install on the new SSD and clean up my development workstation for the first time in a couple of years.

A couple of things occurred to me in this process. First of all, since 2009, I have moved more and more of my data into cloud services. I have moved the lion’s share of my “business and personal documents”, including photos, into Dropbox with my 50GB account. And I have moved my truly old files and digital keepsakes into NAS drives that I host in my little server room at home.

Continue reading Speed and lightness