The Remote Worker: Three Months In

Published Sep 6, 2011 (13 years ago)
Danger icon
The last modifications of this post were around 13 years ago, some information may be outdated!

My home office...

So in the blink of an eye, I've started up with my third months now working for Fresh Consulting. While I'm not planning on giving a month to month report on the live of a telecommuter, I did have some more notable experiences I thought was worth sharing...

  • The office has been "updated" a bit more to include some bookshelves as we reorgainzed Jen's office to make room for Tony.
  • I helped push out two major site updates over the past month.
  • I missed a deadline, and I missed it bad. That's worth another blog post about lessons learned.
  • I've gotten plugged in a bit with the PyroCMS community and my student module has garnered some good lessons learned a few thanks along the way.
  • I figured out a trick to generate a timeline based report doing some count analysis that runs on SQL Server.
  • I'm still struggling to find the right profile setup for my Virtual Machine. Sometimes I can get a really bad slowdown if I don't do things right.

I'm rather excited with myself and the ability to swap languages on the fly. One late afternoon, after pounding through PHP/MySQL land for the day, the reporting issue (mentioned above) came up and I had to jump into my SQL Server mode. It wasn't the largest change in the world, but it still required some mental shifting that I hadn't done much of before.

Fresh has really turned out to be a great place to work for and I'm glad I made the switch. There are those nights where things have been a little crazy and I'm up until midnight, but hey, that's what most folks go through, right? I have a lot more flexibility, I get to work with some new technology and build solutions for some really good clients out there. My fellow programmer and I get along great, and haven't had any major issues when trying to debug a situation, which is a huge benefit. I'm excited to be up here to do some face to face work with the team before heading back.

Though probably the most important think I learned came from this morning and the value of a good face to face video chat with the family. It was good to see them all and amazing how something as simple as turning your laptop upside down and pretending to be hanging on for dear life can make kids laugh so hard. 8^D