Four Tips for Starting Your First Development Job Remotely

I recently found myself in a scary situation: graduating from college and starting a new job in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. As if starting a new job and readjusting from college life to work life weren’t stressful enough, I now had to make that adjustment remotely. Fortunately, I found myself starting at a […]

Work-from-Home Fatigue? Change Things Up

Work can be stressful and tiresome, especially these days — it can be hard to find motivation in the midst of current events. And when I’m working, I can’t always reach the same level of productivity that I have in the past. Why is that? I can’t speak for other people, but at the beginning […]

Why a WFH Social Lunch Can Be Your Most Rewarding Work Hour

It’s month five of working from home with no end in sight — this is a drag. Yes, it’s awesome and you feel grateful that you still have a job. But we’re not here to compare suffering; it’s okay to acknowledge that working from home when you don’t want to sucks. I’ve found myself working […]

The Benefits of Ruthless Collaborative Critique

Communication is difficult. And we’ve all seen reports that needed better peer review, important yet confusing emails, presentations that could have been much, much better, etc. In my experience, many of these situations could have been avoided if the creator had gotten the honest feedback they were asking for. Unfortunately, many people are afraid to […]

4 Steps to Starting a Daily Standup with Your Family During Remote Work/School

Since mid-March, my husband and I have been working from home full time; our two teenagers also began online schooling around that time. Like many households, we suddenly had to figure out how to maintain harmonious relationships while keeping the same levels of productivity. Influenced mostly by having to compete for office space and bandwidth, […]

3 Ideas for Refocusing When Working from Home

I’ve been working from home since mid-March, so I’ve had four months to work on my new routines. One struggle has been learning to stay focused when I’m surrounded by the distractions of my home environment: laundry needing to be washed and folded, cleaning to be done, etc. If you’ve been finding that there are […]

Technical Concepts for Non-Developers, Part 1 – Infinite Scrolling

Recently, a group of friends and I were lamenting how much time we’d wasted on social media. I mentioned my frustration with the overuse of infinite scrolling, and I was surprised to learn that none of my friends had even heard of it. When I started to explain this pattern of content loading and its […]

A Guide to Surviving Burnout, Part 3 – Learn to Avoid Burnout

In the first two posts of this series, we learned how to identify signs of burnout and how to recover from burnout once we are already experiencing it. This post will focus on proactive steps to take to avoid burnout altogether.

How I’m Getting Comfortable with Uncomfortable Conversations

In recent years, I noticed that I was hesitant to talk about personal or charged topics until I felt “comfortable.” Don’t get this confused with feeling safe. What I wanted was control of the outcome and ensured success. Well, that’s not how it works. This pattern existed in my personal life and at work. If […]

6 Things that Helped Me Adjust to Working from Home

For most of us, working from home has shifted from “exceptional and unique” to “daily into the foreseeable future.” In my former life as an office-inhabiting worker, I was among the most gregarious; now I am the only one in my office. I’ve had a few months to perfect my work-from-home strategies. I hope they […]

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