Five Tips from Five Years of Remote Work

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I’ve worked from home for a long time now. Forever, really — Automattic was my first real job after college. In a lot of ways, I work similarly to the way I did in college except that I go to a coffee shop instead of a library.

When I started working from home, I noticed people were very concerned that it would be too challenging. I’ve gotten used to the questions, and over the years, I’ve refined my answer to a handful of main points.

  1. Get out of the house most days. Whatever that looks like for you will depend on how you work best and how much you like to interact with other people. It could be going for a walk around the block, spending some time in a coffee shop, or spending the whole day in a co-working space.
  2. Try to follow a routine. Going back to the first point, it helps me to take a walk to a coffee shop every morning. The ten minute walk to the coffee shop is sort of like my commute and defines the start of my day. When you work from home, it’s easy to forget when it’s time to “go home” for the day. Having a routine to start and end the day helps with that.
  3. Take advantage of the flexibility. Like anything, working from home has pros and cons. One of the advantages is the flexibility you get, so use it! I try to get out of the house most days, but I also have the option to stay in if it’s particularly cold or there’s a blizzard and I don’t feel like walking through the snow.
  4. Set up a nice home office. I think a nice chair is a minimum requirement. Don’t cheap out here. It will pay for itself in chiropractor bills. I also like a desk that can convert to a standing desk. There are a lot of fancy automatic options, but I personally recommend saving some money and getting one with a manual crank. I need a nice monitor and noise canceling headphones. Again, do what works for you.
  5. Meet people outside work. Joining a co-working space can be a nice way to do this, but you could join a basketball league or organize a local Internet of Things meetup — whatever interests you. Joining a new company can be a big transition. Especially if you’ve just graduated and many of your friends are moving across the country.

I also like to make a distinction between distributed companies and remote workers. Automattic is a distributed company. Everyone works from home — or wherever they feel most productive. Sometimes people work from home, but in a company where most people are colocated in one or several offices.

The difference might not seem obvious at first, but I think it’s important because it can be a defining factor in how the rest of the company communicates with remote workers. Since we’re all distributed at Automattic, there’s no way to overlook someone who is remote. If most of your company is colocated, it helps to understand how the rest of the company thinks about communication.

Working from home is great. My colleagues sometimes say that they’ve broken me — remote work is all I know. I’m not sure if I could work in an office every day, but maybe someone else can write that blog post. 🙃

Docker WordPress

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Almost a year ago now, I started a Docker image for WordPress so I could guarantee there would be new builds available immediately after new WordPress releases.

Since I was working on an image anyway, I decided to build in support for Memcached. Object cache plugins like Memcached Object Cache are pretty common on high traffic WordPress sites.

I also set up wp-config.php to load some of the configuration options from environment variables. To make the image a little more extensible, I also have it automatically loading PHP files in the /var/www/html/wp-config directory. You can mount a volume with all your extra config files in the container to automatically load them.

After the initial setup, maintenance was super easy. Docker Hub automatically builds every time I push to GitHub. I’ve also got a script that checks for new WordPress and WP-CLI releases and automatically pushes updates to GitHub.

There are currently PHP 7.3 builds for WordPress core (PHP-FPM) and WP-CLI available.

Wire

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Wire is an RSS reader for iOS that displays articles with their native formatting — or an optimized mobile version for sites that support AMP — and doesn’t require yet another account to sign up for.

As mentioned previously, it had been quite some time since I wrote any iOS apps, so I decided to use some of my free time this summer to build an app that I wanted to use.

There are other RSS readers. It’s not exactly new territory. But like most apps, the good ones all seem to require you to sign up for another account. I don’t know about you, but I find the number of accounts I already have to worry about somewhat overwhelming. I don’t need anymore. Relying on an iCloud account won’t solve this problem for everyone, but in this case it solves it for me.

The other main feature I wanted in an RSS reader was the ability to disable the monotonous E-reader-like view that has become so common. So many of the websites I read look great on mobile.

As you can see, it’s a pretty standard design. There’s a simple list of articles that you can group however you want. The article view loads a selected article in a web view. I really prefer this real view of the site to the reader-ized version other apps use.

I have found Wire to be quite good for what I want. It doesn’t do much more than aggregate articles from the websites you want to keep up with, but I think it does that well.

pb – MacOS CLI Trick

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You can already interact with the system clipboard in MacOS directly from the command line with two commands: pbcopy and pbpaste. I’ve made it even easier for myself by detecting whether there is data in STDIN — for example if we’re sending data to the command via a pipe. If so, I’ve assumed we actually want to use pbpaste. Otherwise, we want to use pbcopy.

pb () {
	if [ -t 0 ]; then
		pbpaste
	else
		pbcopy
	fi
}

You can use it like pb < /path/to/file or pb > /path/to/other/file, for example.