Remote Java Dev

Remote Java Dev

Going Remote Again

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Going Remote Again

I’m happy to report I will be going remote again in a few months time. As previously discussed here, I’ve been back in-office for the past several months at a new client. 

This time going remote is different though. Different because my family and I will be moving from St. Paul, MN to the Kingdom of Tonga. Tonga is my wife’s home country and the place where I served as Peace Corps Volunteer over a decade ago.

Remote from Tonga in 2011 & 2015

Going remote again has become much easier than it was before. Back in 2011, I had my first experience working remotely from Tonga for an American company. Amazingly, even then it was doable, though a bit more challenging than today.

This experience was covered in greater detail in my post, Working Remotely from the South Pacific. The biggest improvement has been Tonga’s connecting to the Southern Cross fiber optic cable network a few years ago. This superseded the geostationary satellite internet connectivity that was previously relied upon.

In 2011 and again in 2015, I worked remotely from Tonga for months at a time. These coincided with working vacations back to the Islands to visit my wife’s family. When you travel 7,000 miles from St. Paul, MN to Tonga, you want to stay awhile and we’ve been fortunate enough to do that multiple times.

Remote from the St. Paul Area

I’ve also worked remotely from my current home here in St. Paul for a client in the Twin Cities area. This is becoming far more common, especially given how distributed most companies are these days. 

We had team members on this project working remotely from the Twin Cities, greater Minnesota, Maine, Texas, California, India, and the Philippines. This is becoming the norm. 

If you’re not working in a startup, you’re almost certainly working with a distributed team. And distributed is just a code word for remote. So it really doesn’t matter much anymore if your team member is in India, England, or in a neighboring suburb. 

While scheduling meetings can be harder these days when dealing with multiple time zones, this is often a net gain. It’s a benefit because most enterprises have too many fruitless meetings. So creating a little more friction to discourage this behavior is a good thing.

Anecdotally, I can say the highest performing team I’ve ever been a part of was a remote team. This team made substantial use of Asynchronous Communication. I’m a firm believer that having to write down our thoughts improves the quality of our communication.

Remote from Tonga in 2020

The plan is to move to Tonga in June of this year or in about 3 months time as of this writing. This could certainly change slightly due to selling our home or other move complications. It turns out moving across the planet long-term can be a bit complicated, who knew!

Fortunately enough, my current client is happy to keep me on after I relocate. Even the idea of working from the South Pacific was not a significant issue. Which makes sense, as our team is already spread out over the US, Europe, and India right now.

After the initial headaches of getting set up in a new location are done, I’m extremely happy about going remote again. And this time for the long term. I must admit, once you get a good taste of working remotely, it’s very hard to go back to the in-office madness.

The Benefits of Remote

Chief among the benefits of remote work I’m looking forward to are higher productivity and better quality of life. While there are many more, these alone are good enough reasons for anybody to travel down this path. Note especially that these benefits ultimately mean we deliver more value to an employer or client.

This is something that I feel often gets lost in the remote work discussion. Or at least it’s not emphasized to the degree that it should be. That is, remote work often benefits the company even more than the remote worker.

Fundamentally, remote work aligns incentives. It aligns the incentives of the worker more closely with that of the employer. Particularly during this moment in time where remote work is not yet the dominant paradigm. 

Remote workers are far more likely to outperform their in-office peers. You’d be hard-pressed to find a remote worker who doesn’t highly value the flexibility she enjoys. Add this to the productivity gains to be realized from controlling her own work environment. 

These both combine to make remote workers much more likely to provide extra value to their employers for no additional financial compensation. It sure sounds like a win-win situation to me. Companies receive more value for their money and workers enjoy better quality of life.

One Year of Blogging

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One Year of Blogging

This post marks one year of blogging or 52 consecutive weeks of publishing. I’d just like to highlight a few things here based on my experiences over the past year. Thank you all for stopping by and I hope you’ve found something of interest.

Fear

In all honesty, I was scared to start a blog. All the usual self-limiting thoughts flood through your mind when considering putting yourself or your work out in the world. 

“Who am I to start a blog?” “Why would anyone want to read my writing?” “They’re going to laugh at you.” And so on.

I am happy to report however, that none of these fears have been realized. In fact, the most common response to my blog posts has been crickets. And this is fine with me. 

I never intended for this blog to go viral or to build a business directly upon it. That’s why you see no banner ads here, nor are you likely to in the future. 

To anyone else who might be considering starting their own blog, I’d say go for it! The fears running through your mind are most likely baseless and will never happen.

The Benefits of Obscurity

Obscurity has its benefits. Especially when you’re starting out as a blogger and are still overcoming some of the initial fears we face. 

Hitting publish on a blog post in the first months can be unreasonably stressful. It’s absurd, but you’re almost hoping that nobody will read it so nobody can pan it.

Our minds can be very silly sometimes. See Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow for more on this topic.

Personally, I’ve found this first year of relative obscurity very helpful. It’s helped me to overcome the irrational fear of hitting publish and being met with a deluge of criticism. That’s never happened, to me at least. 

It’s also allowed me to improve my writing process over the course of this first year.

Writing Process

I’ve coalesced on a writing process throughout one year of blogging every week. This is not to say it’s the best for everyone or anyone else, but it’s worked for me. Worked to the extent that I’ve been able to deliver a post 52 consecutive weeks.

  1. Brainstorming blog topic ideas
    • I use Google Drive and Google Docs to collect blog topic ideas.
    • By doing this I always have a healthy reserve of ideas in case I get stuck for choosing a topic on a given week.
      • This has of course happened several times.
  2. Pick a blog topic
    • I put a reminder on my calendar for 7pm every Wednesday.
  3. Outline
    • I put a reminder on my calendar for 7pm every Friday.
    • My outlines are strictly short bullet point lists. 
      • I just want to highlight the most important topics I want to cover in shorthand and then organize them where appropriate.
      • I’ve found this bullet point/keyword strategy provides all the prompting I need to make writing the copy much easier.
      • I experimented with more detailed and verbose outlines and found it made writing the post harder. I’d spend too much time trying to recall exactly how I’d meant to word sentences rather than just writing it clearly at post writing time.
  4. Writing the Blog Post
    • I like to write early Saturday mornings if life allows.
  5. Editing, Review, and Creating Post
    • I like to do this early Sunday mornings.
    • This includes creating the new post in WordPress. Then formatting it and marking it private until I’ve edited it to the point of readiness for publishing.
  6. Post Goes Live
    • Sunday evening.

To be fair, this is the happy path. Wouldn’t it be nice if things always went as planned…

Unhappy Paths

I’d love to say I repeat this writing process verbatim every week, but of course that’s not always true. As any parent of young children can attest, your schedule is often out of your control. 

Sometimes the little ones wake up early on the weekends and so I need to adjust my writing and editing times. Another week I might pick a blog topic, write an outline, and then on Saturday morning decide that I want to write about something completely different!

I’ve found keeping this flexibility very valuable. Rather than forcing myself to never deviate from a rigid plan, the flexibility to call an audible has made this endeavor easier to stick with. After all, if it’s your blog, you can ultimately do what you want.

Traffic

It’s been interesting to see how traffic to the blog has changed over the course of a year. One post in particular has driven the vast majority of traffic, Pluralsight vs O’Reilly Safari. 

Google has ranked this post highly for the keywords “pluralsight vs o’reilly safari” so that explains the steady stream of traffic. At least compared to other sources of traffic, which have been very few and far between.

Twitter has been my only source of promotion thus far. Aside from one post, Best Podcasts for Remote Java Developers which was retweeted by some high visibility folks, I haven’t seen much traffic from Twitter.

I also experimented with cross-posting to dev.to in the first couple months. I think it would have been helpful as another source of traffic had I continued. However, I found the additional overhead of cross-posting a little more onerous than was worth it at the time.

Onward

I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do with this blog going forward. I’ve kicked around a few ideas. 

One would be to post less frequently, but going into more depth on topics. For example, posting once or twice a month, but posts that were more like 2000+ words.

I’ve also thought about doing more technical posts relating to the Java ecosystem. 

Another idea is to spend time refreshing my last year’s worth of posts. Specifically by improving their readability by adding images and improved formatting.

If you have any suggestions, please feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or via the Contact page.

I appreciate all of you who’ve stopped by during my one year of blogging. Thank you and I hope you’ve found a few thought provoking things here. 

Documentation Rot

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Documentation Rot

Enterprise development teams have a bad case of documentation rot. Maybe not all, but the places I’ve worked that had a strong in-office culture sure did. In contrast, working remotely organically yields better documentation practices in my experience.

It makes perfect sense when you think about it. Remote workers are generally better at asynchronous communication. They also know the value of good documentation as they can’t just yell over a cube wall to get answers. This alone has tremendous value in terms of productivity.

In-Office Documentation

I’m pretty sure everyone has had this experience. You start at a new client or employer and need to set up your dev environment. So you ask the nearest Dev about documentation to accomplish this and get that familiar apologetic look. She says to check the team Wiki and let her know WHEN you hit a roadblock.

The Wiki was last updated by “Deleted” in 2013. They also no longer use Apache Ant, Ivy, or Lucene. At least it correctly tells you to download a JDK, though not Java 6 anymore, thankfully.

And so you begin the painful first week in-office by stumbling through an obstacle course. The best of us will update the team Wiki with the latest information so the next poor soul doesn’t suffer the same fate.

However, in-office environments are not conducive to this. As most problem solving is done verbally in person, which makes it far more difficult to capture for posterity.

This of course is just to get your dev environment up and running. You’ll have to repeat this process in order to perform any number of useful tasks. That is, finding sparse to no documentation available and leaning on in-person collaboration to learn and accomplish the tasks. 

Therein lies the biggest problem with in-office dev team cultures. Too much tribal knowledge lives in the heads of the development team and not enough lives on a durable medium in the form of accurate documentation.

In-office work encourages this manner of work, especially in these days of Agile, which I’d contend is suboptimal in many instances. In person, synchronous communication certainly has its time and place, but it is far over-utilized due mostly to inertia.

Good Documentation is a Company Asset

Any good company has a collection of processes to deliver a valuable outcome to its customers. These processes are a valuable asset. Imagine if every time you went to your favorite Italian restaurant and the chef decided to make your lasagna with a completely new recipe. You’d be annoyed because it would taste differently every time.

Good documentation yields a predictable and repeatable result. This allows us to iteratively improve upon the process. Others can perform the process themselves and perhaps find improvements that we might have missed.

In the development world, good documentation means greater self-sufficiency. We work with a lot of incredibly smart people in this industry. And documenting well allows us a much greater ability to evaluate the efficacy of any given process.

This documentation then becomes a valuable company asset. It becomes easier to onboard new developers.

New developers become productive far more quickly when team practices are well codified. And perhaps most importantly, processes can be improved upon far more easily when they are clearly written.

Remote Developers Do It Better

I’ve found documentation rot is much easier to avoid when working in a remote team. We simply must document well given the context in which we work. 

I believe our reliance on good asynchronous communication practices tends to yield superior results. It’s imperative that we’re more thoughtful and deliberate in how we communicate in a remote environment. 

Therefore the quality of our communications tends to be higher and also gives us a huge head start when creating good documentation. Often it’s simply a matter of taking things we’ve already written in chat or an email and editing them to put on a team Wiki. 

Contrast this with an in-office environment where you’ll often create documentation from scratch as the process you’re covering has only been relayed to you verbally. This is added friction that often means developers just throw up their hands and leave things undocumented. The tribal knowledge remains tribal and the landmines remain for the next unlucky developer who joins the team.

Summary

Documentation rot is a scourge upon development teams. Especially within the in-office culture which is far too conducive to unhygienic documentation practices.

The in-office work environment tends to rely far too heavily on synchronous, in-person communication. As a result, too much tribal knowledge ends up in the heads of the development team and is rarely codified and well maintained in a Wiki.

Good documentation is a valuable company asset. It allows processes to be continually reviewed and improved upon. Developers can be far more self-sufficient and ultimately more productive when they maintain and have access to quality documentation.

Experienced remote developers are skilled in asynchronous communication. The remote context prioritizes aptitude in this area and gives us a leg up on our in-office counterparts. Thoughtful asynchronous communications tend to easily translate to durable documentation on a dev team Wiki.

Work Remotely to Stay Healthy

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Work Remotely to Stay Healthy

Tell me it hasn’t crossed your mind once or twice that you’d rather work remotely to stay healthy. Especially when half the office is hacking and coughing and you’re practically bathing in hand sanitizer. All the while knowing that no matter how careful you are, there’s no way you can avoid the surplus of germs floating around the office.

It’s a stressful situation. And it’s one that is guaranteed to repeat itself multiple times throughout the year. As if you didn’t have enough to worry about with wrangling code and balancing a host of other responsibilities while working in the Enterprise.

The Coronavirus

The recent outbreak of the novel coronavirus is extremely alarming. Hundreds of millions of people in China have been essentially quarantined and countless airlines are cancelling flights to the country. In short, this is serious business.

The reality of our increasingly connected world is there are weaker boundaries than there used to be. A pestilence such as the coronavirus can travel to all corners of the globe before we even realize there’s a problem.

Joseph Norman, Yaneer Bar-Yam, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote a highly insightful paper entitled Systemic Risk of Pandemic via Novel Pathogens – Coronavirus: A Note. I highly recommend reading it, it’s brief. It highlights our increasing vulnerability to pandemics and suggests we strengthen our ability to decouple at the community level as one example in order to mitigate risk.

The Office Crud

A much more common plight is the office crud. It may be less terrifying than the coronavirus, but you deal with this one every year while working in-office. Working in-office is already inferior in many respects. And when you add in the health implications, it’s a wonder it’s still the norm.

It’s almost like clockwork when Fall rolls around. The office crud starts rearing its ugly head and before you know it, half your coworkers are filling the office with viruses and bacteria. There’s no way to protect yourself when you are forced to cohabit the same working space.

There is a solution, though. And it’s already common practice even within in-office work cultures. You just work from home when the crud catches up to you! Of course usually by then it’s too late and then the crud has already spread to you and many others in the office.

If only there were a better way to avoid the crud in the first place…

Work From Home

We should just work from home, of course! Maybe then we wouldn’t catch the crud in the first place. We’re always going to pick up some nasty bugs here and there, but we don’t need to put ourselves in an in-office petri dish to make things worse.

This is yet another great reason to work remotely on top of the many already covered here in this blog. If I had to sum up in a few words why I’m such a strong advocate for remote work it would be health and productivity. This includes both mental and physical health.

It’s not surprising that one of the responses to the coronavirus outbreak is the following, Coronavirus Forces World’s Largest Work-From-Home Experiment. Imagine if the coronavirus was rampant in your community, assuming it isn’t already. Would you dare go into an office with 100 or 1000 other people? No way!

If there is any silver lining to this horrible pandemic it may be that it will help us avoid such a widespread outbreak in the future. We are more connected now than ever before so it is vital that we also consider our increased risks as a result of this. 

Working remotely is one way we can effectively decouple. We can and should be fully involved within the communities in which we live, but there is no longer any good reason for us to commute long distances for our work. 

As Java Developers and Consultants, we can do our work better from a location of our choosing. One where we can work remotely to stay healthy and be more productive too.

Summary

We are more susceptible to illness when working in-office. There are the regular, annual illnesses that make the rounds and then there are black swan illnesses. Coronavirus is just such a black swan event.

Our world is more connected now than ever before. Therefore it is important for us to be mindful of the added risks that accompany this new reality.

Decreasing our exposure surface area by working remotely is protectant. While it’s not complete protection, it does allow us to mitigate risks to our health.

Weight Control

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Weight Control

Have you battled with weight control before? It’s likely that most all of us have fought this dragon at some point. Especially as we progress beyond our early years and our lives become more full of responsibilities. I know I certainly have. 

What are the first principles of body weight control? And how do we manipulate the variables to accomplish a desirable change in body weight.

I fully admit that when I started trying to control my body weight, I did not think in these terms. It’s only in hindsight that I can see clearly what I was trying to accomplish all along.

What Controls Body Weight?

Weight control as a concept is very simple. However, simple is not the same as easily accomplished of course. There are an endless number of diets which all attempt to solve for one thing, energy balance. Also known as calories in vs calories out.

As a general rule, if we ingest more calories than we expend, we gain weight. And conversely, if we expend more calories than we ingest, we lose weight. 

There are indeed complicating factors not least of which is our bodies tend to respond quite differently when it comes to expending energy. Some people’s bodies when faced with a calorie surplus will automatically increase NEAT, Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis.

Which is a long-winded way of saying bodies will increase energy expenditure without us having to consciously do anything. We may fidget more or do other seemingly trivial things that end up burning more calories throughout the day. 

However, some people’s bodies do not respond in this way. Their bodies seemingly hold on to excess calories and want to store them as fat for a rainy day.

From an evolutionary perspective this makes perfect sense as a strategy to survive when food sources become scarce. Though in our current age of caloric abundance, this feature has now become a bug.

This does not mean that people with poor NEAT responses are doomed to gain weight uncontrollably. It just means that it’s going to be a little more challenging than those whose NEAT response is advantageous for weight loss.

How to Manipulate Body Weight?

There are two sides to this equation. Calories in vs calories out. It so happens that manipulating one side of the equation is much more efficient than manipulating the other when it comes to body weight.

Calories in is the clear winner here.

For example, one Costco Chocolate Muffin is roughly 700 calories. Walking briskly on a treadmill for one hour might burn 300 calories depending on age, weight, and several other things. It’s obvious that it would be much easier to not eat the muffin rather than eat the muffin and then walk on the treadmill for 2 hours and 20 minutes to offset it.

Let’s say you walk on the treadmill for one hour per day for a week.  At roughly 300 calories burned per walking session you will have burned 2100 calories in a week.  Eating only 3 of the Costco Chocolate Muffins in that same week you will have effectively nullified 7 hours of exercise.  

A horrible trade off of time and effort!  Ideally of course, we don’t eat the muffins AND do the walking too, but it’s a good illustration of how easily one side of the energy balance equation can disproportionately dominate the other.

A Durable Solution

In order to take control of my body weight, I started counting my calories. Learning this skill was the single biggest factor to my losing 50 pounds and keeping it off permanently. 

Counting calories will help accomplish a couple of key objectives.  First, it will help us align calorie consumption to a more healthy body weight.  Second, it will develop our subconscious mind to recognize when we’re deviating from a healthy calorie intake.  

Basically, it’s a way for us to replace our often faulty appetites with a better system.  As time goes on, this system becomes ingrained habit and further mitigates the physiological and psychological pull of our appetite signals.  This results in a diminished need for sheer willpower to combat the faulty signals.

What About All the Diets?

Keto, Paleo, Atkins, Mediterranean, and more. The number of diets is never-ending. But which one is the best?  Well, I don’t honestly know. 

What I am fairly confident in is that all effective diets must ultimately solve the basic calories in vs calories out equation. The named diets are merely child implementations of this parent class. 

What this means is that you can create your own child implementation, which is every bit as effective for weight loss as the litany of named diets. It also means that if you implement one of these named diets and do not mind the energy balance equation, the diet will not work.

That’s my biggest criticism of the named diets. That is, they tend to obfuscate the critical importance of the energy balance equation. 

That’s why I found counting calories and constructing my own diet easier. I could pick the foods I already liked and manage the portions to satisfy my caloric requirements. Once I started counting my calories, it also became quickly apparent what foods and drinks were too calorically dense and should be removed or drastically reduced from my diet.

In short, I just found this approach gave me more control and certainty that my efforts would pay off. I could monitor my calorie intake for a couple weeks and see if I lost weight or gained weight. Then adjust accordingly going forward.

The Remote Workers’ Advantage

Remote workers are empowered to control our health to a greater degree. And not just our mental nutrition, our physical health as well. 

When you work from home, you can choose to eat any diet you want. You can eat the most healthy, nutritious diet imaginable or you can eat deep-fried candy bars every day.

This also means that we eliminate some common temptations in office life. Such as the endless candy dishes, cheap soda, or weekly donuts. We also avoid the frequent restaurant visits with coworkers. While these are certainly enjoyable on a social level, they make it very difficult to control calorie intake.

Instead we can more easily plan our meals, snacks, and drinks. We shift our calorie intake decisions to the point when we do our grocery shopping. We’re far more likely to make good decisions at this point in time rather than when we’re in-office and perhaps stressed out. Which makes it far too easy to reach for the donuts or candy.

To reiterate, the benefits of remote work extend to our physical well-being as well. It makes it easier to manage our calorie intake and make good, healthy decisions on a day to day basis.

Summary

Weight control is mostly determined by calories in vs calories out. All effective weight loss diets solve this equation behind their marketing veneer. 

Controlling calories ingested is critical for efficient weight loss. Exercise is great as a supporting activity and for a myriad of other health reasons. But if you want to see the scale go down, you need to manage the inputs.

Counting calories is a reliable way to manage those inputs. Learning this skill is incredibly empowering and can pay dividends for the rest of your life. It can allow you to lose or gain weight virtually at will.

Remote work allows us to take greater control of our physical health. It’s much easier to implement a diet when we’re in control of our environment.

Mental Nutrition

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Mental Nutrition

Much like how our food and drink choices determine our body weight, so too does our mental nutrition determine the health of our minds. Put simply, our bodies are systems. The inputs affect the outputs.

The big difference between mental and physical nutrition is that we are not primarily in control of our mental nutrition. Much of it is beyond our control.

However, too often we give up what control we do have of our mental nutrition not realizing its impact on our cognitive performance and well-being.

Physical Diet

Body weight is mainly determined by a simple formula of calories in vs calories out. Of course this doesn’t tell the whole story. Some bodies will respond quite differently to a caloric deficit vs a caloric surplus. 

The broader principle holds, however. If we take in more calories than we burn, we will grow. Now we can do things such as weight training and consuming sufficient protein to maximize lean body mass gain. In this way we can shepherd our weight growth towards a desirable outcome, i.e. more lean body mass and less body fat.

If however we consume more calories than our activity level requires, we will gain primarily body fat. We also open ourselves up to a litany of health problems such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes to name only two.

In short, the inputs affect the outputs. This is not controversial. Yet we often overlook a closely related analog, our mental diet.

Mental Diet

Our mental diet on the other hand is not primarily within our control. While we can voluntarily choose how many calories we ingest, we rarely choose what mental stimuli we encounter. Given this high proportion of involuntary stimuli, it’s extremely important to mind the parts we can control.

For example, we often can’t control with whom and where we work. At least for the majority still stuck in the in-office corporate culture. These environmental factors unleash a deluge of detrimental stimuli upon our minds whether we like it or not.

This is ultimately what I mean when I refer to mental nutrition. That is, the mental stimuli we experience. One part of which is voluntary and the other part is involuntary.

I contend it’s in our best interest to increase the proportion of voluntary mental stimuli. Of course then it’s incumbent upon us to choose wisely what stimuli is beneficial and what is not.

How to Improve our Mental Nutrition

One of the most straightforward things we can do is to avoid attention rabbit holes. Spending significant time on social media, politics, or office gossip are guaranteed ways to sabotage your mental health.

Social media is one of the most egregious offenders. There are few easier ways to waste hours a day on an activity that is both unproductive and likely to make you feel bad. It’s too easy to compare yourself, warts and all, to the curated versions of others found on social media platforms. 

Politics and office gossip too can easily swallow up huge chunks of your attention and time. They’re also sure to cause unnecessary problems in the workplace at some point and pollute your mind as well. 

But enough of what’s out, what’s in? My shortlist would start with spending time with family, exercise, reading, writing, and working on projects. Your shortlist may well be different, but these are all things that are likely to increase your happiness, health, and mental acuity. 

Moreover, it will be no surprise to readers of this blog that working remotely can also greatly improve mental nutrition. Recall the aforementioned involuntary environmental factors from working in-office. Those largely vanish or at least become voluntary when we work remotely.

This is a big reason why remote work has such enormous potential for our productivity. It shifts a large chunk of mental stimuli from the involuntary category to the voluntary. It empowers each of us to better optimize for productivity based on our individual characteristics.

Summary

Our bodies function better with proper nutrition. So too do our minds function better with proper mental nutrition. 

We have less control over the mental stimuli we experience than our calorie intake.  Therefore it is important that we consciously choose our mental nutrition well for the parts that we can control.

We should be mindful of where we spend our attention. Social media, politics, and office gossip are attention rabbit holes that are largely net negative activities. Engage in them sparingly and with caution.

Working remotely puts us in greater control of the mental stimuli we experience. This allows us to optimize our mental nutrition much better than an in-office worker ever could.