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Recent Experiences - Possible Posts

Over the last year, I've been increasingly doing a lot of blogging the intranet at work. As a consequence of this, I think I've felt less urge for blogging out here.

The same way an open source developer builds a public profile by having their product shared in the open, I think it makes sense for people who don't work on code to do the same in the form of blogging, vlogging, tweeting or writing posts on Twitter/Facebook.

Unfortunately, the content I write on the intranet is very specific to that culture. So it wouldn't be right to copy it in here.

What I can do is to iterate some of the topics just quickly in this post, and then think about what topics are worth writing more about here. Your feedback is appreciated! Write a comment below or tweet me if you want to direct my writing in a particular direction.

What do I do anyway

For context, the last years my role has evolved quite a bit. I have a tricky profile to pin down into a role: I've drifted from software development through infrastructure/operations management, organizational development, and now currently I'm an agile coach for a business unit of development teams.

I like this role because it gives me the freedom to operate where I can have the most impact, in a wide realm between technology and organization.

While it seems everybody has become proficient in running distributed teams the last 3 months, I did get a head-start in this area by starting to work remotely almost 4 years ago.

What have I been writing about (internally)

In no particular order..
  • A whole bunch of pro-tips about GSuite, Google Calendar, Gmail, IRCcloud, BlueJeans, and so on.
  • Various exercises for distributed teams (various formats for retrospectives, team building, post-mortems, etc.)
  • Radiating availability and absence (particularly important in distributed teams)
  • Planning for operational capacity in globally distributed teams (hint: no single day is a holiday in all the world's countries)
  • Online meeting survival guide
Some of the more interesting things I've been doing (and could potentially write about)
  • Coaching a team distributed over 11 countries (with time-zones from California to India)
  • Gathering said team for a week of co-located team building
  • Running one of those team weeks in a distributed form (due to COVID19)
  • Onboarding new-hires into distributed teams (building processes for this and practicing them)
  • Practicing leadership in distributed teams (do's and don'ts)
  • Setting up Jira projects for distributed Kanban teams
My inner imposter-syndrome-voice is saying that all these topics have been discussed at length already (I particularly enjoy the perspectives from the Know Your Team blog).

I still hope my writing on any of these topics will add something new to the public body of knowledge. Let me know which ones are more interesting to you!
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