Issue #10 -Remote Work Will Win

Leveraging remote work will level up your development team

Welcome!

Welcome to Developing Skills - Skills for Developers looking to develop their careers.

This week we have:

• Tip of the week: Leverage the Power of Remote Work

• Finds of the week: Companies Requiring Full-Time In-Office Are Struggling to Recruit; How to give presentations your teammates will love; NASA Software Safety Guidebook

Tip of The Week: Leverage the Power of Remote Work

Can you imagine working as a software engineer without access to Google, Stack Overflow, ChatGPT, GitHub CoPilot or the Internet?

I can!

I started writing code professionally in 1996. I wrote C on an A4 pad with a pencil and eraser, when I got a PC - a week and a bit into the job - I had access to the man pages on the web server we ran - I was working at one of the UK’s first ISPs and we had two web servers!

In my second job I had access to the C manual that came with a VMS minicomputer, but as a traditional software house, there was limited Internet access. When you were able to access the Internet you found things by following links or using an index/catalog page like Yahoo.

Around mid-1998 as the Internet started to become more popular, workplaces started limiting, banning or monitoring Internet access - to stop you browsing instead of working. I remember campaigning for developers to get Internet access! Arguing it was the future of work. In the meantime I’d look for details I needed for work at home in the evenings and print them out to take to the office.

In late 1998 Google launched and changed the way I worked, there was finally a search engine that would scan the 2.4 million (yes just a few million back then) websites on the Internet and return useful results.

In 2008 Stack Overflow launched and rapidly became the go to resource for many software engineers. It wasn’t until then that the companies I worked for (excluding my own startups) normalised Internet access for software engineers.

Now Internet access is a given, essential part of a software engineer’s toolkit.

Looking back on it, it’s hard to imagine why anyone ever tried to stop knowledge worker having access to the Internet - the biggest ‘single’ information resource ever, even as it was back then.

I can only imagine that in ten to fifteen years time we’ll be looking back on our current time and wondering why managers tried to limit their companies to the [relatively] tiny talent pool that lives within a commutable distance of an office instead of building flexible remote work into their organisations so that they could recruit from the global talent pool.

What do you think?

Want to Level Up Your Coding Skills?

I believe the best way to do this is to build real-world applications. For that reason I write a weekly newsletter sharing Coding Challenges.

The coding challenges are all designed to walk you through the process of creating an application and to be less than 8 hours work.

Each challenge has you focus on building real-world software rather than toy applications or algorithms and data structures.

You can tackle the challenges in the programming language of your choice. You can even tackle them in several different languages if you prefer.

You can see the challenges and subscribe on the Coding Challenges SubStack.

Share(s) of the Week:

1. Companies Requiring Full-Time In-Office Are Struggling to Recruit New Employees

2. How to give presentations and demos your teammates will love

3. NASA Software Safety Guidebook