Posted by Tejus Parikh on March 05, 2020
Seattle is in the midst of one of the largest work from home trials in the largest work-from-home trials in recent corporate history.
The COVID-19 outbreak has caused may of our large employers, including Microsoft, Nordstroms, Expedia, Fred Hutch, and Amazon, to advise their employees to practice social distancing and stay away from the office at least until the end of the month.
I was remote through most of 2017 and in that period I quickly learned that being remote for a sustained period is very different than the occasional WFH day.
Through that experience I developed a set of best practices that made that experience work for me, which may help others that found out this morning that their physical presence is not requested.
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Posted by Tejus Parikh on June 09, 2020
When you peel back the covers on most agile software teams you’ll often find a collection of processes that are more accurately modeled by a waterfall.
Comprehensive layouts (“comps”) created by design teams to often put a hard stop to any true agile process.
Comprehensives look like an application.
This is doubly true with modern mock-up tools that can simulate user flow.
So when it comes time to evaluate the output of the engineering team, there is a natural inclination to compare the live application to the comp and determine success based on how closely they match.
This is not agile.
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Posted by Tejus Parikh on December 08, 2020
Before anything else there were our colleagues from Wuhan that were expressing their concern about an illness that was effecting their friends and family back home. Within a month, there was a reported illness of a returning Amazon employee followed soon after of an outbreak at a nursing home in Kirkland, WA. It escalated quickly from there. There were cases reported at some of the corporate offices of the major Seattle area employers and in the first week of March they almost universally issued guidance to stay home if you can. A few weeks later schools shut down and employers changed their tune to “you should stay home.” Thus began the began the biggest change in how many of us live and work since the industrial era’s drive to separate home and the workplace.
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