EntBlog
Code, 3D, Games, Linux and much more...

Working At Home

I have been working at home for a week now and I have to say that it is being quite a good experience. At first I was not sure if this would work but, now, my old ideas about how inefficient you can be when you work in an office with an strict timetable are coming to my mind. It may be a coincidence, but in this week the Flow Moments (moments of maximum concentration where you forget that you have internet in your machine) have been before lunch (12-14), middle afternoon (17-19) and after dinner (22-…). More or less all the days have followed the same pattern. My objective is trying to enlarge those Flow Moments. Rest of the time I have tried lightweight tasks (attending the email, participating in Mailing Lists, reading books, white papers, elaborating my personal planning, thinking about the next things I have to implement, etc). In those periods, maintaining focus is quite difficult. When being out of the flow, strange forces drive me to distractions like opening the Firefox. Anyway, I have been all my life a Late-night coder, so that is probably where I am being attracted to. To the (22-…) zone, where I am probably most productive.

I think that the development of the project (at least I have a clear idea about the phase zero) is going on the right track. The pieces are starting to fit together. I am not alone in this trip and that helps a lot. Having a shared vision with more people is incredibly satisfactory.

About my infrastructure: I can work wherever I want! I am using a Subversion repository installed in my server that can be accessed from internet using a ssh connection (MyEntunnel is very useful to create a background tunnel without having a PuTTY window). For task scheduling, bug tracking and Wiki I am using Trac. It integrates perfectly with Subversion and all the items can be linked uniformly (tasks can be linked to Wiki pages, Subversion commits can be linked to bugs, etc etc). For very small teams is definitely a great application. I don’t know how well it scales to bigger groups. And that is all about the admin software. There is still a lot of work to do in this area, but for now it is enough. I have the basics and all the work is being backed up every night in my NAS. One day I will write about how nicely you can organize your working environment in Windows to mount shared that are backed up (w: for work, h: for home…), how to set up a PDC with Samba, etc. But that will be in another post.

In short, a positive and productive first week.

Thanks for reading!