I've managed fully remote engineering teams for ~7 years, from small teams to rapidly growing orgs spanning 10+ countries. I've developed some pretty strong opinions about what makes remote work actually work: <rant> 1. YOU MUST GET "THE TEAM" TOGETHER ONCE A QUARTER, NO EXCEPTIONS. The faster the team/company is growing, the more critical this is. If you follow no other piece of advice follow this one. Remote work is built on a foundation of trust which for most humans can only be built in person. Think about a person you know well who has extremely dry humor. Would you be able to detect that characteristic if you met them for the first time over SMS or slack? Bonds are built over dinner, a beer, an in person hackathon. And those bonds carry forward to the rest of the time spent remote. **for some definition of "the team" - can be a mix of immediate team, org, company-wide, all are useful at different cadences. 2. Managers must be pros and must be highly technical. Many non-technical managers rely on lazy half-ass signals like "who left the office last". As a remote manager you literally have no option other than to inspect the concrete outputs to understand what is going on. This tip is also very useful to non-remote teams 🙂 3. No juniors except for exception cases. Exceptional cases are obviously exceptional. Gotta build the muscle before you play on hard mode - for mere mortals at least. Don't expect someone to learn "how to remote" and "how to engineer" simultaneously. It is too much. 4. Establish a physical center of gravity, ideally 20-30% of staff. Company can still be fully remote and have "an office" where company events are held, some fraction of local employees cowork once a week even if on different teams. 5. Regardless of critical mass, all meetings must be remote first. None of this conference room with 10 people dialing into a zoom meeting with 3 other people nonsense. 100ms latency of conversation is real and you are at a disadvantage if you are trying to interject remotely into a room of in person attendees. 6. Hire managers into the critical mass (or who are willing to travel a lot). There will be lots of good reasons for the manager to make their way in on occasion (once a week, twice a month) to the home of critical mass for one reason or another 7. Onboard senior hires and leaders in person. I have seen new leaders, ICs, managers, design/pm/marketing leaders crash and burn over lack of building good relationships in the first 3 months. If you're bringing on a new leader for god's sake make sure they spend a few days in person with the other leaders they have to collaborate with. 8. Hire within a deliberate, manageable timezone range!!! This becomes more important the more varied the experience level is within your team. Is it possible with absolute engineering pros and remote veterans? Yes! But you need to ask yourself if your team is ready to coordinate work across Australia, UK, NYC, SF, Japan, and India timezones. Think hard about this one. My team is US west coast through Czech Republic. Teammates spanning every part of the US, Brazil, UK, Portugal, Denmark, and more. 8.a. Have a clearly established schedule for "time the whole team must be online". For us this is 8:30 - 10:00am Pacific, but many Europeans choose to work shifted schedules to have more overlap with their peers. I advertise this upfront in every hiring manager screen. Make expectations clear and let people decide. We're all adults and we're more likely to commit and make things work when we make a decision with complete information. 9. Onsite time is precious. Don't waste it on ordinary meetings. Use it for strategic conversations, solving hard problems together, hackathons, and high-bandwidth planning. This is where you build the relationships that make the next three months of remote work successful. For fuck's sake please do not fill a week making people stare at a projector while you read powerpoints!!! Take the advice or don't. </rant>

dear people who say ai generates bad code, pls show me the handcrafted code you were shipping before ai best regards, can

Okay NGL Claude projects looks dope. Hope it comes to team plan soon! @claudeai

Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5: the cheapest, fastest, and most capable small model we’ve ever released. On average, it costs around 75% less to run than Claude Haiku 4.5.

How do you know your MVP is good enough for launch?

tweeting with 0 likes and 2 followers

Postmortem: An experiment of grok bot turned out to me returning after dinner with an absolute flood of posts and comments from my profile. The goal was to see how running a vague task would work, if context continued to degrade the results, and to test a theory of the future of businesses, to try the thing I'm building worked as well in grok bot. It did not, Its a perfect example of what happens with agents without clear evaluation. Classification and quality control. For those that saw some AI slop I apologize. While it might not be the hugging face incident its a perfect example that any misaligned agents compound and can do damage fast. The damage for me was that I got blocked by some people I genuinely respect and that sucks. And if anyone comes across @GergelyOrosz, I'm sorry.

Claude is safe. Another absolute banger 😂💀

WAIT… Fable 5.5 JUST DID THIS. 😳 A song + the Hugging Face incident turned into ONE story. Now I’m addicted to watching the first frame load. 🔥

Me: disappear from X and post nothing for a few days. Also me when I return:

Only software engineers will understand why this is actually funny.

Every step I've ever taken in the wrong direction, help me get to where I am today and lead to monumental moments in my life that I would not have got to experience if I had let the mistakes that I made rob me of my full potential, life will test you, don't forget to remember the fundamentals

Take the worst and try to make the best of it. Cause when you fail, just know that it's a test and if you can learn to pick yourself back up again and train your brain to not be such a pessimist.

See, we've all got somethin' that we trapped inside. That we try to suffocate, you know, hopin' it dies

See, one man's inconvenience is another's joy

I'll be the first to admit that I'm a lonely soul, And the last to admit I need a hand to hold.