How we work

Did you ever wonder how we work? Do we sit in an office together? Em, no, we don't. Actually we can't. We're in three different countries! And even in three different time zones! That's crazy would you say, how can people work together if they don't even see each other face to face every day. Well, modern internet technologies nowadays make it perfectly possible for three people from US, Canada and Germany to form a company. And today I want to write about how my average work day looks like.

Morning rounds...

First thing I usually do is to look at the timeline in the bug tracker, to check what got fixed during the night when Steve was working (don't worry, he didn't work during the night, it was a day for him - we have 9 hours of time zone difference between us). And yet again some Steve's commit comments of fixed bugs are not understandable. Grrrr.... Looking at code, aha, that's that bug about wrong highlighting on desktop, number 234. Ok, closing that ticket. Entering it to the changelog page. (By the way, we use Trac for our bug tracking and we are really happy with it).

Now looking at emails. 15 emails from beta testers. Woohoo... Reading. Reading. Still reading. Ok, this one looks like a bug, needs testing, maybe reproducible. Marking that email as todo, will test that later today.

Now crashlogs. 15 new crash logs. Let's see. Already seen this one nn times, not fixable, sorting to OS Bugs. Next looks like this PDF crash again, tired of those. When will we be able to reproduce it at last? Maybe I'll try to play with that one more (like maybe 10th??) time today. No idea, maybe make a folder of 10 GBs of PDFs and try to open them all at once... Or try to open them one by one very very very quickly. Or preview them everywhere, in each drawer and all sections of the bottom pane. Or everything of the above at the same time, more weird it gets, the better... Maybe I'll luck out today who knows.

Ok, now forum. 3 new posts. Good, that's not much. Now when will they stop calling their topics "a couple of suggestions" or "desktop problem, please help", grrrrrrr... Needs renaming. This question was already asked 100 times, why won't he bother to enter it to the search box? ok, nevermind, merging with an older thread. Now answering. Done. Looking at the weblog comments. We get almost everything into the junked folder, so I need to sort out good comments regularly (if someone knows how to save me from this hassle, please, let me know, thanks). Probably there are no good comments, but I'm going to look through all this stupid junk stuff like "Hi, great site" or "buy cheap levitra", etc. ... actually what's levitra? I have no idea, might google that one day. Morning rounds finished. Going to read some fresh techie news and blogs and have my breakfast now.

And it was evening, er... morning, er...

It's late evening now - around 7 PM my time. Steve usually comes to the office about this time (10 AM in SF), but he's still not online. I know he's probably making coffee and checking his mail. He's going to fix something first, and when he has a sense of having accomplished something, he'll launch his iChat... After another session of desperate attempts to reproduce that PDF crash (no luck today either, sigh), I'm preparing my usual checklist of stuff to tell him about - beta testers opinions of the new Get Info window look, a couple of new common crashes just for the info - they are still not reproducible, and I should also remind him to send that TransitionTimer crash to DTS. We'd then usually video chat for about an hour or so discussing all that stuff, Steve would tell me what he's planning to work on that day, we decide what's important to look into next, etc. We then usually discover that we need to clarify a few things together - I will show him how to reproduce something he couldn't by himself or he would ask me to research some technical info for him, etc. And we end up working in parallel for a couple of hours, sometimes trying to solve same problem, or sometimes working on two different things. When Steve's going out to lunch - I'm usually going to sleep. He will then continue to work, and a couple of hours after he leaves the office, I'll wake up and begin my day. So we can proudly claim that Cocoatech is working round the clock for you :) .

Essentially my work consists of taking away issues that are not directly related to programming, so that Steve can have his head free from stuff that could slow down his coding. Besides that, we just have a lot of fun working together and we're very good friends. I hope that I could bring our developmenet process and atmosphere a bit nearer to you with this post. Do you happen to work with people in another country? What means of communication do you use? I would love to hear about your experience.