Category: remote

It’s been 2 years!

I can’t believe it’s been 2 years since I started working for Open Knowledge. I vaguely remember my first day on Oct 2, 2012. The strongest memory of the day is that it was a public holiday in India and my first day at…

I can’t believe it’s been 2 years since I started working for Open Knowledge. I vaguely remember my first day on Oct 2, 2012. The strongest memory of the day is that it was a public holiday in India and my first day at work. I’ve looked through the commit history to figure out what I did that day. It seems I was setting up PyBossa and I fixed a bug in it on my first day! The project looks gorgeous these days thanks to Daniel’s amazing work!

Team Picture in January 2014

In the last two years, I’ve written lots of code; traveled to UK, Kenya, Tanzania, and Germany; managed servers and documentation for the systems team; and finally moved into a new role where I’m Senior Systems Administrator and Developer at the same time. It’s been a fabulous 2 years and I’m proud to work with my fantastic colleagues.

Looking forward to more fun!

A year at OKF!

I cannot believe how quickly time has passed! Two trips to Cambridge for the summit, 100+ commits on CKAN and CKAN extensions, contributions to PyBossa, OpenSpending and satellite sites…

I cannot believe how quickly time has passed! Two trips to Cambridge for the summit, 100+ commits on CKAN and CKAN extensions, contributions to PyBossa, OpenSpending and satellite sites, and innumerable GIFs later – I’ve finished a year at the Open Knowledge Foundation!

success!

It doesn’t seem like time has passed at all. I remember the first call I had with Rufus and making the Salary Converter. Among all the interviews I’ve had, interviewing at OKF is definitely among the top 3.

In the last year, I’ve learned a lot about working remotely and I’m now in love with being a remotee. Managing time better is also something I’ve become far better at than I used to. I’ve discovered that my best time for productive coding is 6 am to 12 pm. Any day that I start at 6 am is bound to be a very productive one; starting later makes me struggle to be productive.

The two trips to Cambridge have been a lot of fun – meeting my colleagues and planning for the 6 months ahead. Plus, it’s the one time I get to actually grab a drink with my team!

On the programming side, the biggest learning has been handling testing better. Thanks to my team, I’ve learned to write new tests and fix the ones I break, though I occasionally run into “how did these tests ever pass” kind of tests though, leading to a fun day of debugging. I’ve also volunteered to own projects in our team that’s leaning towards operations. This has given me a chance to work with Ansible and refresh my packaging experience.

Ever since I’ve started working as a programmer, OKF is the first time I’ve stayed on for a year, and I have to give full credit to my amazing colleagues who’ve made waking up to work fun!

okf-team-waving!

A Month of Being a Remotee

Since October, I’ve been a remote employee, working for the The Open Knowledge Foundtion…

Since October, I’ve been a remote employee, working for the The Open Knowledge Foundtion. I was nervous about being a remotee and I talked to a lot of my friends who’re remotees at Mozilla. Shout out to ashish, fox2mike, glob, and Unfocused for helping me out. I also enjoyed reading about people who wrote what their team did, particularly, RelEng at Mozilla, shout out to you guys as well! Also, The Oatmeal was right! Although, ironically, I’ve started to wake up unnaturally early after being a remote employee 😛

The biggest fear about working from home were the distractions The most important distraction-killer is a time tracker. We use toggl for timesheeting anyway, and turning off the time tracker when I’m distracted helps. After a few times of doing that, I automatically stop myself when I’m getting distracted. I keep two Firefox profiles, one for work and one for everything else. While I’m working, the non-work profile is closed, so I can’t get distracted. I reward myself with time to look at it when I finish 2 hours of work and take a short break.

Having good communication channels is great since we’re distributed. Every day, our team gets on a stand up call. It’s great to actually hear everyone talk about their and ask for help from the team if they’re stuck. We also have a Campfire chat room and an IRC channel (#okfn on irc.freenode.net); they keep me sane. Seriously. Speaking of sanity, on some days, the Campfire room is just a world of gifs, we’re awesome like that. There’s also the weekly notebook posts to keep track of what folks in other teams do.

Time’s flown by so fast; 10 days ago, I finished a month here! It’s been a fun and busy time!

PS: If you want to work with me at OKFN, we’re hiring for a bunch of positions!