Over a year ago, I left San Antonio and started working from home in Lexington, KY. ( previously)
AV Tools
Microphone: Still very happy with the Meteor microphone.
Camera: Purchased a Logitech HD Portable 1080p Webcam C615 with Autofocus. Works with OSX 10.9.4 well enough. The only pains were reconfiguring various VC software to use the new camera. Hangouts users, beware: every Flash update you must to set your non-default video/mic.
I enjoy the dedicated camera instead of using the one on the MacBook. I work with dual displays, and having to properly position the Macbook or worry about looking into the camera on the Macbook was a bit awkward.
Chat Tools
The majority of my collaboration is on IRC every day. My basic setup uses the Textual client connecting to a ZNC instance running on a server.
I like being very upfront with my status. The usual way I see this done via IRC is ’nickname’ and ’nickname_away’ or ’nickname_zzz’. Don’t do this - it’s the digital equivalent of bad manners. IRC has /away builtin, just use it. Lots of clients are aware of ‘away’ status. ZNC has a nice module called ’ simpleaway’- when you are not connected to ZNC, it sets your status away.
Turns out you can overshare. After I returned from being idle, help vampires sent messages nearly instantly. ZNC’s ’ antiidle’ module helps counter this by hiding your real idle time.
Finally, our team worked on IRC bots. Some examples:
- Single bot command to launch a telepresence/VC session with the entire team
- Music player control
- Fun sounds playing in the conference room
- RSS feed streamed to channel for the team’s Redmine/Jira projects
Overall
Remote work is awesome. I’m thankful Rackspace gave me the opportunity for remote work. I’m also thankful the team I work made remote work painless and rewarding.