Sandy Update #4

For the most part we've worked from home through the last few days, I'd say at 65-75% attention, but that's to be expected. Some tools have made our work easier. Here is a list of them!

The obvious:

• Github, Dropbox, and hosted gmail apps. It's practically table stakes to rely on these for day-to-day operations now. But I am glad I don't have to worry about email & file hosting this week, what a pain that would be. Gmail slickly rolled out some new features this week, as if to underscore the point: "Life's better here."

The still common but less obvious:

• IRC (specifically freenode). We use freenode to chat, wherever we are. It's very lightweight and reliable although not without it's quirks.

• Google Chrome Sync. Like the old days of MobileMe & NetNewsWire, once you have your browser state synced from home to work, including bookmarks & open tabs, you cannot live without this feature.

• Asana. Asana often feels like overkill to me, especially when we're all in the same office, but it really shines in the case where everyone is working remotely. Especially when tensions or anxieties are high, I think it's fundamentally better for state of mind than simply dashing off an email.

You have this, but you may be doing it wrong:

• iCloud. iCloud is much maligned but quite solid. One undersold feature is "back to my Mac," which allows you drop-dead simple access to all of your computers with a simple Screen Sharing app. Of course Apple didn't invent this, but they baked it in to every Mac sold and it works. I shipped two new builds of an app we're testing in the past four days without having to step into the office or move the build process to Amazon. This stuff matters! And it's free.

• Stellar.io. Stellar is also free! And it looks (to me) like many people use it for jokes, or to power retweet-bots. But when big news hits — say a shake-up at Apple, Lucas selling Vader to Disney, or … a Hurricane, my Stellar stream is only the most important tweets as curated by the people I trust. This is completely essential to me. During these peak news cycles is also a good time to discover new bloggers (or twitterers) whose voices may otherwise get overwhelmed by the volume of the surrounding noise.

You may not have heard of these:

• Droplr. Select a file or take a screenshot, and it's on the Internet behind a private URL. Simple and essential, Droplr is basically what everyone loved about skitch. They just have to avoid the trap that Skitch fell into of adding stuff. Dear Droplr, do not add any features! Thanks.

• Papertrailapp is a system for aggregating server logs in one place. When you are pinched for time and servers are under duress from news events (like a hurricane!) being able to see what's going on in a simple web interface is really critical. We've upgraded our account twice in the past two weeks already. Of course, logging is such a critical part of development that the vendor lock in here is fairly ironclad. I'll never tail -f again.

• tender is an IRC bot which helps us moderate our meetings in IRC (really). It's more helpful than it sounds.

Not exactly software:

• Cookies-as-a-Service, electricity, water, internet. Things that perhaps people take for granted! Greg sent us cookies (delivered last Friday). They were delicious. And of course I'm grateful to be at work today, that's a luxury most people have. Blake's parents visited us today (since they have no power in their east-side apartment), and their presence, as well as that of other close friends has helped my spirits tremendously.