I've been working from home for almost eight years now. At first, it was just me and my dogs while my wife went to work. That was definitely hard at first, to stay focused and productive. Every day Alicia would come home and I'd be desperate to get out of the house, she'd usually want to stay in and chill, though, having just had a full day interacting with people at work. I eventually learned that walking down to the library or coffee shop a couple times a week helped some. But coffee shops aren't ideal workspaces in that they don't provide reliable internet, space, often too noisy and sometimes feel like you're not welcome to stay for a long time.
The past few years my wife started staying home and we have two kiddos now. Being able to work from home while raising a young family is a huge advantage logistically speaking and I am thankful every time I get to have lunch with my kids or take a 15 minute break to play in the backyard. But there's also a lot of distractions that are sometimes hard to ignore and the problems of professional isolation and like and reduced networking opportunities.
To this end I started working with a couple friends on a project last year called SpareChair (https://sparechair.me) to build a community of people who work remotely and so we can get connected and provide easy access to a lot of places to work together. We're mostly active in Brooklyn/Manhattan right now to gather feedback and learn how to make this work. Would definitely love to hear any thoughts you all might have on SpareChair, too.
I've wanted something like this for a while now, especially because the usual coffee-shop routine is to pack everything up and take it all with you to the bathroom, and bring it right back and it can get tedious after a while. It's too bad you don't have any spaces in Toronto right now.
Cool! We're hearing the same thing from a lot of folks. They want a lot of choices when it comes to spaces and they want to also find people to work with. I'll get in touch when we launch in Canada!
Much of the science points to blue light as the main problem in disrupting circadian rhythms. I started using a blue light filter app on my phone when using it close to the time I'm planning to sleep. Anyone else try one of those apps? Are they bullshit?
Definitely interested in watching this competition in June. This group of robots is impressive. The updates to DARPAs Atlas robot, done by Boston Dynamics, are impressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27HkxMo6qK0.
Basically, the problem is that no sane person will let you mess with their teeth unless you lack the proper credentials, and experimenting on oneself can be painful enough that almost everyone will quit after their first equivalent of an off-by-one-array-access segmentation fault.
I've worked as the main developer and designer at an online publication using Drupal, then WordPress, among many other duties including communications and social media. I learned enough PHP and HTML/CSS/jQuery to write custom themes and a couple custom plugins. Recently I started working a side project as a technical cofounder (called SpareChair) and have been working with a design/dev shop to build the site with Rails. The TeaLeaf Academy has nailed the tough problem of learning to code with Ruby and Rails online. It's a Goldilocks combo of written and video tutorials and exercises, weekly live sessions and nearly instant responses to questions from students, the founders and TAs in their project forums. It's focused on producing a coder ready to sit in that dev bullpen and hang with everyone from day one of the job and accomplishes that goal. And it's very affordable, the ROI is amazing. Anyone looking to get into Ruby and Rails should check it out.
