Writers and developers essentially work alone. No matter how much consultation a writer does with other people, at some point it's just you and a blank screen that needs to be filled.

Working on the plone sprint this week (previous entry here) is an odd experience, so far. I'm not used to working around other people; I've been telecommuting for years (see Getting Clueful: Seven Things the CIO Should Know About Telecommuting for some of the wisdom I've gained on that subject). My husband, who also works from home, has a separate office, and we're more likely to send each other email than to brutally disturb the creative process by walking into the other's office. (Knocking on the door to ask, "Lunch?" is apt to earn a snarl, as Bill loses track of a linked list, or the muse snatches away a particularly brilliant sentence.)

I can, of course, handle myself perfectly well in public (though when I visit the home office in Framingham I worry that they think, "She doesn't get out much, does she?"). Working with my CIO coworkers is different than the sprint, though, perhaps only because CIO staff know each other's areas of expertise, personal quirks, sense of humor, and tone of voice (if only from a teleconference). I'm a bit of an outsider at the sprint because I'm such a newbie with plone (my expertise can be summarized as, "Bill, come here and fix this!"), and I haven't hung out on its IRC channel before. Yet it was jarring to write something funny on an IRC chat and hear laughter around me... with everyone staring at their screens. Laughter with people looking at one another, yes; but when I type into an IM or IRC window I don't expect aural response. On the #getpaid side of the whiteboard partition, they call Bill by his IRC handle name because that's how they know him.

None of which appears to get in the way of people operating as an existing team. The first day was (typically, I'm told) a slow ramp-up, as people try to get a new build installed on their laptops, or work out what can be accomplished in the few days available, or decide how the edit process will work. (Nobody uses Word, for example, so I can't depend on Word's revision marks.) But by the end of the day,

You do not have flash or javascript support.

Average (3 votes)

Reply