VSHN.timer #35: Working From Home

Welcome to another VSHN.timer! Every Monday, 5 links related to Kubernetes, OpenShift, CI / CD, and DevOps; all stuff coming out of our own chat system, making us think, laugh, or simply work better.
This week we are going to do an overview of the best practices, ideas, and books about working from home that we have found so far.
1. We start by what we think is probably the best article published so far about the subject. Alice Goldfuss, who has had lots of experience in remote working, not only provides practical tips about your setup (office layout, furniture, equipment, etc.) but also about the emotional stress caused by being on your own. Her advice is timeless, but never as timely as today. Simply extraordinary reading.
https://blog.alicegoldfuss.com/work-in-the-time-of-corona/
2. In a similar vein, but with a much more practical point of view, Marion enumerates a list of things to keep in mind while working from home in these troubling times. Habits, attitudes, timings, food, it’s all there. A simple but effective checklist for our daily well-being.
https://dev.to/codeidoscope/top-tips-for-working-from-home-8md
3. Of course software vendors are actively trying to transform this crisis into an opportunity. It is certainly the case of Zoom, whose shares are skyrocketing as we speak. In any case they have published a blog post full of useful tips and tricks for working from home. It includes some technical guidance for webcams and microphones, for the sake of sane online meetings. In VSHN we use Zoom every day! We meet at 9 in the morning, while we enjoy a cup of coffee or tea, and later as well, at 4 in the afternoon, before the day finishes. These meetings help us keep in touch with one another, and work better as a team. By the way, we informally call the 9 AM Zoom meeting a „Znoomi“, because it is a mix of Zoom and a znüni… Swiss German readers will understand! 🙂
https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/03/09/working-from-home-tips-to-meet-like-a-pro/
https://twitter.com/vshn_ch/status/1239589997440884736
4. Are you curious about other people’s home offices? Jason Fried from Basecamp asked his colleagues to send him a picture of their desktops, and the resulting collage is quite a sight. Tip: scroll to the bottom!
https://m.signalvnoise.com/remote-working-the-home-office-desks-of-basecamp/
5. The tool of the week is the Microsoft Live Share extension for Visual Studio Code, allowing teams to remotely share pair programming or training sessions. Think SubEthaEdit but cross-platform and with all the debugging prowess of a great editor. And of course it also works with VSCodium!
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MS-vsliveshare.vsliveshare
6. But there’s One More Thing™®©: since many of you are stuck at home, and might want to have some book recommendations, here’s ours for this week: „The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work“ by Scott Berkun, and „REMOTE: Office Not Required“ by (once again) Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Bonus points: at the time of this writing, Scott’s book is available for free in its Kindle edition, while REMOTE is available for free on Audible. Check them out!
https://scottberkun.com/yearwithoutpants/
How are you balance your personal and working life? What other tools would you recommend ? Get in touch with us through the form at the bottom of this page, and see you next week for another edition of VSHN.timer.