Let’s get physical
Two recent announcements have been made about how it's viewed that people should interact with each other. Both, in my opinion, are misguided.
Firstly, Yahoo's chief executive, Marissa Mayer has announced that she's banning staff from remote working. The idea behind this announcement is simple - that "some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings". This is absolutely spot on, but the next sentence in the leaked internal memo is more problematic: "Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home".
Don't get me wrong, working remotely has some special challenges, but they are by no means insurmountable. There's lots of tips for people working remotely which will turn into a future blog post at some point (I'm running an internal training about how to do it in a couple of weeks), but three simple rules are stay connected, set a routine and take care of yourself.
The second decision is one by Ubuntu to move Ubuntu Developer Summits to a purely online meeting, ditching the physical meeting. This misses the point of conferences. If we simply wanted to listen to talks and presentations, why meet up at all? Webcasts have been around for the last 20 years, and yet conferences still exist. The most important part of a conference isn't the talks, it's the "hallway track" - it's the ability for people to meet up, chat and socialise. Be this an impromptu meeting in the corridor, or over a few nice beers. Without this component, why schedule a time at all? Simply publish a list of talks over the coming 3 months, and anyone can pick the best time for them to attend.
At Collabora, many of our engineers work remotely. One of the perks we offer is the ability to attend conferences, and to "touch base" and visit and work from one of the offices. It is important to recognise the importance of collaboration physically and it shouldn't be discounted the way Ubuntu has done. But it should not be seen as a silver bullet to an organisation, like Yahoo seem to be implying. Both extremes are wrong, and a balance must be struck to ensure the best outcome for productivity and innovation.
(Title from an iconic 80s song)
DebConf 2012 – Nicaragua
After 4 flights, about 15,000 miles, a beach, some Toña and cheese and lots of geeks, I'm able to update my Places I've Been map by adding Nicaragua to it.
I was speaking at DebConf12, entitled Bits from the Release Team. In case you missed it, it's been recorded by the wonderful DebConf video team and is available in high and low quality. It was great to catch up with people again, and do quite a bit of work on Debian itself, mostly on the Wheezy release. I even found an hour to take a basic Spanish class, although I'm fairly sure I've forgotten most of it by now.
As usual, there were a number of Collaborans present, and it was good to meet them. I suspect I'll be seeing a few more at GUADEC in a weeks time.
My photos are available, should anyone be interested.
I’m going to…
I've recently book my places at a few conferences, so just to confirm:
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I hope to see a few people there!
Gnome 3, multiple monitors and desktops
Today I tried to install Debian Wheezy on a Lenovo X220, in preparation for the upcoming release.
It generally went well, with just a couple of incompatabilities:
- the wireless card requires some firmware in non-free
- the fan seems to be constantly on at a low speed
Generally though, the install went very smoothly. At that point, I booted up and greeted by the new Gnome 3 desktop, which is where my troubles started. It seems that the fonts are fairly poorly rendered, either far too small or far too large. There doesn't appear to be any way of changing workspaces using the keyboard. [edit: ctrl+alt+arrows works] Using a second screen placed above the first produces some... interesting effects with moving windows around, as can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yTr12Q7CYU.
The result is that I've gone back to using XFCE. It seems to actually work well, which is kinda important when trying to be productive.