Around-the-clock Development

Since I work in California and most of Teleios is in Florida, there is a 3-hour time difference which would ostensibly cause some problems in synchronizing workdays.

Recently I’ve taken to a strategy which has been used, to great effect, by almost every software giant in existence. This strategy doesn’t so much solve the workday synchronization problem (as getting up at 4:30 am would, for example), but instead says that, actually, desynchronization is the solution! Namely: around-the-clock development.

This is how it works:

At 6am Eastern, Joe and Pavi get to work at Teleios headquarters. They put in a good 8 hours of work, writing new code and testing code that I’ve written previously. In the course of this writing and testing, they come up with a number of bugs having to do with my web app or with the integration process.

Then, around 12pm Pacific, I stumble out of bed and wander bleary-eyed in my underwear to my computer downstairs, where I check my e-mail and immediately wish I hadn’t. I’m greeted by the results of Teleios’ hard labor the previous day (well, it’s the same calendar day, but I got up so late it’s effectively after their work day), namely a huge list of bugs for me to squash.

So I spend a good 4-5 hours fixing bugs and wondering when it was that I wrote that particular line of code and was I on drugs at the time? About then it’s dinner time, so I’ll do that and hang out with people, play sports or games or talk or whatever. Then around 10pm-12am, I’ll put in another few hours of work, and this is when I code new features, since all the previous part of the day has been spent on fixing old ones.

Sometimes I’ll code (like I did a few days ago) to 3am, which is just about when Joe and Pavi are getting into the office in Florida. Now it’s their turn to be greeted by a bunch of new code which may or may not play nice with their own respective pieces of software!

In this way the proverbial sun never sets on the Teleios workday.