Making Better Video Calls!

A note about links.

I’ve spoken a bit in the past about how to make your (sometimes unexpected!) remote work environment work for you. Whether it’s setting up anywhere that you can find a place — be it your kitchen table, your sofa, and for those lucky few, an actual dedicated home office — having a place where you can get into the work mindset and be able to focus is key to maintaining a productive day. 🙂

So, what do you do once you’re there? These days, you’re probably going to spend a lot of time in front of a camera, right? As video interface platforms become more and more important, you’re seeing the inside of everyone’s home and — sometimes the inside of their noses — when they have a less than ideal set up.

Earlier this week I gave my quickest possible set of recommendations for how to step up your video call game (spoiler: it’s not combing your hair, though probably that too!). I’m here now to give you a much more expanded set of recommendations . . . and there’s even a video to demonstrate these suggestions!

On Hiring

In the last two plus years, there has been no single activity that I have spent more time doing than hiring. If I haven’t been reviewing resumes, then I’ve been on the phone with applicants, or I’ve been traveling to some part of the world to do in-person interviews, or I’ve been in meetings with one or both of the co-founders of the company I work for, strategizing on how to perfect or iterate on our hiring protocol.

Yeah. It’s been all hiring, all the time.

I’ve learned a few things during these past 24 months (not to mention the several years wherein I was less-directly involved with hiring to one extent or another at previous companies), and I thought I would share some of those lessons.

On Work/Life Balance

Back in the early days of when I worked for Automattic, the folks behind this very blogging platform, new hire training was done over the course of two or three days. Full-time reps were asked to take training shifts of about a half-a-day each and cover certain topics for whichever session they were teaching.

Being the team player that I was, I tried to help out as much as I could. In each case, I would generally try and get that very first session on Monday morning because I would always sneakily add in one additional little bit to my agenda.

I would tell everyone to work less.

An Item off of my Apocalyst

There was a fairly short lived show called No Tomorrow. The basic premise was that one of the two main characters believed that a comet was going to hit the earth in several months and wipe out all life as we know it. He had tried warning everyone and failed, so had resorted to living out as many amazing experiences as he could. The other main character was his new girlfriend who didn’t always believe him, but was enamoured by his desire to live life to the fullest.

This inspired me to create an actual Apocalyst of my own. It’s a real book that I really add things to.

Today, I got the chance to cross the very first thing off of it.

WordCamp Phoenix

Header photo credit: Alan Stark

Have I mentioned recently that I work with WordPress rather a lot? Well I do. I really really do.

Not only are pretty much all of my sites powered by WordPress (either .com or .org), but I am also gainfully employed by Automattic, the folks who run WordPress.com and are the publishers of the insanely-popular twin plugins Jetpack and Akismet as well as several other awesome tools like Simplenote and Cloudup.

Flexibility is NICE

I don’t mean the bendy kinds. I wouldn’t know what those were if they walked up and punched me in the face.

No, I mean the sort which allow you to do what you need to when you need to do it.

You see, my kid, Mal, was the first kid born in AZ in 2013. I would say that is some sort of PII (personally identifiable information) which should never be shared, but there were news articles written about it. He’s never going to be able to use his birthday as a secure method of password retrieval, that’s for sure! But the other down side is that he’s never going to get very good birthday parties. He’s always going to be out of school and the like. And as a guy with a late December birthday, I feel his pain.

I did a thing . . . a year ago.

I just wrote about a 1,000 word post telling you all about how I started out as a sturdy kid and eventually became a fat and sick adult.

I decided to delete that post however, because . . . well . . . we all know that story, amirite? We get told every day about the obesity epidemic that is crushing the world, so if that’s the case, the odds are that if you’re reading this post you have lived it yourself.

Instead I’ll tell you that when I found out that Kendra was pregnant with Georgia, I realized that I probably wouldn’t get to see her graduate. Hell, she might not even really know who I was if I wasn’t careful. So I decided to do something about it.

One year ago today, I had a Roux-en-Y gastric bypass.

Let’s play “Remember When?”

Remember when MTV and VH-1 played actual music?

I know that this is a worn out trope and that there are any number of folks who have written (and even created videos) responding to it, but in this case it’s more of an entrée on to the topic of what has been playing on my second monitor all week.

5 Lessons “The Website is Down” Teaches Every IT Professional

Once upon a time, before I was a manager in GoDaddy’s (now sadly defunct) Advanced Hosting Support department, I was a Lead and then a Supervisor for the entirety of its third shift — the graveyard/overnight shift. It was a pretty great job. Third shift was significantly less formal than any other, and it was populated with workers who had either just joined the department or those who for whatever reason refused to face a typical daytime shift (the extra couple of bucks an hour in shift differential no doubt served as a motivator in many cases)!

Like most, I too had started my career in AHS on graveyards, but had bounced around the department while climbing the ranks. Once my chance at leadership came, I ended up back on third and it was like coming home. I could tell all sorts of stories about my time on third shift (and some of those stories are already on this very blog). Despite the stereotype of overnight shifts being the social rejects, a huge portion of my philosophy about customer service comes from my time with those fine folk.

But the point to this post is not about that. Instead, it’s to share with you a video.

I find myself . . . humbled.

Much of this will not be news to many of you (since we did not exactly hide what was going on when it happened), but last week our youngest, Georgia, got sick.

Quite sick.

We were on our way back from Kendra’s Birthday Extravaganza in Barcelona, Spain, when we got a call from my mom and dad, who had been babysitting the kids. She wanted us to know that little Jordi was running a fever. It wasn’t too bad, but she felt we should know. “No big deal,” we said . . . we were on hour 31 or so of a 39 hour trip home, and so our give-a-fuck about anything was pretty low. “Just keep an eye on her and if it gets BAD let us know.”