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Your first tool for distributed work: the headset
This is an essential tool that every worker on a distributed team or company should have, no exceptions: a headset. Let’s explore why. When working distributed you are going to be having a lot of calls and the quality of audio is important. All meetings are tiring the same thing work is tiring, but bad […]
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Distributed companies vs time zones
Time zones is the arch rival of distributed companies (or rather, the earth being round, but I digress into the meaning of time zones). When you run a distributed company and you hire people, you might be tempted to hire from all over the world but there’s a problem. If you hire someone that lives […]
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Be distributed because it’s cooler, not cheaper
There are two motivations that drive the creation of distributed teams or companies: it’s cheaper there just isn’t any available people locally There’s nothing wrong with these motivations as starting point, but if they become your sole driver for being distributed the results are probably going to end badly. Remote workers will be treated as […]
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My biggest hiring secret: text interviews
I built a kick-ass team of 6 developers in little over 6 weeks, by myself, doing all the hiring and without using any recruiters. When I tell people how I did it there’s one aspect of my hiring process that raises the most eyebrows: text interviews. When someones profile looks promising (CV, GitHub, cover letter) […]
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From bank to Google, what’s your staff onboarding like?
I remember two onboarding experiences the most. Joining Google was an amazing experience, I felt like a hero in a hero’s parade. Joining a Swiss Investment Bank made me question my life choices. Google At Google, I had clear instructions sent to me well in advance about what to expect, where I was supposed to […]
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How I’m testing seed data generation
When I create a new Rails project I like to have a robust seeds that can be used to quickly bootstrap development, testing and staging environments to interact with the application. I think this is critical for development speed. If a developer creates a feature to, for example, connect two records together, you just want […]
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The startup CTO dilemma
About 10 years ago I took my first job as CTO but I wasn’t a CTO, I just had the title. I was a developer with ambition. I made mistakes, very expensive mistakes, mistakes that contributed to the failure of the startup. Since then I have learned and grown a lot and although there’s still […]
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Growth vs maintenance time
Someone asked me if I would have a property manager if I lived 5 minutes away from my rental property instead of across the Atlantic from it. Yes, of course I would! You have two types of time in your life: Free and Taken. Taken time is the one consumed by tasks required to maintain […]