or Lupin, it's like, bro, this could be a list comprehension and it would take one line. Oh my, here's the list comprehension.  Here's how to read it. All right, I'm just gonna start the show. Boodoo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Stream looks good. Everything looks good. Bow, bow, bow, bow, bow, oops. It's Monday, November 12th, 2018. I'm rim. I'm Scott. And this is Geeknize tonight. Why aren't there any good Monday shows for us to do? Do you always show me that orange bar or whatever? We're gonna ignore it. Work fine last time. Switch to Twitch. I love how it shows me the bar. You're new neighbors. But does not actually at any point say there's a problem with the stream. Does the stream end up turning out right in the end? Please check your video resolution. The current resolution is 1920 by 1080, which is not optional. Maybe maybe they're trying to encourage 720p streaming. I don't know.  I got banned with I got banned. I can send you maybe something else is off about it. Maybe it's like 98 1920 by 10 81. Yeah, the thing is nothing's changed. So I'm not going to change anything yet. I'll say I'll watch the stream again. If there's no problem with it, I'm just going to leave it. OK, that much. Plus, the listener will complain if there's a problem. Hmm. All right. We both have opening bits. I'll start with mine, I guess. So this weekend for the second time in a row of two years, because when it was a thing, Emily and I run races, like 5Ks or whatever. It's kind of like a thing that's really easy to do and really easy to organize. But the Rangers do one that's like the super charity thing where it's expensive because all the money goes to like the charity. So we run it every year and this year like Pionk was there and he high-fived us at the high-five. I'm surprised anyone was there because they were in Columbus the night before. They were in Columbus playing a night game. Back-to-back games. The game's over at like 10 Columbus time. Then they're in New York the next day at the Crack-Assadon.  But like he was there a whole bunch of like legacy, like old Rangers were there. And it's always like this fun thing. It's expensive. It's like 50 bucks, but all the money goes to garden. Only 50 bucks? That's cheap. Dude, a normal charity bike races. They want you to bring thousands. Dude, normal 5K is like a regular race. I run in the city. Like if you book it in advance, we're talking like 15 to 20 bucks. Like charity bike races. They want you to bring thousands of dollars. Yeah, foot races. It's partly because there's a couple of organizations that have the equipment. I guess for running, you don't really need. Well, you need the chips.  All that. But the running stuff is reusable, right? Yeah. But you know, so you need the electronic things in the bibs. Yeah. Those are disposable. Right. And then you need the chip tracking stuff for the splits and the start and the finish. But that's pretty much it. Like you bring it and set it up for a bike thing. First, someone has to lay out the course. Yeah. And the course has to be a lot more tight because on a running race, like the course could just be like pretty much any street anywhere in the city. Yeah. The course has to be long, 100 miles plus. Yeah. Our courses are like a market. Our courses are 5K, 10K, 13 miles. Full of food. We don't need any rest stops. You've got one table with water. The ride takes almost all day. Not, you know, that's what you could do in the morning and then go home. Yeah. 5K takes 20 minutes. Yeah.  So maybe it's the same dollar per minute ratio. So what's interesting is I'm getting older and my like short race times are getting worse because like I keep saying on the show, 35 ain't 25 and I ain't even 35. But my long distance times are getting better. So I tried to push myself. I tried to like, despite the fact that I'm getting older, I actually tried to do well in this race. I trained for it. And I ran hard to end again. I did vomit at the end. Great. Because the problem is actually I got almost the exact same time as last year. 20 minutes, 11 seconds. I was number four overall in my age group and I was 16 overall among everybody. Did numbers one, two and three in your age group also vomit? I saw another person vomit right over the finish line just like me. It wasn't just me. But the trouble I have is that these short races to push myself at the end. My body is just like, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, slow down. Jesus, Ram. God damn.  It saves you a fraction of the time. Yeah. But running faster in the last hundred yards is the difference between fourth place and third place. So yeah, it was super fun. And I got the exact same time as last year, meaning I am at best slightly staving off the right reduce of age. That's what I got. Okay. It's a good race though. So someone tweeted that Joe Hisaishi, if you don't know who that is, this is the guy who composed. Oh yeah. I didn't buy tickets to that concert. All the music for Studio Ghibli movies. His stuff is real good. He was putting on a concert at Carnegie Hall. And I'm like, Hey, I've been past Carnegie Hall like a thousand times. I know exactly where that is. It's a famous place. I've never been in there. Really? When have you been in there? I saw some concerts in there. What did you see in there? Like 10, 11 years ago, I saw a piano concert. It was this famous guy. I don't remember his name. And he did a rock mountain off. He did another thing. Anyway. So I'm like, Oh, and I look and the tickets were hella cheap. So I just bought them. So apparently I found out after buying the tickets that apparently last week he was performed. They were conducting. They had like the orchestra symphony or whatever. And they were doing Studio Ghibli music.  This one isn't that. Cause the weebs always sell those out. So that one is in the. So Carnegie Hall is the building. It has three different, I guess. Theaters in it. Halls, three different music halls in Carnegie Hall. Right. Which is the building. There's I forget. There's the big one, which is what you think of as Carnegie Hall. I forget what it's called. It's a recital hall, which I guess is for recitals and very small things. Like maybe one person singing or maybe, maybe a quartet, maybe, I don't know. And then we were in Zankel Hall, which is like the medium sized one. And it had like a chamber orchestra in there. Right. And he was performing that he was conducting. What is it? Like he recomposed a Philip Glass piece from the sixties. And then I gather that's kind of his thing. Like every year he'll make like a set of new pieces. Yeah. It was like very modern music, right? This, this land guy composed two other things, even though his side, she was conducting all of it. And then like after the intermission, this really good singing singer came out and this weird looking, but still good at playing cellist came out and was like sitting on a platform separate from everyone. Anyway, so that was good. But the thing I want to talk about is that before the show we were sitting around eating some rice, right? Like you do. And I go, you know, and the ticket was a PDF on my phone.  So I'm like, huh, you know, it's like six, 20 in the shows at seven, 30. And I'm like, when should we go over there? Let me refer to the ticket. Let me refer to the ticket to see when we should go over there. I'm in the boat you're in. Maybe it has some info on it. I look at the ticket and I start reading it. And I'm reading all the fine print on the ticket. And eventually I get to some fine print. And it says, yo, you have to print this out on paper, even though it's.   It's 2018. This is a famous venue. I can go to Madison Square Garden with a bar code on with a QR code on my watch. Yep. I went to the World Series with the ticket on my phone. I can go to the game devs of color with a bar code from event right on my phone. Right.  A world famous musical venue that people are like famous jokes about.   Right. So the story I want to talk about is I'm in Manhattan.  Yep. There was this brief era in a distant past where there were a lot of facilities. It's a good thing that I checked because more of the fine print also said, yeah, we're not going to print this out for you. So I went and I'm like, where can I print something? I know where you can print something. Staples. Yep. So I searched for staples. No, it's closed at 6 30 on Sunday. Right Sunday. So I searched for Kinko's, which is now FedEx office. So I searched for FedEx office and I go there and there was one open just a few blocks away. I actually known I had known of this location previously. I could have just gone to my police of employment. That's not that far away. Yeah. So I go to this FedEx office and I'm like, all right. I have a PDF in the email. How do I print it? And then I look it around and I see this some copy, a big fancy copy machine and next to it is as a little terminal and a sign and the sign is like, yo, forward your attachment to email address at FedEx.com. Then we're going to email you a number and I'm like, hi. So I do it and I wait. Worst case scenario, some employee of FedEx goes and sees Joe Hisaishi very and they can get to Carnegie Hall in an hour with that more power to it. I'm waiting and I'm waiting and nothing happens. So I start poking. I emailed. I forwarded the email. Nothing happens. I'm poking the terminal and the terminal is like, all right. You can get a USB stick. I'm like, yeah, no, that's not happening. They're like, you can log into your Google Drive on this terminal.  I'm like, I really don't want to do that. I really do not want to log into my Google Drive. That is, that is the terminal. That's the equivalent of here is a hole somewhere. It's like, I'm going to type in my Google email and password on the shady FedEx office terminal. And then is it even going to bring up my 2FA prompt? My good sir. Is it even going to bring it up? My good sir, please present an appendage of your choice into this mysterious hole. So I'm like, I go to the attachment and I push the button that saves the attachment to Google Drive. And I'm like, I really don't want to do this. I really would not like this option. They also had a Dropbox option and some other options. I'd be more like inclined to make a Dropbox account right then and there. I thought of that as well. But luckily, as I'm waiting there, it just took some for like, it took like almost five plus minutes.  I'm like, oh, thank God. So I go to the terminal. I type the code in. I dip my credit card in the in the slot and two pieces of paper come out. And that's how that works. You know, it's funny because in the course of my life, I've gone through their own like FedEx cloud where the attachment was located. The file on the little terminal. But if I think about like printing adventures. Yeah, I said they sent me an email today that's like, how was the show? And I'm like, the show is fantastic.   I mean, I went from as a child using a Rizograph because the school couldn't afford an actual copy machine. My school always had a copy. Yep. To going to Kinko's and trying to Xerox pages from my Dungeons and Dragons Cyclopedia and them stopping being saying I can't violate the copyrights by doing so. It says on the character sheet page, specifically you can copy this one. And they didn't they didn't want nothing to do with it. They turned me away and we're real shitty about it. Public library never actually bothered. You just go nuts. Yeah. Usually we went for copies to that brief era where there were multiple retail places.  Like if I print something at work people don't realize most bodegas in New York still will do like fax machine stuff and print out a thing for you.  The other places in New York. I don't know if people have these and not and not. I haven't seen them in suburbs a lot. But you know that I've seen same day cash checking places. Yeah. Payday loan places which are usually shady. But there's a place that's actually way useful which is the get international credit phone card wire money places. Yeah. Those places very often will do fax machine copying printing all that kind of stuff as well. And those are good places. Thankfully I think I think some of them are also payday loan places then they're bad.  Then I'm not faxing. So I faxed from a bodega in Yonkers. This is just a warning to you. If you buy tickets to a venue you haven't been to before. Double check that it's modern.  Well here's the same same deal right. So we fly a lot right.  So I can buy a ticket on my phone for that bus while I'm waiting for the bus and I can't go to Carnegie Hall a world-class musical institution.  So you know I fly a lot and one thing I've learned is that the consistency with which e-tickets are accepted at airports if you're not flying to or from New York City is so low that you're pretty much got to print shit out. No I you I've not had a problem. You have not flown nearly as much as I have. But what I did have a problem with which is partially just because I didn't fully understand it was I had the passport card that I got way back. I didn't use that flying. I got that when I got my I got that way back when I bought passport card in America basically means this is useless and 99% of all cases where you would want to use. I got it back when I got my passport because I just picked the max option just like I picked the max option for my new driver's license right. So the new so the passport card said you can use this to go to Canada, Mexico and Caribbean Island. Fine print not on a plane. I didn't see that. Not a moron but I was like I can't use this one. They're like no that's for like on a cruise ship or something. Yep. But yeah the passport card is only for boats and land and the they said oh you can use your driver's license or reentry into the US.  There's no point it's all just garbage. Let me use the passport card for everything. How about just we got to get back to those days somehow. If you vote for Scott for president I will improve relations with Canada so that we don't need that anymore. So once they find out that the big hockey fan is president they'll be all good. So in some news so another problem of flying around the world a lot is that basically everywhere civilized except the United States when you have a credit card it's you can have a chip and pin meaning there's a chip. People in the US have to pin and when you want to use your credit card you have to input the pin math happens to determine it's two-factor authentication essentially. You put in your credit card in the slot which you did learn in the US recently.   If someone steals your credit card they can't go around buying it. But this does not work the same way. So it actually provides real security. So many of you younger people won't know because I learned recently that most people who are younger than us have never even heard of the idea of a cash advance because they're largely disappearing. But basically you only use that in an extreme emergency. Yeah, because their interest rate is like 40%. It's a bad idea. But basically remember they used to send you checks, fake checks well not fake checks but like checks. Real checks that you could just write to people that would just do what people could do that if they wanted to. And the way it would work is your credit card whether you know it or not has a pin. And if you have to put that pin in and it basically acts like a debit card. The point I'm making here is that America relatively recently started forcing everyone to use chips instead of the magstripes. But this was ostensibly for security but they didn't actually implement the pin part of that. They're basically just using the chip instead of the magnet strip. Yes. It's not actually in any way more secure. And in fact credit card fraud appears to have not dropped at all. Nope. And even funnier a lot of Americans who don't travel like in Europe as much as I do will go to Europe and try to use their credit card.  Like most things the government does that are anti it's usually because someone is paying the representatives to go against common sense and it's like a lot of the times it's just plain old visible like oh yeah that oil company is paying them to deny climate change obviously right. But in this case it's criminals so that's the ones that they don't make so obvious but I'm pretty sure I'll be willing to bet that credit card fraud profiteers are definitely paying to make sure the U.S. does not implement chip end pin. I don't know who's paying to me. But you know I was crazy than actual crazy conspiracies that crazy people believe you know I'd suspect more all the companies that issue credit cards in the U.S. don't want to have to update their systems because you have to they already just updated them. Yeah and have to place I go in New York still use the mag swipe so only the only place I actually saw the mag swipe even though I was just talking good about them for letting me use my Apple if you want to buy no if you want to buy anything or something you got to use the swipe. Yeah. Like it's like a 19 whatever. So not only the ships basically do nothing and they're not actually the chip and pin that the rest of the world uses.  Nobody seems to know what happened was they changed the law so that if you were a merchant and you didn't update your system that you would now be liable for any you know fraudulent like charge backs and stuff whereas otherwise you know Visa MasterCard the bank or whoever would be liable and that would encourage you to update your shit because otherwise if anything happens in those transactions you're in big duty. Yeah. And I'm not actually sure what the status of all credit cards are getting stolen. I didn't know where I heard it from but the main way credit cards are getting stolen is actually really sad and it's simply just malware on the point of sale systems that are all basically running windows right. It's like you go swipe your credit card into a Windows machine like oh that terminal thing at the FedEx because it's very someone put some spyware cards and I have a set of credit cards that are only ever used online and are never used in person and I have another set of credit cards that are only ever used in person and never used online. I only have one credit card used for everything. Yeah. Well I won. I kept my old credit card because having that ancient line of credit I have two ancient credit cards with zero that I just never use but they're not I keep them from expiring them ever because you're not buying from any shady ass websites you're only buying from places with nice green locks in the corner and you know it's the right domain and you know you're not. Meanwhile my in person credit card has been compromised like six times and I'm pretty sure every one of those times was the result of a shitty hotel. I go into hotels in my credit card and having a problem. Yeah. Well it was funny even in a US credit card I was actually concerned about that on the tropical. Yeah basically mean nothing but I check my statement every balance every month and nothing shady so you got any news what was my news the ridiculous foldable right. So so this is something where the core idea is a good idea and that is a phone that folds we've had phones that folded my first phone the Motorola StarTac great phone yeah flip phones which is great because you can fit it in your pocket but then when you need to be bigger you unfold it and now you have a large device that's easy to use but then when you want to put it away and not use it it magically becomes smaller the last phone I had that did that was the Palm Free where you can flip out the iPhone like the new iPhone X I forget if the S or R is the bigger one but the biggest iPhone the newest but it's too damn big but you know what if that sucker folded in half I'd buy that right away maybe even for like $800 not $1000 but $800 right because like damn that would fit in my pocket if it folded in half and the main reason why unfold it it's great the main reason why I don't want a big phone is that I can't fit it in my pocket that's right that's the reason number one so folding solves all these problems so because you can fold every part of the computer we have laptops that fold the problem is if you have a phone the part that can't fold is the screen and that's the only part that needs to be big for most people that are the battery right so I mean we can make a folding phone where the screen's on half of it like a laptop like a blackberry with a hinge in the middle fuck that garbage right we need to make the screen itself somehow fold we don't want to have like a DS with these two screens with a blank space in the middle the screen itself folds they've been working on this technology for a long time and Samsung has apparently succeeded they want to make this phone and this phone looks like fucking even worse than iPhone 1 it is way thick and chunky way janky the most telling phone the rumor is that they want to charge $1,700 for this someone zoomed in on how thick it is like he's holding it in his hand when it's folded it's so thick that defeats the purpose it's like a ham sandwich I have eaten sandwiches that were thinner than this fucking phone based on this picture at least it's smaller than a de vele sandwich I really want a de vele sandwich right now oh my god I'm hungry already maybe I'll pick up a bread and some stuff you said those words anyway like a primal part of my I'm salivating now same okay so the point is that's the one thing I can't get to New York I'm rich and I live in New York and I can't get a goddamn de vele sandwich I could go to that other place in a story of people talking anyway it's garbage no one's paying $700 for this but I cannot one I cannot wait if my current phone could fold over forward and turn into a tiny square that's one thing this is like if my phone were just twice as big yeah I'm hoping though and the square aspect ratio what the hell the fact that they have succeeded at this though means I'm really hoping that in five-ish plus years right when Apple makes folding phone that I have an awesome thin as hell folding phone and I'll buy the second generation of folding phone and it'll be sweet as hell here's my problem I know what's going to happen the folding phones are going to be in their folded state still too big because the market for this is people who want phones that are way too big if I wait for the second generation of folding Apple phone it will not be too big but then it'll get too big in the later versions and I'll keep that one so we'll see I'll stick with the iPhone F7 look at this screen like who needs a screen that's just wider like that the thing okay so if this thing wasn't thick if it was nice and thin that would be okay then it would actually be okay because you wouldn't have a tablet it would be your phone and your tablet true but most people this thing and that's it most people who want a big phone seem to want it so that they can watch movies on it even at $1,700 it's cheaper than a phone and a tablet what I don't see here is what the actual resolution is of this screen not good enough because I mean it doesn't say you gotta have to obviously not okay so it is a oh good God okay Samsung Fold is a tiny four point display with a 19 blah blah blah the unfolded mode is a 7.3 inch 21 52 by 15 36 that's okay that's alright that's okay yeah yeah I'm actually surprised that they're going with this instead of waiting one more generation I think they have to push it out to make it there's always that first right remember before the iPhone there was that Motorola iTunes phone yeah people don't remember that thing right at all right so there's always has to be the one janky piece of crap before the first real thing so I'm not going to link to this article from my last news cause it's on Forbes and if you don't know the deal with Forbes there's a reason why Forbes used to be a magazine that was a real magazine even though the guy who runs it is like a piece of shit the guy named Forbes is a piece of shit but Forbes now use a website like a real magazine but now basically anyone can write a Forbes article almost and then whoever writes the article will go around trying to post it everywhere on the internet cause they get paid and they get more clicks and stuff and so just cause something's on Forbes it sort of lends it this credibility of being in a real magazine mostly cause and I run into a lot of people who don't realize Forbes change their business it may as well just be a fucking blog if it's on Forbes it might as well be a company that does delivery services within cities but the point it makes and like the data it talks about is pretty interesting if true if it's not just cherry pig data to support that company's business model yeah but the point it makes is that in most major cities transit is where the like bicycles are literally the fastest and most reliable way to get around almost any major city that is true which is 100% true in my experience like if I'm going it's obviously faster than walking you cannot walk faster than a bike it is faster than taking the subway even if I'm going like way out into Brooklyn from here depending on the distance right so it's like an ultra long distance no it's not faster but it also depends on where you're going cause sometimes if I go into somewhere like if I go to Brooklyn the subway to Brooklyn is either like three transfers and a G and then versus a straight shot it's like I can basically take a super shortcut with the bicycle and have to go way fast to go into Manhattan and come back and or even like far rock away it takes about the same amount of time to bike there as it does to take the subway there well the subway to get to there is very far take the A train it's not close rock away it's far rock away it's named that because it's farther than regular rock away yep it's not named that for any other reason it's actually talking about the distance it's far but it's something just think about that stat cause a lot of people if you have to rank the ways to get around the city in terms of how efficient and fast they actually are well everyone knows I mean it's proven a long time ago that a bicycle is the most efficient form of transportation period ever conceived in terms of energy per going again until you get too long like very long distances or like use cases and all this nonsense if there was friction in space then you could use a bicycle but there is some economic evidence of this too like a secondary set of evidence in the sense that I'm not again I won't say the name of the company in this article but pretty much all the deliveries in New York City like even deliveries of kind of big stuff like anything that isn't UPS FedEx is coming via bike like bike messengers have exploded again to the point that like there's a million of these bikes around the city both electric and not electric and I think the only reason UPS FedEx doesn't use say cargo bikes to deploy like all the packages small enough to go on a cargo bike is because they would need so many riders they could use money even though each individual package would be delivered more energy efficiently it's more speedily so there's something to think about there's a reason why people move to the city there are places where they do use bikes though like UPS and whatnot plus now that New York like the city bikes in New York have been such a big success that they are like they are such an important part of the transit system in the daily commute now that like a city bike outage is almost as bad as certain kinds of subway outages oh there's like 15 people watching alright go away oh I didn't talk about the sand I'll save that for another time that's fine you'll forget I won't forget because it's so there's a good picture on that article I'll remember just water hitting a rock no it's a dead guy in sand oh that's not good because yeah people are dying because of this there's a sand mafia okay oh that's what yeah I've encountered actually I encountered a little bit of this last time I was in India there was a thing I'll save it for the show people were poaching sand people were poaching rocks and sand and it was a fascinating thing I encountered first the ivory then the copper then the sand first you get the ivory well then you get the copper and then anyway so it happens when you use all the resources on earth yeah stop fucking shit up but anyway things of the day so I'd bigclive.com is a pretty great YouTube channel I've linked to occasionally where he'll basically buy like dodgy ass Chinese bootleg electronics on eBay and take it apart and explain why it's so dangerous and terrifying but his channel's great and he goes into all this stuff but this one is pretty unique because I had never conceived that such an item existed and apparently these are commonly used outside of the United States and essentially this device even if it works as intended is terrifyingly dangerous it is a USB flash burning pen for ladies and what it is used for is to use high voltage burning for people to burn moles off of themselves oh I could use that or burn skin tags off basically I have a mole yeah so you could buy this you could buy this thing on eBay and even that expensive charging with USB and burn the shit out of yourself wouldn't that fucking hurt yes I'm not gonna do it then and this video is great because he just he burns himself with it can I use the burn a mole off of you uh no so just the fact that this is a consumer item then I get all the fun of mole removal without the pain part yeah it even comes with dire warnings about not to use it on like areas of skin larger than a certain amount and the area that they mention as being the line between safe and not safe is in my personal opinion way too big of an area to burn yourself on purpose mm-hmm so and the funniest part is the thing doesn't even actually work and it keeps crashing crashing because it's just it's a Chinese like bootleg piece of shit and even if it works it's intended to burn you with an electrified needle couldn't you just use a wood burning laser or something uh no this burns a different way like a laser cutter the video is like 15 minutes you didn't see all the detail but warning he uses it to burn a callus off of his hand because do you want to see how it works why don't you use it to just burn piece of wood uh I could do that too I knew that thing so what do you got so uh here's a twitter account story board art b o r e d like your board but it's all one word oh cute it's some animator of some kind I don't think you even I don't know who this person is because someone retweeted them if they're a bad person which it doesn't they don't appear to be a bad person yeah I've occasionally retweeted something and later found out oh cute Nintendo comic oh a Nazi made that's the exact one I was thinking of that fucking Nintendo comic but anyway this person doesn't appear to be a bad person and they're an animator artist of some kind and here is the tweet art thread my 10 year old brother wrote a kids book and I drew the pictures for it it's like an X cop story right it turned out so funny that we're actually gonna get it made into physical books for us and some friends so not for you listeners it's how many posts is this one two three four five six seven there are seven tweets in a thread and each one has four pictures except for the last one which only has two pictures and you just go through the pictures one by one and that's the whole children's story book that is very well illustrated and it appears to be colored in by someone who's using crayon but is also really good at crayon or making a Photoshop brush that looks exactly like a crayon and it's an excellent children's book it's not on the level of I want my hat back but it is excellent and entertaining for all ages even if you are 90 or 9 pretty cute in a minute moment the book club book is Space Odyssey 2001 the book we'll read it soon we're also gonna be live I noticed the other day that you know because that the film struck websites going down but it's not down yet it's here till later in the month and 2010 was on there so I was at your book because I follow instructions yeah it's like the one rule also we will be live a packs and plug doing learning win Puerto Rico I just mostly finish the slides for that and all I will say is the production values are off the charts and it's gonna be a great panel you did not do the strategy section no I didn't I also made some edits in your rule out of a thing because I was in a hurry I also I think some other things also yeah I also I found a rules clarification that we had we never knew about this rule what rule is I'll share it later and we've never followed it but I'm confident it never came up okay so it's one of those situations but this will be a good panel and then also the 40 tabletop games you must play the advanced version for the tabletop con we can assume it is so this will be a good time also PAX South is coming up PAX East is coming up I wonder if the PAX East badges are sold out yet that's a good question because Saturday's sold the fuck out yeah they've already went on sale and no only Saturday's sold out all other days are very available for PAX East hotels might not be available but if you want to go to PAX East and on any day but Saturday you can just go and you can maybe get a Saturday badge in the secondary market or something and enforcer are live so if you didn't know East is the con that like me and Scott enforce we're there enforce a night shift every year enforcing it East kind of makes East way shittier yep East I mean East is great but it is the worst PAX by far I'm saying you know I often talk about things being like the least smelly poop and that's when everything sucks but this thing sucks a little less East is like a scratched up piece of platinum it's like it's like okay it's not it's just oh no it's like I got a platinum piece a gold piece and then East is like the electron piece like that's still worth something yeah that's still great that's still great it's just it's slightly imperfect compared to the other greats especially because oh no I only got a Donatello piece of artwork and not a van go I mean honestly the only problems with PAX East are one Boston yeah like Boston doesn't have enough building the building is a big rectangle actually literally every problem with PAX East is the direct fault of the city of Boston and not PAX yeah like 100% so but it's still fun and we'll be there it's gonna be awesome do do do so yeah we were trying to come up with the Monday shows we do and I realize we almost just did a show on printing I feel like we might be able to do something on that maybe one is that we're not really learning technologies it's not like to do a show it's like we could just read Wikipedia to you but that's stupid yeah we need to know something so that we can talk about it for 20, 30 whatever minutes well another like minor problem but we don't learn new technologies that much and there aren't new ones to learn that work I'm doing like for example there's new there's a couple of new routing protocols I'm gonna say new I mean from like 2012, 2013 yeah you're not working in routing though yeah I don't configure routers anymore so while I know what those routing protocols do on a high level I could it's not like OSPF where I can start drawing the details right now for you and if I tell you what I know about these new routing protocols that you will learn less than like there's even there's even a new non-routable range in IPv4 for a specific kind of net right and things some things I do learn are so incredibly specific and narrow that they're not really appropriate for a podcast for the audience that's you know not someone like I could talk about like a specific function in a specific library and it's like anyone who's not using that library doesn't give any shits it's not something to talk about right I can't move from the code my own engineers right that I work on a very high business oriented level now which is one not interesting most of you and two I can't talk about what I'm doing like I can't just talk about it the second reason it's hard to come with Monday episodes is because even though technological change is moving at a more rapid pace than at any point in history right in terms of actual computers consumer electronics developments have that are that are significant and meaningful and episode worthy have decreased significantly in recent history well there's a few caveats to that though like number one a lot of the things we would previously have talked about on a Monday show around technology in the modern era much more appropriately fit in like a Thursday show because it's more about the society around the use of the technology and we've started to make that distinction more often than we used to but one of it is that a lot of the advances in technology while they are transformative to like cell phones like battery technology and all that and while they are moving pretty quick the gains from those are being basically eaten by other evolving aspects of technology like batteries got bigger but also we're doing more with the devices so batteries don't actually last longer right and it's like a lot of the improvements to something it's like okay something was made faster it's like okay like there's a new set of letters now they are simplifying it they're gonna be like Wi-Fi v6 Dude! 802.11 g is like literally fast enough for everything I do in my house right but the point is I don't know what the differences between them are only that they're faster it's still Wi-Fi you don't notice any difference as a user there are there are some differences around how the signals interact such that you're gonna have more density of access points and signals like in a connection center How can you possibly get a GeekNines episode a new enough device and somehow they link up. Well here's it. But it's way it's faster than your internet connection is. You won't notice. Well that's it. The impact of a lot of the fast moving technology impacts like like it's multiple steps removed from the consumer use case like ISPs will benefit from some of these changes. But you using your phone connecting to a Wi-Fi at home there is literally no meaningful difference to you for the foreseeable future because look live streaming six megabit up. That's all I need to live stream to YouTube. They wouldn't even take more than that. At least for what I'm doing. Also even you know they used to be this thing more is law where they were like OK every two years transistor density will double. Right. And it's like well actually we're sort of slower than that. It's more like three years at this point. And we're not seeing even even things getting faster are not getting faster as fast as they were five six seven years ago Intel specifically who's like his number one in terms of consumer chip still kind of they've been working on this 10 nanometer process which means that transistors are 10 nanometers in size supposedly and they sort of have fucked that up repeatedly and have missed all the deadlines and it was supposed to be out this year and this year is almost over.  And this is why they're in trouble right now. Well that's why you see things like Apple and Nvidia really gaining on them. Apple making its own chips for a lot of its machines and devices and video maybe making a CPU. They haven't officially announced that but well of course there's a common. There's another sort of subtle thing going on there is that when we were talking a lot about computers one like buying a lot more consumer like computer shit and building computers more often. But two the metrics of performance were much more straightforward and 800 megahertz chip versus a gigahertz chip. The actual impact on your use of a computer for even simple things was noticeable to a human. You can sit at the two different computers running the same software otherwise configured identically and one of them would be obviously faster. You would double click on an application. It would appear sooner. Right. You would run a game. You would get one of them would run smoothly and one of them have lag and not have enough FPS. Yep. But now it is like my current computer is running at 4.5 gigahertz. It's got four cores for most games. Even if you crank the settings up pretty high. It's like unless you got like a four or five case screen and really crank it up. You won't you'll get the full 60 frames whether you got a 10 60 or a 10 80 or an 11 80. Right. So for gaming just regular PC usage. If not for the fact that I edit 4K video. There is literally no performance difference between my current crazy powerful computer and the one I replaced it with that was like five years old. Yep. Like literally no difference. The only thing that's ever used all this computing capability of this modern computer I have is doing complex effects that can't be done in the GPU on 4K video. Like that is the only thing that uses the CPU. Right. And even like cell phones it's even worse. Like I don't think I have noticed a performance difference in any cell phone I've bought in like six years. I literally don't even care what chip is in my cell phone. No it used to be that like the first few iPhones I had 3G 4 right noticeably kind of slow compared to the newer phones. But once we got to six seven it's like oh actually this is just perfectly fine. And the new phone if I went to the Apple store the new phone doesn't feel any faster than iPhone 7. Yep. It's the last phone I had that felt slow was my what that like LG something for. It was so long ago it's ancient history. Right. So it's not just speed. Right. Is that meaningful. Other kinds of advancements haven't really been happening recently in like the past couple two or three years. Right. It's like all right. We had like we were talking about this earlier. We got phones with a full screen on the front. And today we still have phones with a full screen on the front. We went from not having any tablets to like here are tablets. They're all screen. Right. It's like what meaningful you know big developments that are in terms of like the actual features and capabilities of devices. Consumer electronics and computers are meaningfully different from how they were a few years ago. Well meaningful is complicated because that could be very contextual based on like what I'm saying. I would say I'd use a different word. I think transformative. Right. Where are the changes where as like everyone who uses the technology or a wide body of those people fundamentally change the way they interact with that technology. The clothes I could find is like a folding phone. That's the closest thing I could find. It's not it's not going to be good for us. If it's ever good in this in the span of like our lives. What were the transformative technology moments like going well when computers suddenly had a hard drive in them instead of always needing a floppy disk to be stopped in a penny. I'm like the pennies compared to the 486 color screen on the computer. Well having a mouse that went. The difference between a 386 and a 486 like literally changed the world for me going from a modem to a modem that actually was fast enough to load a web page. Not a dial up modem. Yep. Oh computers that don't actually have good sound to a sound card that you can just buy. Wi-Fi is now a thing and you don't have to always have some sort of wire USB.  I remember when is that even support USB. You have a battery. You have a laptop. You can take the computer with you somewhere that's not a desk.  Yeah. We seen a lot when I was in high school. We had a digital camera. The entire school shared cameras. You put a floppy disk in the digital camera was not the thing until like it's actually shockingly recent. Like even early 2000s it was still film camera even though digital camera was a thing. Yeah. It was the kind where you put like a CDRW or a floppy disk into the camera until like you know two thousand three four or five maybe. Yeah. You start they had a real digital camera with compact flash card. Right. That came later. But now like Internet access like broadband at least like forget access because there are parts of the world and especially because we're talking about like just sort of our experiences in America where people don't have broadband. But broadband getting faster doesn't benefit the vast majority of users of broadband. They're going to use it the same way they use it today. But it drastically affects people who don't have broadband who suddenly need it. I read an article recently about I read that same article. Yeah. Basic kids who live in rural places where there's no broadband at all can't do homework and they go to the near the school because the school has Internet and they sit in like the parking lot using the school's Wi-Fi to do their homework. Yeah. Let's try to step back. What was the last technology improvement that was transformative in our lives because I'm hard pressed to think of anything other than like the complete sweet modern live streaming technology. I've had I've had the same sort of device loadout for like a significant period of time. I'm still using the same laptop from 2009 and it plays six. Right. It's like I had upgrades to devices but like what transformative change was there between my iPad Pro and my mini iPad other than it's bigger and faster. Yeah. Nothing. Right. It has a has a stylist. Styles ain't new. Like I bought a fancy camcorder to use for Gignite stuff like recently. That camcorder is you know a thing but 4K video is already like four years old. Maybe four or five years old. So the fancy camcorder I bought is just cheaper because of like improvements in process and technology. It's not better than camcorders I could have gotten previously. It's just cheaper and smaller but I'm going to use it the exact same way. I would use one of those other ones if I could have afforded it. Yeah. Let's see. The GH4 which I had not the GH5 was like basically the first prosumer camera that had like meaningful 4K recording. Yeah. Right. Video recording and it came out in we've been using that to record Gignite panels for a while. Yeah. Long time. 2014. Yes. I was right. Like yeah. Four or five years. Right. Wow. 2014. It's only 28 May 2014. Yeah. It's 2018. Here's one. Remember. A video is four years old already. But digital video cameras that just work and encode things in reasonable formats. Like we tried to record some Gignite panels with that flip camera and those videos were encoded badly to the point that you could not sink them like go pros are a thing now but you know the GoPro has basically been perfect since like the GoPro four ish. Yeah. I think I have the five is the seven out now. Yeah. A new GoPro came. I'm thinking about not really. I think those 4K 60 instead of 30 maybe. I don't know. I'm thinking about getting a last gen GoPro because I have a GoPro like G2 that I think I gave away. Yeah. I think the one I have if you have that one you're good. You don't need a newer one. Yeah. And we only need one because I need that top down view if we're doing like panel streaming and stuff like it's like there's been advancements in the drone department but that's not something we can use. Well it's still hobbyist. It's not transformative. It's been a lot of drone coupled with camera has been transformative for video and audio and like low budget film like video professionals. A drone is like now standard equipment. Yeah. Look at it. Look at a helicopter tracking shot. Look at how many YouTube videos now have aerial shots overhead shots. Yeah. That is transformative drone camera drones. I will give that is a transformative technology. Look how many things you watch now have like some drone footage. I basically like that drone chasing the poor baby bear. Usually it's like you know scenery like to sort of set a scene. Yeah. But seriously look at a tracking shot from a helicopter from the like late 80s compared to like a drone I could buy with the cash in my desk right now. Like seriously. I just not allowed to fly it anywhere near here. If I lived in the woods and I would use a drone more I would get one. Yeah when we went to the only reason I not droning is because I'm in a city and it's illegal to use it everywhere. If you do it anyway do the right. I'm not going to mess around. I showed up to the Rangers 5K.  We will arrest you. There's one place that you can fly them because next to the Meadow pond there's a little area where you're allowed to fly like model helicopter. You can fly your drone right there in that spot because it's no different than a model plan your helicopter. Yep. I think the only other thing I can say that's been transformative is like in relative recent history we hit these sizes of solid state drives to where you can have just solid state drives and be fine.  The new iPad Pro has an option for one terabyte of storage which I think is enough. I mean I have a one terabyte SSD like PCIX SD cards that I put into my camera are hundred and twenty eight gig SD cards. I can't have a one edit those on a one hundred and twenty eight gig iPad. I need especially when a panel fills up the card. But if I had the one terabyte iPad I can now record video put it on the iPad upload and edit which I did on this iPad. It was just very difficult so the new one will now make that a possibility. No but not much.  Cloud storage solutions for consumers are more expensive and less and more encumbered than they used to be. Well because the economy of well because yeah that will also because the business model there was a loss leader and that doesn't scale. It's because people don't back up. If you will backed up as much as they should then it would work. The other thing is that people are now the instead of paying for like what was that one. The backup solution that was really popular carbon. I was that was the one that had a flat fee for like unlimited backup carbonite right. People now don't need carbonite because they just pay Apple like five bucks a month or Google Drive. That's where the money's going. Yeah. For the and that's your automatic automatic back especially if you don't have a desktop computer or like a for real laptop. You're just living in an Apple world. Even if you do you could they both have desktop backup solution. Yeah. Because not everyone's weird like me or I need like a 40 terabyte NAS up there for people. Most people are not backing up a huge bunch of video they record. Yeah. They're just backing up their photos in their contacts and their few documents. I think any any one and any at any one pack. If I did not have video to back up or many many years of raw photos. Yeah. I could get away with just Google Drive or just I could do the raw wave Geek Nights archive would fit on like a USB stick. Yeah. Like I could just back. I could just put that in like 20 USB sticks and just scatter them around the earth as my backup anyway. Now there are some sort of in terms of soft driving cars I think will be the next like really transformative even that we've already discussed in the death and also the only news would be they're finally being sold. Well I think there's more to discuss. They finally writing laws about them. This is what they say. Let's discuss their finer points. Well also the technology isn't actually there yet. It's getting it's getting. But yeah we've you know I think another problem is that if you look at like software right. We've sort of figured out all the algorithms we've figured out all the methodologies. There hasn't been a lot of movement there. Right. There is movement and machine learning and some transformative things are happening there. But these are not things that are being harnessed directly by you. Yeah.   Yeah. Right.  That's right. So it's like great.  Yeah.  Some stuff is getting close like the next gen of VR that Oculus Go is a big step toward mass market compatibility VR. The current gen of VR is like already been so many years. It's like it's like none of this is what's new in 2018. Oculus Go. No. I'm saying specifically like anything was new in 2018. Right. Oculus Go. That's actually a pretty what's it called. Let's go. Oh that's the one where it's with the battery in it. Yeah. It's it doesn't need a computer. It's got tethered and it doesn't need sensors. I remember that. That should have been a news when it was. I was. Yeah. We should talk about it.  But then like no one else talked about it. I know it like it was a news and then it's like I haven't heard from it since because it's like I feel like that hype train should have gone because basically that honestly as someone who hates all the VR and is poo poo it. That has everything going for it.   Like this is the kind of VR I would just buy for my mom or dad and they will not buy it until it's smaller on my face. Yeah. Otherwise it's like whoa that is a great advancement. Great great idea. Good job. Yeah. That is actually huge and makes it way better. The only reason I'm not going to get it is because I have the legit Oculus which is better still. I'm just waiting for it to be small enough on my face. So they make Oculus go that doesn't stick out for my face so much. See I don't know about sticking out from the face. AR technology is not anywhere near there. Well it's AR technology is getting very advanced. A lot of people are investing in it. But it's only getting very advanced in showrooms and controlled situations. It's like but it's not that useful and it's like the cases where it would be useful.  I would argue has not been transformative at all but all the investors are desperately trying to make it transformative.  Yeah. People have those in their house and that's their thing. They use it and it works right and it's good. But I'm just most people I think are not in the scenario where that's a thing. It's like I have a stereo. You know it's like if I had like a room in a house that was far away from all computers or something I might need one or so I don't know. Well I mean I I would use one in the kitchen but what I found is that in my kitchen if I had a kitchen that was a separate room that was far away from all of the rooms. But I found in practice even like trying to use all these different voice things that don't quite. They're not intuitive enough to do the thing I actually need and it is faster to just pull out my phone and look something up. The other thing is that I just really despite and maybe it's because I'm old but even if no one's around I'm self-conscious about talking to a computer and if you're like computer please do X and it just happens. If anyone is around I'm not talking to a computer but I think if the computer was so intelligent like a person that then well for example if right now I was like I wouldn't feel bad about it. Computer said preheat the oven to 425 like while I'm sitting here but in the current state of things I don't trust any Internet of things to have any ability to set the temperature on anything in my apartment. If I say computer set preheat the oven to 425 and it said now preheating oven to 425 I would have to go look at the oven to make sure. Yeah I wouldn't trust it. I also I don't want to be slain in the middle of the night and suddenly here off in the distance is preheating oven to 550 because someone hacked into my apartment is trying to kill me. So yeah that killed an episode I think. Right but we need ideas for the next Monday episode. Tell us what we should do the Monday show on. Please invent something new or find something that actually have a reason to learn that is a significant item that I could talk about for the forum thread for this episode. Tell us what we should do a Monday show on. We're going to pick the best of those ideas even if it's shitty and we'll do the show on it. Great. So put some good stuff in there.


joining us today as we kick off the distributed teams track at RailsConf. My name is Maria Gutierrez. I am VP of engineering at FreeAgent. At FreeAgent for over 10 years, we've been building accountancy software using Ruby on Rails that puts freelancers and small businesses in control of their finances. Our head office is in beautiful Edinburgh, Scotland, but about 25% of our engineering team works from home in other parts of the UK. I'm Glenn Vanderberg. I'm VP of engineering at First. We use predictive analytics and Rails to help real estate agents make more effective use of their marketing time and dollars. Our company is located in Durham, North Carolina, but I work from home in Dallas and about one third of our company works remotely. The two of us recently spent five years as colleagues helping to manage a large widely distributed software development team at Living Social. So Living Social started with offices in Washington, D.C., that was our head office, but it grew in open engineering offices in Boulder and Portland, but still the majority of the engineering team, which grew up to 200 people at one point, we're working from home from all over the US, but also in the UK, Mexico, Brazil, and eventually China, India, and Australia. Between us, we've been a part of several distributed teams for the past 11 years, including today at FreeAgent and First. While working together at Living Social, we found that we shared a passion for understanding how to do distributed teams well. We're strong advocates of such teams, and we both think that the distributed teams we've been a part of have been some of the best teams we've ever experienced. But when we say things like that, a lot of people seem to hear things like this. We'll hire some senior engineers and we'll figure it out, or distributed teams are just as good as co-located teams in exactly the same ways, or even it'll be easy. So those things are not what we mean when we say that distributed teams are a good idea or a great choice for your business. None of those statements are true, and they don't have to be true for distributed teams to be a good idea. There are also plenty of people who think distributed teams are a bad idea, and they make statements like these from executives at Zarely, IBM, and Yahoo. We also believe that these statements are false, and they miss the point that distributed teams have their own distinct kinds of benefits. In these cases, what we see is a lack of willingness or commitment to do what needs to be done to succeed. And that is okay if that's the way a company wants to run their business. One size doesn't fit for everybody, doesn't fit all. But today we are going to talk about some of the lessons we've learned over the years. We've made a lot of mistakes along the way. But whether you are an engineer, a manager, or a senior leader in your company, we hope this talk will help you to avoid repeating some of those mistakes, and will help you take advantage of the benefits distributed teams provide, and hopefully avoid the same path that some companies like Yahoo or IBM took, and others kind of building a distributed team and then having to take that benefit away. If you are an engineer or an individual contributor, some of these things might not seem immediately applicable to you, but as a remote team member, you bear some of the responsibility for making a distributed team successful through your own behavior. And you can influence your management and help them understand the challenges they're facing. And if you're searching for a new remote position, you can ask the right questions to find a team that is set up for success. Part one, make a commitment. Choosing this path requires commitment. Half-hearted efforts will result in a worse experience rather than a better one. Company leadership has to support a distributed team strategy. In this section, we'll talk about things that will test a team's commitment and show you some of the answers that we've found so that you'll be prepared at the start when you're beginning going down this path along the way as you face challenges and later when the strategy is questioned by new managers, executives or investors. And you start by investing in the basics and the basics is organizational culture. But how do you build company culture when you are not working shoulder to shoulder? A lot of people ask that question. A lot of people are very skeptical about this but distributed teams can also have a great culture. It will just be a little bit different.  Kind of the space certainly contributes to the team environment but it does not build good culture. We have amazing offices at ThreeAgent but that is not what makes good culture for us. You can have the best offices, you can have people working shoulder to shoulder and still have a very toxic culture. So to us, culture is all about the people, all of you, kind of your common goals, your common values and also their respect for each other. So it's caring about the success of your customers and it's caring about the success of your colleagues and their wellbeing. In fact, the two companies that have worked with the stronger cultures have fully embraced distributed teams. In the case of Living Social, their culture has far outlived the longevity of the team. So most of the people we used to work with are still in touch every single day supporting and caring for each other long after they've left the company. Another basic commitment is to invest in the best tools that your company can afford. Better tools make communications easy. Some simple things have really big payoffs, good computers with quality cameras, headsets, easy to use communication software for chat video documentation, et cetera. Start there and then pay attention to how well those tools are meeting your needs. Make sure everyone that needs them has access and knows how to use them and help people who are having difficulties. If your engineering team has access to Slack and Jira, but no one else in the business does, it will be difficult for them to collaborate successfully. At First and FreeAgent, where we work, every single person in the company uses the same tools. Consider that case, that cost when making tool choices. For example, remote pairing using SSH and Tmux works great for us nerds, but it leaves out less technical team members like product managers and designers. But a tool like Screen Hero can be more inclusive. You need a critical mass of remote developers. If you just have one or two remote people on a larger team, that builds friction and resentment that comes from having special snowflakes that get special treatment. If you don't have a critical mass of remote people, they won't have a sufficient voice in the culture building process. What constitutes critical mass? Is it a quarter of the team, a third, even a half? The proper threshold will vary from team to team and it'll actually fluctuate. Once you've made the important changes in work practices and habits, maybe it's not as important to have as many people who are remote. But here's the rule. As long as the remote team members feel like second class citizens, your balance is off. And it doesn't take senior leadership to influence that situation. You can start by helping eliminate the us versus them attitudes between locals and remotes. And terminology is an important part of this. The terms remote and local are alienating and emphasize the distance and the difference. So we started emphasizing the term distributed, which puts people on an equal footing. Some big breakthroughs at Living Social came from individual contributors who started adopting this more inclusive language. But that said, it's quite helpful to have managers and technical leads as well working full-time from home. So one, so that management understands the issues firsthand. And two, so that there's not a perceived glass ceiling for remote workers. And if there is, at least it's very, very high. Because if employees feel that their location is a barrier to their career progression, they will live probably when you need them the most. So everyone in this picture, so Glenn, Ndala's, Evan, Nla and myself in Scotland started as engineers and moved into senior leadership positions over the years, working full-time from home all over the world. But also those in the DC office and the head office, like our VP of engineering, Ryan Owens, work sometimes from home. So Ryan used to do a couple of days a week from home. And I got this picture from one of the engineering all-hands meetings he was hosting from his home office with his amazing Bobblehead collection. It's even more impressive today. And I got him to send me a picture just for, that's the latest version as of yesterday, how that looks like is getting out of control, but it's quite cool. Or Jesse Ling, another of our directors of engineering who was based as well in our DC office, but used to strategize from home every so often with us in her cat form, as you can see. So, but even today, when I propose engineers to become team leads, they question if that is possible given that they work from home. And it should not be an impediment if the right support and commitment is in place for them. Culture grows through shared experiences. That's why it's important for even the office-based employees to work from home occasionally, especially on days when they have meetings, so that they can have the same experience as the home-based team members. Eventually, the whole team needs to work in the same style, whether they're local or remote. And this is another place where individual team members helped to shape the living social culture by choosing to work in ways that worked for everybody. Likewise, it is important to get the team together face to face, but fight the temptation to use that time to maximize productivity. It doesn't have to all be fun and games either, but the best use of FaceTime for a distributed team is to get to know each other better. That improves empathy and communication and it makes your team more productive even later when they're apart. And finally, you cannot treat remote and inside employees equally, but you can treat them fairly and there's a difference. So each group will have the perks and challenges that the other group doesn't. And as a manager, if you are not vigilant, that can lead to unfairness. Kind of usually that means that you need to be aware of practices or policies that unfairly favor one group of employees over the other and try to find a balance. But as a team member within reason, it's important that you also focus on the unique benefits of your situation. Sometimes we focus more on what we are missing rather than our own privileges and it's important to be aware of the pros and cons of both groups. Once one of my team members who's based on the West Coast was asked to attend a meeting that began at 7 a.m. in his time and as the meeting started, he made a kind of annoyed comment about having to wake up so early. And it was important for him to realize that his commute was from the upstairs bedroom to the basement, but some of the people he was meeting with on the East Coast had had to get up early, get dressed, put on makeup in some cases, brave DC area traffic in order to get to the office by nine for another meeting that they had already had. So it's important that you understand how good you've got it and where the real problems lie and empathize with the other people on the other end of the phone line. Other examples are, for example, important decisions must be made in a setting where all the stakeholders have a voice. So lunchtime at the local restaurant is probably not the best place to have a strategy meeting or an architecture kind of review. It also doesn't mean that you have to limit the social aspect of a team, like just because some people are going to miss out, so local employees still should be able to go for lunch together and enjoy the fact that they are together. But remote employees can also find ways to engage in social events. So at FreeAgent, we have Wednesday's remote coffee where a group of people, if they are free, they just get together, have a coffee or a drink and then just talk for a while. The same that if you were going to the path after work or for lunch. During health and well-being month as well at FreeAgent, we have specific sessions to address the challenges of remote employees so that they can keep healthy because it's different what they might do if they are at home, but if they have to commute to the office every day. Part two, communicate intentionally. The point here is that on a distributed team, communication doesn't just happen by itself. Look, people are great at communicating face to face. So good that it happens automatically in ways that you might not even notice. Think about it, you notice facial expressions and tense postures or smiles, high fives and other signs of success. You notice who's talking together a lot lately or what reference books are appearing on colleagues' desks. All of a sudden, you overhear conversations in the hallway or in the break room and in all of those ways, you implicitly pick up on things that are happening in your team and those things don't just happen by themselves on a distributed team. You have to compensate in at least two ways. You should plan for important changes and decisions to be communicated widely and repeatedly and you should make opportunities for more casual and serendipitous communication to happen through the team. That might all sound like just a lot more work that you have to do, but the casual implicit communication patterns of a co-located team have their problems too. Sometimes important decisions leave out crucial stakeholders. Often, they're not communicated as widely or clearly as they need to be and nearly always the rationale and thought process behind the decision gets lost. Let's face it, every team would benefit from being more thoughtful and deliberate about their communication patterns. And in one respect, it's fairly obvious why communication is vital because on a software team, that's how we get our work done. But there's a less obvious reason and it's because communication is how we build trust within a team and without trust, a team cannot be successful. So Patrick Lenzioni identifies absence of trust as the primary problem with dysfunctional teams. So when we trust each other, we can be vulnerable with each other and when we are vulnerable, we admit our mistakes. We ask for help, we tap into each other's experiences and skills more easily as well. That's why blameless cultures are so important. But all this leads ultimately to making better decisions and delivering better solutions for our customers. But as importantly, when you trust your team, you feel accepted and you are more comfortable and you ultimately enjoy your work more. So as a manager, trying to build a cohesive team or as a remote employee, most of our efforts should focus around building that trust. And trust is important in several directions. So it can be downwards if you are leading a team, kind of with a team that you support, it should be upwards with your manager or other leaders in the company. But as importantly, it should be upwards with your peers. And those are not just other engineers, it's with peers across the whole organization. So I spend a lot of time trying to understand kind of what are the problems of the head of sales? What are the problems that customer services have? What are the problems that marketing has? And I try to make sure that I build those relationships and understand those problems every day. So regular one-on-ones is a good tool for this and an important way to compensate for losing some of that accidental communication that Glen was talking about in the office environment. With a one-on-one, you get a chance to truly get to meet your teammates, your manager, kind of know more about them, kind of their interests, aspirations, issues, and have some life-hearted conversations. And we do this because the better you know the people that you work with, the easier it will be for you to pick up on certain cues. Are they happy? Are they lonely? Are they stuck? Is anything bothering them? And if you are in an office, as we were saying, you probably get those clues from bumping into them in the kitchen or by the lift. But if you don't know about it, you won't be able to address those issues. And there will be people, like you can see here, in your team that don't find it easy to proactively reach out to you or others. Like, for example, Kent Beck. And it's everyone's job, not just manager's jobs, to make sure that everyone in the team is successful. So the takeaway here is that out of sight should never be out of mind, so we need to make sure that we are present in people's minds, hopefully, for the right reasons. We've talked about committing to good tools, but internet-based audio and video tools can be a real challenge. It's worth learning the ins and outs of the tools that your team chooses so that you can help meetings to go smoothly.  Also, whenever you can, prefer video to audio-only conversation. One-on-one, it conveys so much more personality and helps geographically separated people get to know each other better. In meetings, especially when several of the participants are in one room, video is even more beneficial. It helps the remote participants put names to faces and voices. Just seeing facial expressions and lip movement makes voice more intelligible over a noisy audio channel. And even just seeing who the people in the room are looking at makes the flow of a meeting much easier to grasp. And choose the right tool for each situation. I think of communication tools as fitting somewhere along three different axes, synchronous versus asynchronous, low bandwidth versus high, as in text to video, and persistent versus ephemeral. And depending on where a tool fits in that space, they should be used for different purposes. I don't stress about this. Remember, if you choose it, it will be the right tool for the job, trust David. But there's no universal rule. But I find that when you're exploring ideas that aren't well understood, you need people communicating fluidly in real time. In other words, a video conference or an in-person meeting. When asking questions you think others will know the answer to, fire off a message in group chat so that you don't interrupt anybody, the right person can respond, and other people who might benefit from seeing that answer can see it as well. And when communicating important decisions, use a persistent, searchable text-based channel to maximize the spread of the message and minimize ambiguity, possibly supplemented by a recorded or video announcement. Different time zones and different work schedules make syncing up for meetings much more difficult.  Time overlap on a team is desirable so that communication can be more synchronous when possible, try to build teams with compatible time zones, at least three to four hours overlap during the work day. But even time zones aren't all bad. At Living Social, we benefited from having round-the-clock coverage. Maria and others in Europe and Australia saved the sleep of many U.S. engineers when things went wrong during our nighttime. But you should also learn to work in less synchronous ways, write stuff down, circulate proposals for review, solicit feedback, and so on. Getting good at this kind of thing can make your team more effective with less time spent in meetings or blocked waiting on meetings. So another way of building trust is showing your work, so letting people know what you are up to, and being good at communicating and writing is very important in distributed teams, but being remote doesn't mean that you have to give up the stand-ups, retrospectives, demos, planning meetings. There are solutions to run all those things in effective ways in a distributed context, and those are great opportunities to really show your personality and kind of share your interests with your team.  You know, get a little bit creative, because as they say, if there's a will, there's a way, and you can work around those problems. So those team gatherings are really key to building kind of the social aspect of the relationship between team members when they are apart. So Sarah Fleming here at Living Social was incredible at doing just that. Kind of she and others in our team contributed immensely to our culture just by not being afraid of being themselves. So demos in our merchant team at Living Social came with our guest DJs at the beginning and at the end of the demo, and really was a big part of keeping all of us up to speed with what everybody was working on, but also learning and sharing that knowledge and kind of having fun together on a Friday at the end of the day. So if you can do a distributed conference, kind of key note via hangouts like this, you can really do anything. And if you are going to showcase your work, just you can make it memorable as well and fun for everybody. Part three, be clear. Even if you do everything we've already said, it will still cause problems if your team doesn't understand how the distributed team should work. If you're a leader, it's your job to provide that clarity. If you're clear about the goals and plans, the team will help you make it work. If you are not a leader, ask for clarity about these things. These are the areas that we've found demand clear expectations set by the team leadership. The first is about how work is measured and evaluated. One of the good things about distributed teams is that managers have to learn to evaluate productivity based on actual results rather than perceptions of busyness. So set clear expectations about how work is measured and evaluated and review those regularly. It's also likely that in nonfully distributed organizations, there will be some positions that require being in the office. If that is the case, leadership as well needs to be very upfront and clear and explicit about it. And it might be very senior executive roles or it might be more junior or entry-level positions. In occasions, you might decide that you need to have senior engineers in the office to mentor those more junior ones because they know what is the point of asking the more junior people to be in the office if they don't have anybody to learn from. Or it can be a specific roles that require kind of intense collaboration with other people in the company that are not set up as well for distributed work. If most of the business is co-located, which is something that is happening in quite a lot of these companies that are starting to embrace distributed, it starts with engineering, but the rest of the company are not quite ready to work in that way. It's important that engineering has a presence in the office so that they can interact with the rest of the business regularly. It's also very important, and we know that from experience, to know who you can actually hire based on the location. So not having a good understanding of different countries and states, intellectual property, employment, and tax laws can get you in trouble down the line. This is normally not a big issue for big companies that have big legal departments and big HR departments, but that can become a problem for smaller business and quite expensive as well. And it can also be flagged as a risk during investment rounds or IPOs. So acquisitions. So acquisitions, yeah. So it's worth doing it, but kind of look at the implications of bringing people from areas that maybe you haven't hired before. The same goes for your budget. If you are responsible for the money, for the budget, for the team, you need to have a very clear picture of the cost of having a distributed team. So how are you gonna budget for the tools? It's not the same buying tools for five people that for 200 people. Kind of what is, you're always gonna have to be investing the most you can in the best tools that you can so that you can guarantee that communication. And it can get expensive, so you need to be prepared. What about home office setups? Are you going to pay for it? Are you gonna pay for co-working spaces? That's not a right answer. So it's okay to choose not to or to do it, but you need to be prepared and you have to have a clear message for your team. But most importantly, travel for face-to-face kind of basis of the team. And that can get quite expensive. It's normally, again, not a big problem with five people, but what happens when you have 200 engineers that need to kind of all get together in a location and you're based in Washington DC or San Francisco where accommodation is extremely expensive. So it's important that you plan for those things. Budget is normally not a big problem where things go well with a company, but what happens when things don't go so well? We have, unfortunately, some experience with that. And those are the first areas a business looks to cut costs and that can be very damaging for a distributed team. So what I like to do to manage this a little bit of some tips is to set a clear budget per person to travel to head office a number of times a year. So I normally budget at least for four trips, more if it's not kind of too expensive to get to the office. That budget is allocated to the cost of employing somebody rather than being part of the travel budget so that if then we decide to get travel budget that doesn't affect kind of the money that is available to bring those people into the office. So when we hire people remotely, we account for that expense as just the cost of hiring somebody. Also think about your strategy to set salaries depending on location. There's no one perfect formula, but think about it and decide what works for you. I like to have a common bond across everybody and then have a specific adjustments based on location. For example, for expensive location like London we'll pay a premium at 20% from what we pay in Edinburgh. So that if people happen to move, that will happen, then you know how you can adjust the salary accordingly. Because it's a little bit unfair if you're paying a lot more money for somebody in London and then they decide to move to Edinburgh and they keep the same salary and suddenly you have a team with completely unequal salaries in the same location. So it's important to do your homework because people will move about and they'll move home and go to other locations. And companies finally need to start setting those clear expectations during the recruiting process so that people know what they're signing up for. And if you are not in a leadership position, what you can do here is when you decide to join a distributed team, ask some of those questions proactively during the interview process so that you know what you're actually signing up for. And we have some examples here. So for example, you could ask how is performance managed? Who works from home? Are there any roles not suitable for working from home? Are the people, other people employed in this same state as me or this country? Does my compensation change if I move between states or between countries? So what tools work best for retrospectives or team meetings? Do you actually do those things with remote people? How often are you gonna want me to travel to the head office or to meet with other team members in person? So the key here is to get as much clarity as possible during the interview process so that you know what you're actually signing up for. So we've been talking for a while now about all of the challenges you'll face and we've been showing you some of our battle scars. But we are fans of distributed teams and we wanna close on a more positive note. We'll conclude by telling you what we love about this kind of team and what you'll get out of it. Living Social was able to build an extremely talented team that went from 12 to over 100 engineers in less than a year, in large part because we cast a wide geographic net. A distributed team strategy today can be a strategic competitive advantage. That's especially true if your company is located outside a tech center. But it can also be a big win if you're in a tech center. Those cities are usually expensive and there's a lot of competition for good employees. A distributed team can reduce costs even when you factor in travel expenses and increase retention. And even in bad times, there are silver linings. For us at Living Social, it eased the burden of having to do a big layoff. We didn't flood a specific geographic market with a large group of people with similar skills. That made it easier for our team members to find new jobs, not to mention that they all had good remote working skills. One underappreciated benefit of a distributed team is that it can make organizational change easier. Once everyone on the team is working in a distributed style, it's easier to organize teams more dynamically and fit the team structure to the work. For traditional organizations, Conway's law here is a constraint. For a distributed team, it can be a tool. You still need to be careful because you don't want to treat employees like interchangeable parts, but nevertheless that organizational flexibility is an advantage. And as I said when discussing communication strategies, even though that seems like a lot of extra work, every team would benefit from thinking hard and being more deliberate about communication patterns. The work that a distributed team puts into this can produce improvements throughout the larger organization. And finally, a distributed team strategy can potentially help you build a more diverse and engaged team, as long as you're not left-handed, apparently. It is not a silver bullet, but it can be a powerful tool by removing certain barriers and provide extra flexibility for those that really need it. So both at Living Social and at Free Agent, I've seen from surveys and retention figures that remote employees are consistently more engaged with the business. They appreciate the flexibility and they see themselves having longer careers there. So almost seven years ago, and time really flies, so this happened to me. At the time, I was commuting every day to the office in Edinburgh. After a few months of maternity leave, I decided to go back to work and I really, really struggle with the fact that I really wasn't spending hardly any time with my little baby. So my husband and I considered different options. One of them was going part-time, but I really enjoyed my career and I wanted to continue working full-time. It was then that the opportunity to join Living Social Engineering Team working full-time from home came about. So after joining the team, I started spending all mornings with Ethan. I would drop him at daycare about 1 p.m. in the afternoon and then work East Coast hours the rest of the day. My husband was also at the time working from home and he could pick him up at five o'clock when he finished his U.K. hours. We both, during all that time and up to today, have managed to spend a very good part of our lives with Ethan and continue developing our careers. And I am 100% sure that my career would be in a very, very different place today had I not had that opportunity over six years ago. And this is applicable not only to mothers, by all means, it's applicable to anyone that needs that extra flexibility because, for example, they are the family main carers or they have a disability that prevents them from commuting easily to an office or just working effectively in an office. But having the opportunity to work from home by itself is not enough. Kind of without the commitment of my manager and without the commitment of my peers, the rest of the engineers to make it work, I and those that were in the same situation could not have been successful. So it goes without saying, however, that when you are working, it's important that you give full attention to your work, especially with young children. You shouldn't be attempting to be doing both things at the same time. So when my husband and I are both working, we make sure that we have childcare covered. But inevitably, work and family will sometimes mix up and anyone that has ever worked from home knows the drill. I mean, show your hands. So in my first, I'll let you enjoy this, it's priceless. In my first senior leadership meeting, my husband decided that it was a very good idea to walk into our home office after a shower in his dressing gown gown. So as you can imagine, I was kind of mortified, but at the same time, I was so relieved that it hadn't been any worse than that. But, you know, so don't do that, try to avoid it if possible. But sometimes mixing things up is just what the team needs to finish out something. What's your name? Gordon, and what do you want to show them? So this is Ethan. He came home from the school one day whilst we were doing one of those merchant demos. And he had a demo too. I know, he was so proud of his pictures that he wanted to show to everybody. And in that context, it was actually a fun thing for the team to see and kind of gave them a glimpse of my life and who I am. And everyone enjoyed it, as you can see by the chat on the side. And it really helps, those kind of things helps to create a bond kind of within the team. It works in the right context, so I wouldn't recommend you do it during a board meeting, for example. But if it happens, just be gracious about it and handle it with some fun. And the same way, just to close kind of, my manager and peers had a huge influence in my career. Every single one of us here has the power to impact positively and more importantly, negatively, those we work with. So don't underestimate the importance that every policy, every decision, every engagement with each other has on building a company's culture distributed or not. So don't leave things to chance. This talk was conceived and written and mostly rehearsed remotely from Dallas and Edinburgh. And I think we have two or three minutes for questions. So the question is, you wanna get the whole team together face to face, local and remote sometimes.  I can take it. So when we've had some situations like the layoffs at Living Social, we kind of the management team, we had to fly into Washington DC more than anything to spend some time with the Char and kind of to get some guidance and counseling. But obviously we couldn't bring everybody that was gonna be impacted by those situations kind of to the office. So we are still there, we did it through kind of the same way that we do our work every day, hangouts and a call. We try to be sensitive on the time zone so that people waiting to start hearing about kind of what's going on and then they're waiting seven hours or eight hours till it gets to them. So we try to follow kind of as people were waking up to make sure that we talk to the people as quickly as possible, that we got them into a hangout and that we were kind of as sensitive and accommodating and trying to be as empathetic as possible with them. But that is the way that we worked anyway, during normal, a layoff is a big kind of a specific situation but sometimes you have to do as a manager kind of some kind of behavioral issues that you have to address or performance issues and we just make sure that we were all very comfortable with communicating video and be able to address those things successfully. And there's a flip side of that. During one early incident, an employee had to be let go. It wasn't a layoff situation, it was being let go for other reasons. And because of conventional wisdom, right, the hiring manager had him fly to DC and he meant well but he said afterwards the employee said, I've never lost a job before and now I have to go sit in an airport away from my family and my support system and travel home having received this news and it would have been better if you'd done it over video. My advice is always put people first and really think how it impacts them and how can they be best supported when you're gonna share some bad news with them. One more. Anyone? Okay, I guess we answered everybody's questions and that's all. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.


Good morning everyone and welcome. This is Melissa Arma with the stocks. What should I'm doing a review here today of juniper Juniper was a watch for me today and It didn't work. So you can see this here is a large green bar. Actually Every green bar every bar in the 15 minutes green 930 945 10 o'clock 1015 look at this. Wow So what did it do? Let's take a look So first of all a gap down the night before closed in here night before about 27 74 ish That's right. Yep, open then this morning Really a little down a lot. Okay, open at 2490. So here you have it It opened it rallied and I did this I did this and thought it looked like a good short But it didn't have the follow-through held the stop then it looked good Then it looked good, then it looked good, then it looked good and then boom got stopped out here had to stop at 85 Even if you had given it more room it wouldn't have mattered it ended up popping here over 26 but I got taken out in this bar, so I took the loss and Sometimes you will have gaps that do not work in the direction of the gap. This was a good watch though today I do believe this has potential for follow through But it really depends where it closes on the day. Let's just take a look at this This is a big bar here now in this though Really went well over $26. So after we got stopped out, I said leave it. Don't do anything else in it Be done with it. I'm out here. It is. It's a huge huge massive green body bar So every once in a while you will have to take a loss Today I decided though to do a second trade and I made money in the second trade today and We'll go over that next CL was the second watch Which I did not see actually the gap in the morning in the pre-market So I rated the gap after the open after someone in the room put it in the room and did a lane trade in this Actually, this still looks like it's going here. I'm already out of this and it looks like it's going to go to 63 dollars This looks really good So I took the loss in juniper could have stopped. It's been a good week Usually do only one trade a day. I Decided to rate this this rated as a good gap. So when it's set up for the second time, I did it I did not do the first aggressive entry in this and some people still are in this Again, I'm all out, but it looks like it's going to 63 So I didn't get this first entry here. It was boom dropped fell broke. I Was watching the juniper because I didn't see the gap in the morning pre-market. I couldn't have done this That's why it is important to find the gap in the morning This had earnings late and then the volume didn't come in till after 9 o'clock So I missed this didn't see it on the scanner It's a couple people in the room solid and mentioned it later. So then we did it here So we did it here. We had this nice move boom perfect exit on this for the morning But if you still are in this you are still in the full-on trade Which was the second trade I called because the stock was all the way up here So anyways, this looks like it is going to break the low I didn't want to be in a trade too long took it right into the 10 o'clock period and got out But this very well could go on and break and go to 63 If there's not doing anything wrong except for taking a little bit of time looks like this is going to break It at lunch So did the one loss in juniper then did a positive trade in ceo Which may back the loss from juniper and profit and that is sometimes what you can do But it's not what I usually do what I usually do is one trade and stop and usually The the top pick that I look at worked, but today I didn't see this Let's see what time it actually She's actually did have some movement here early, but it was earnings, but it was very low volume Early in the morning here's where it started to get going into 9 o'clock 9 15 You see the volume in these bars here. This is on the pre-market And that's when some people then noticed it So I'm happy that I had a good recovery today made money made money every day this week it was a really strong week and Even if you had taken the loss today in juniper You still would have been up for the week trading with me because we made money every day And I even made money today said a good recovery when you look to do something You really need to have a hundred percent conviction when you do it You need to have the gap rating You've got to have the setup and you can't keep going back over something over something over something for example I didn't do a second trade in juniper didn't warrant it this had the first move May have been it when I rated and looked at the targets. I realized that it could have a secondary move I didn't know if it set up or not, and then it did and It held extremely well again though This is taking longer to break the low So I already had gotten out of it, but this very well looks like it's going to do it So the next target on this is 63 and there were some people in the room that were still in this and I wish them luck It looks like it's going to make it and it could even break 63 today So great week in the stocks wish trading room just and a wonderful amazing day today again today because I Did a trade that didn't work and had a great recovery and flipped it around very quickly So my eye is just spot on this year 2017 I'll look to continue that into the remainder of the year If you'd like more information you can email me at Melissa at the stocks wish calm The golden gap class is this weekend January 28th and 29th if you want to learn my method How I do this how I rate gaps how I take the entries How I find the top pick daily then you can email me at Melissa the stocks wish calm to sign up for the class this weekend Today is a deadline. Thanks everyone. Have a great day