At the best of times, running a remote team is hard. At the moment the world is battling the COVID-19 Coronavirus pandemic, more and more workers are working from home instead of going to an office. People are in quarantine, unable to go outside and socialise. A lot of what was working before now isn’t, and people are having to change.

I live by myself and work with a remote team of 40 people throughout Europe and Asia, with time zones from the UK to Japan. I have not spoken to anyone in person or been outside, for 2 weeks other than to put the rubbish out.

Software and services to power your Amazon business.

I’ve been selling on Amazon since 2014 and over the years the strategies, services and tools I used have evolved just as much as the Amazon landscape has evolved.

There are now suites of tools dedicated to solving specific problems faced by Amazon sellers but as my business has expanded, becoming more of a business than simply a form of search engine manipulation, my needs have grown

Whilst working along side CEO and designer Jon Myers a common conversation thread that would emerge was “Where do you get your information from?”.

Motivational speaker Jim Rohn famously said that we are “The average of the five people we spend the most time with”. A similar philosophy can be applied to the information we absorb.

Limiting the scope of information we gather will in turn limit our horizons. If we live in a bubble we will isolate ourselves from incite and experiences of people outside that bubble.

Application logs are one of the most useful diagnostic aids in platform support and it pains me that many developers often ignore such a critical aspect of their system.

When To Not Log

There is only one reason for an application to not generate any logs, and that is for performance reasons, e.g. constrained telecoms or web servers running at maximum IO capacity where even writing to disk will have an impact on application performance.

This is a brief video and tutorial on building your first VR experience in the Decentraland VR platform and getting you started with the tools, a-minus syntax. By the end of this tutorial you will have an area of land with a Lambo on it you can walk around. Publishing the land to the Ethereum blockchain will come in a later video.

Sorry for the fan noise, the client seemed to have killed my CPU 🙂

I’ve been lucky in that I’ve always enjoyed reading. My earliest memories are of consistently getting in trouble as a child due to reading Terry Pratchett or Fighting Fantasy at night, it’s always something I enjoyed but ended up getting sidelined shortly after I turned 25 when I become a jaded, adult with a career.

Since leaving the UK I’ve become an avid reader again as it’s one of the best ways to discover new experiences and perspectives on life as well as engage the mind and reduce stress. Reading is my meditation. It’s New Years Day, 2018, and the end of a cycle which is always a good time for reflection, here’s a short list of some of the observations I’ve made looking back over the last 4 years of my reading habit!

The Year Without Pants is an insightful look in to Scott’s year working as a team lead for WordPress and Automattic’s company culture that allows remote work. What’s most interesting about it, is the culture works! Running a remote team successfully can be incredibly difficult at scale. Their culture was unconventional, employees are independent, working from wherever they wished and most interestingly, rarely using email to communicate.

The book makes a great case for why remote work can work, especially if you consider how much time at a traditional workplace is spent purely through the computer. I know for myself I could actually spend days during a busy project not speaking to a single soul in my office and just working through the day on my computer and collaborating with the team on IRC and Skype whilst handling tickets in Jira. The principle is sound and in my opinion the things that make it a success or not are employee commitment and competence and the company culture and processes. A remote team with a paranoid and suspicious company culture will never work.