Jessica Tan

Async across 4 timezones: what we changed after a 9-hour gap broke our sprint

My product team is spread across Manila, Bengaluru, Lisbon and Toronto. On paper it's "follow the sun". In practice, in August, it was "follow the confusion". What broke Our Toronto engineer asked a question about an API change at 5pm her time. That's 5am in Manila, 2:30am in Bengaluru. The Bengaluru dev had the answer, but by the time he woke up the question was buried under 40 messages in a busy channel. The…

Nice video, genuinely. But after 5 years can someone make the day in the life where you spend 3 hours finding a laundromat, your visa run gets moved, and you eat dinner alone again? That's also nomad life. Still wouldn't trade it 🙃

Working with US clients from Manila: the 2-hour overlap rule

I have worked with US teams from Manila for three years. The first year I said "I'm flexible, I'll be available whenever" and nearly burned out by month eight. Here's what I do now. The time maths Manila is UTC+8 all year. No daylight saving. US East in summer is UTC-4, so 12 hours apart. 9am in New York is 9pm in Manila. US West in summer is UTC-7, so 15 hours apart. 9am in San Francisco is midnight in Manila. When…

this week's office

day 3 in Da Nang. cafe downstairs: 94 Mbps, egg coffee, zero outages. my Airbnb: 3 Mbps and a rooster with no respect for US standups. the eternal nomad trade off ☕🐓